The Media's Ancien R?gime
HEWITT, HUGH
The Media's Ancien Regime Columbia Jo'urnalism School tries to save the old order BY HUGH HEWITT New York To enter Columbia University's graduate school of journalism is to enter the highest...
...David is the grandson of Joseph Pulitzer, so that sounds to an outsider like a crucial endorsement of the innovations underway...
...The president's Harvard MBA and four consecutive victories over Democrats judged "smarter" than him haven't made even a dent in that prejudice...
...he favors same-sex marriage—there are no surprises...
...It was, therefore, with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been...
...This gift is available for scholarships, an underfunded and pressing need for new and old programs alike...
...How to cover a fire in Brooklyn on deadline" is one catchphrase I hear repeated...
...This year a pool of 70 applicants yielded a class of 27...
...It is difficult to picture Pat Buchanan, Newsweek's Rick Smith, CBS's Susan Spencer, or writers Mitch Albom and James McBride—CSJ grads, all—covering fires in Brooklyn on or off deadline...
...Lemann's project is either a masterful flanking of the dominant critique of the mainstream media— thoroughgoing left-wing bias among its prac-titioners—or an irrelevant and doomed exercise in beside-the-pointism...
...Among other points, he wanted to emphasize: * The M.A...
...He was eager that alums understand what the M.A...
...The very best investigative reporting is being done not by big names at the big papers, but by people like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' journalist in residence Claudia Rosett, who almost single-handedly unraveled the U.N.-Saddam Oil-for-Food scandal, with much of her work published online...
...military in Iraq was targeting journalists for assassination—were all still in the future when Columbia president Lee Bollinger was presented with an opening in the deanship by the retirement of Lemann's predecessor, Tom Goldstein...
...Truth is elusive...
...Of 24 or 25 faculty," he told me, "I'd have had maybe two votes...
...He launched a controversial top-to-bottom look at the journalism school, empaneling a committee that met a dozen or so times to debate the future of the school...
...The big battle in American journalism is over the very idea of objectivity...
...The first person I met on campus, Bruce Wallace, is a student enrolled in the school's traditional program, intended to result in a Master of Science degree after an intensive year of studies...
...Shapiro is clearly hoping the students will go for the profile, and spends considerable time instructing his charges on how they might go about selecting their subject...
...The genuine enthusiasm for a new program's launch is always difficult to gauge, but one measurement that simply does not lie in the world of academia is donor support...
...An interesting and provocative 90 minutes later, though, I am left wondering how much the Pre-witt lecture will do for these students unless they are fortuitously assigned some future story on the census or a related topic having to do with, say, racial classifications in university admissions...
...The average scholarship is $5,200, which means that these students are putting a lot of money into the program...
...For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies...
...And it has very little in common with Lemann's project...
...Pulitzer wanted reporters to push for virtue...
...degree, but also journalists who can demonstrate to us that they are already working at a level of skill commensurate with that of M.S...
...There public opinion was made, and accordingly as the people listened to a Pericles or to a Cleon the state flourished or declined...
...Lemann also recommends to me the 1920 Walter Lippmann essay "Liberty and the News," but curiously not Lippmann's better known 1922 opus, Public Opinion, which opens this way: There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived...
...And the "authority" of journalism with the American public is clearly at a modern low point...
...There is a new high priest in the dean's office on the seventh floor—Nicholas Lemann, veteran writer for the New Yorker, and before that the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, where he spent 15 years after stints at the Texas Monthly, the Washington Post, and the Washington Monthly...
...and M.A...
...The program involves greatly deepening the ties between the Journalism School and the rest of the university, mainly by bringing academic faculty people here to teach in partnership with the journalists on our faculty, so as to marry deep substantive knowledge to journalistic practice...
...And there is simply no way he can succeed...
...Another fifth are from the west coast, and 10 percent are foreign...
...Pulitzer's acolytes at Columbia undoubtedly believe that they are members of an "able, disinterested, public-spirited press," and not a "cynical, mercenary, demagogic" one...
...That, in a nutshell, is Lemann's grand plan for salvaging the profession: Teaching reporters new skills that will make them more competent amateurs in the worlds of other professionals...
