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August 17, 2007

Journalism Educators Behind the Curtain

Bill Moyers gave a brilliant and stirring keynote speech to the annual AEJMC convention. AEJMC stands for the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and is the primary educational association for journalism academics. Moyers quoted a blog a young journalist wrote on the Huffington Post and said he felt it was “clearly the worst of times” for journalism and asked if it could also be the best of times, referring to the advances in technology that gives everyone, not just working journalists, immediate access to a worldwide audience.

Moyers urged journalism educators to teach students that because “the market will not deliver to democracy the information we need to survive” a new generation of students must provide that information in spite of government, corporate, and right-wing media attempts to silence the truth. In response, Moyers dramatically pronounced "silence is sedition."

You’d think the AEJMC would make some effort to promote the speech and make it easily accessible, both in video and text form. It would be good journalism practice to do so. But if you Googled the speech or went to Yahoo Search to find it, what came up in the search results were several blogs entries complaining about not being able to find a text version and about having to launch RealPlayer to view it on the CSPAN website. I tried, but found it impossibly complicated, so I gave up. The only place I could find the speech was on YouTube and YouTube only had the speech in two parts, which consisted of about a third of Moyers’ remarks.

The AEJMC website didn’t feature the speech; it merely had a summary of it—no video, no text version. The AEJMC website sucks—hard to use and hard to find anything—but it was better than the incomprehensible mess on the CSPAN website. No wonder YouTube is so popular—it’s easy to use, it’s easy to find stuff on it.

What this tells me is that the AEJMC and journalism educators are, like the Wizard of Oz, hiding behind a curtain, pontificating about the magic of journalism without having any clue about the techniques and tools of today’s journalism, which are now web centric—blogs, video, citizen journalism, user-generated content, and social networking.

Moyers said in his speech that he starts his day with Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and ends his day with Jon Stewart, about whom Moyers says, “Mark Twain is alive and well and holding the powers that be accountable” with intelligence and wit. How many journalism educators and academics read Josh Marshall’s blog or sing the praises of Jon Stewart and his “Daily Show” on Comedy Central? They are still teaching newspaper reporting and doing stand-ups for local television news programs.

Someone tell the AEJMC and journalism educators that they’re not in Kansas anymore. I give Moyers credit for trying to do so--that was really his message, I think.

Posted by Charles Warner at August 17, 2007 12:55 PM

Comments

Media Curmudgeon [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 18, 2007 06:35 PM writes:

Neil Derrough writes:

"Just to prove the point that my generation has some difficulty with the 'new tech,' I can't get your posting process to work for me.

However, it does not keep me from laughing at Moyers about worrying about 'right wing attempts to silence the truth.' Where on the political spectrum do you think Moyers would put PBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, not to mention the many extreme blogs? It's so interesting to see Fox and talk radio reveal the thin skin of the so called 'main stream media.' It's concerning that there is such anger about differing points of view. I would submit that for years there was silence. It's that lack of silence that now so bothers Moyers."


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