...The "blue" nature of the student body is further confirmed by my polling of the class I attended, done with the permission of Shapiro...
...Lemann is clearly hoping that the best and brightest of the M.S...
...All supported same-sex marriage...
...Shapiro stresses that all of her professors have been teaching "the value of objectivity," but Nordenson isn't buying it...
...Hedged with some qualifiers—he could not commit any of his faculty to talk to me or guarantee access to classrooms, though everyone proved to be very welcoming—Lemann agreed...
...The marble floor tells you that the school was endowed by Joseph Pulitzer and erected in 1912 in memory of his daughter Lucille...
...Lemann noted that the spring of 2006 would see the school of journalism confer its first new professional degree in 70 years...
...What is everybody's business is nobody's business"—except the journalist's...
...I get 50 calls a day about the crisis in journalism," Lemann deadpanned when I posed the "crisis" question...
...students, equipping them to go beyond their ordinary reliance on dueling experts interpreting studies...
...That the elite media are hopelessly biased to the left and so blind to their own deficiencies, or so in denial, that they cannot save themselves from irrelevance...
...Lemann's hope for this course is to cultivate in his students a capacity to discover and analyze data...
...No one owned a gun...
...A fifth of the students are from the New York area, and between 37 to 40 percent are from "the corridor"—from Boston to Washington...
...Public attitudes toward the press, which have been on a downward track for years, have become more negative in several key areas," the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports...
...It is beyond argument that Pulitzer's dream of the press preserving public virtue has been abandoned, but Lemann is on a mission to help restore credibility to a "profession" without licensing or standards or governing bodies of any sort...
...She's moving to Israel after this year, where she hopes to pick up freelance work...
...is the hardest of all to preserve...
...program was all about...
...Its origin is an email request from Lemann last spring: Would I be willing to be the subject of a New Yorker profile...
...Every social science study in the United States depends upon regression analysis, but almost no reporters understand it...
...There are many public-spirited lawyers, but the bar as a profession works for its retainers, and no law-defying trust ever came to grief from a dearth of legal talent to serve it...
...Shapiro is a gifted teacher who, three weeks into the term, already knows all of his students' names and engages them with ease and good humor...
...Lemann assumes that objectivity is possible, but that the skills of reporters need burnishing if their reputation for disinterestedness is to be recovered...
...On my first day at Columbia's graduate school of journalism (CSJ), the poster boy for all that has come to plague elite American media—former CBS anchor Dan Rather— took to the podium at Fordham Law School to denounce the "new journalism order...
...Physicians work for their patients and architects for their patrons...
...The first half of this hour is given over to outlining a large assignment—a profile of some recently deceased person or the reconstruction of a crime...
...The worst moments in recent history for the mainstream media—Rathergate, Jayson Blair's fabrications at the New York Times, the slander by CNN executive Eason Jordan that the U.S...
...Lemann was among the panel's members, and delivered a paper to the group in the spring of 2003 that urged the one-year M.S...
...Regression analysis is the best example," he tells me...
...holders are assured of the status of their credential...
...Tomorrow becomes the next day, which becomes next week...
...Reactions to his profile of me varied among family and friends, but I thought it complete and fair...
...The company employed 13,750 as recently as 2001...
...The school doesn't yet keep stats on religious background, though Mac Donald believes there has been a significant increase in Muslim students post 9/11...
...Virtue, said Montesquieu, is the principle of a republic, and therefore a republic...
...They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans...
...They sense the excitement about what we are doing here...
...A bronze quotation from Pulitzer's 1904 cri de coeur in the North American Review is on the wall: Our republic and its press will rise or fall together...
...I think he regrets it...
...He is certainly trying to salvage the situation...
...the editorial board of the greatest brand in undergraduate newspapers...
...There was unanimous agreement with this proposition, one of the widely shared views within elite media and elsewhere on the left...
...Every conversation with one of the old guard citing the old proof texts comes down to this point: There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer...
...Rachel Templeton is from Alaska, graduated from the University of Washington, and has spent a few years at the Henry Jackson Foundation...
...The Media's Ancien Regime Columbia Jo'urnalism School tries to save the old order BY HUGH HEWITT New York To enter Columbia University's graduate school of journalism is to enter the highest temple of a religion in decline...
...Pulitzer was very much a crusader, though, and his 1904 North American Review article "The College of Journalism," which Lemann points me to, is almost hilariously optimistic in its aims for the profession: There are many political reformers among the clergy, but the pulpit as an institution is concerned with the Kingdom of Heaven, not with the Republic of America...
...They are very different projects, proceeding from very different ideologies...
...I went to Columbia to see if Lemann was the exception that proves the rule, and to test the rule itself...
...holders...
...The Greeks thought that no republic could be successfully governed if it were too large for all the citizens to come together in one place...
...He repeatedly uses the term "power skills," and he has in mind a deeper appreciation, and use, of more sophisticated research and analytical skills than most journalists bring to the table...
...Harvard is filled with this sort of humiliation," Lemann told me in a conversation last fall that capped a two-day visit to the school...
...Whites make up 69 percent of the new class...
...Andreea Plesea is from Rumania and her Facebook entry announces her goal is to "become a top notch investigative reporter" and to "pursue a degree in law...
...Bollinger, a First Amendment expert, former president of the University of Michigan, and former dean of its law school (I took media law from him in the spring of 1983, and the quiet, brooding, and even moody Bollinger hasn't changed much in 22 years, according to reports) seized the moment...
...But with 205 students in the M.S...
...class this year are women, a reflection of what Lemann calls the "feminization" of journalism programs across the country...
...Bree Nordenson is from Freeport, Maine, a graduate of Minnesota's Carleton College, and is transitioning from her work as a psychiatric counselor in Boston...
...But the M.S...
...The goal is a class of 60 drawn from 250 applicants...
...For the first couple of years, the program will be tuition-free to students for whom paying tuition imposes a financial difficulty...
...Plesea is cynical: "You don't get truth in political reporting," an opinion she didn't confine to the countries of the former Soviet Union, with which she is familiar...
...Two raised platforms proclaim the missions in bold gold letters: "To Uphold Standards of Excellence in Journalism" and "To Educate the Next Generation of Journalists...
...Robert Mac Donald, the assistant dean for admissions and financial aid, ran down the demographics for me: The average age of an M.S...
...Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs...
...student is just shy of 28, the mean is 26, the youngest is 20, and the oldest is 63...
...Lippmann's world, Pulitzer's world, even Nicholas Lemann's world of the Harvard Crimson from 1972 to 1976—they are all gone...
...And also an admission of great significance about all that ails the craft today...
...But for his care almost every reform would fall stillborn...
...Dan Rather's CBS, eager to impugn George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Guard, got duped by fraudulent documents it took months to obtain and only hours for bloggers and readers to shred...
...division, there is no doubt that the training of front-line reporters is still the core mission...
...This objective is both large and novel...
...Three had been in a house of worship the previous week...
...Lunden is particularly animated...
...You can put Lippmann's book down after page one, his 1920 essay, and Pulitzer's vision statement for his school as well...
...No one had a background in the physical sciences...
...No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days...
...The Cheney profile earned Lemann some animosity among colleagues, who thought him too gentle with the only man the left fears as much as Rove...
...I thought...
...These six want to pursue the idea of "objectivity," and most had read Lemann's profile of me, which included my very skeptical assessment of the objectivity of the mainstream media...
...In fact, it isn't pulling in many moderates...
...Bollinger obviously warmed to some part of the Lemann pitch, and offered him the deanship...
...It alone makes it possible to keep the political blood in healthful circulation in the veins of a continental republic...
...degree be replaced by a two-year Master of Arts program...
...Lemann intends to reconstruct journalism's shaky reputation via an infusion of specific and measurable skills—either you can or you can't do regression analysis...
...The third of the big three came to found a Center for Investigative Journalism, and came via a big name in that business, Toni Stabile, whose reporting on the cosmetics industry in the '60s and '70s set a high bar for future practitioners of the craft...
...This story in its small way partakes of the seismic shift underway...
...I am not here to debate the proposition, but find it interesting that the three-week wonders are already committed to the defense of their new profession's reputation for objectivity...
...He brings all classes, all professions together, and teaches them to act in concert on the basis of their common citizenship...
...Today marks the third in three lectures by the former director of the U.S...
...For there is nothing more subject to decay than virtue...
...and the industry gets a promise of "deep substantive knowledge" on the way...
...The M.S...
...Only 50...
...You need to make your first phone call today," Shapiro insists...
...The fortunes of the big five papers— the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal,, as well as the old TV networks and big weekly newsmagazines— are visibly in decline...
...It is a pretty "blue" student body, and willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of their credentials...
...With a faculty that does not appear to count among its number even one prominent name from the center-right, but does include respected voices of the left such as Todd Gitlin and Victor Navasky, it is difficult to see where they will acquire any useful skepticism about their own craft's motives and abilities...
...Virtue, as Pulitzer understood it, was not so difficult to figure out...
...With Michael Shapiro, Hoyt team-teaches the class "Advanced Reporting," into which Wallace and 15 other students are headed, and introduces me to Shapiro, who quickly welcomes me to observe the hour...
...The upstart blogosphere is ever at the ready to "deconstruct" the work product of the old media's old guard...
...Sophia Chang, originally from Texas, has been a reporter for the past four years...
...Three quarters of them hope to make more than $100,000 as a journalist, 11 had voted for John Kerry, and one for George Bush (three are from abroad and not eligible, and one didn't vote for either candidate...
...The intake valve at the elite media's equivalent of the Army's war college isn't pulling in many conservatives...
...Before I sat down with Lemann I had read everything he'd written for the New Yorker and was impressed with his profiles of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove...
...Joseph Pulitzer wasn't a skills man, though his detour from reporting to law school suggests at least a hint of Lemann's recognition that reporters are often overmatched by the complexities of the stories they are assigned...
...Authority is a construct," Lemann tells me on my second day at the school...
...Six read blogs...
...A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself...
...But there are other ways to pursue change and reform...
...Wallace is a native of Baltimore who left his job as the manager of the classifieds at the San Francisco Guardian, an alternative weekly, to hone the skills that he hopes will take him to a daily to do local political reporting...
...Stina Lunden is from Sweden, and spent her last year as a Washington Post intern in France working for Keith B. Richburg...
...The school's newsletter, 116th & Broadway, carried a letter from Lemann on its front cover for the summer '05 issue...
...11 percent are African American, 7 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, 3 percent Middle Eastern, and 4 percent South Asian...
...The Athenian democracy could all meet in the popular assembly...
...Columbia faculty are given their props...
...Lemann quickly realized that alumni and faculty would unite to kill any idea of a uniform two-year degree at CSJ...
...Another $5 million is arriving from Leo Hindery, formerly of the YES Entertainment Network, and the father of a CSJ grad—another category of endorsement crucial to the school's constituencies...
...Three $5 million gifts do not a conclusion render, but are more than a good start...
...Lemann began his scribbling for a New Orleans alternative weekly, the Vieux Carre Courier, while still a high school student, covering everything from boxing to city hall to the private school network of the region...
...David and Katherine Moore have given a $5 million gift to endow a faculty position to cover government and public affairs in both the M.S...
...Lemann understands completely what has happened...
...Lemann endorses, first and emphatically, "truth-seeking...
...I agreed, on the condition that I could have reciprocal access to Lemann and the Columbia Journalism School for this piece...
...He reapplied for a position as a reporter, and the second time was successful, rising through the ranks to become the paper's president in the 1975-76 academic year...
...In that last phrase is the figure in the carpet, the grand design for saving journalism...
...program is in essence a 10-month education in the details and practice of that craft...
...He holds officials to their duty...
...The story of what is going on at CSJ cannot be separated from the collapse of credibility of the mainstream media, also known as "elite media" and "old media" among its detractors...
...programs...
...He exposes secret schemes of plunder...
...I taught myself how to do it, and we are going to teach the M.A...
...Good reporters make the first call on the first day...
...the applicant pool sees a hint of tuition deals...
...A statue of Thomas Jefferson guards the plaza outside the doors, and the entry room is suitably grand...
...A year at CSJ—tuition, living expenses, incidentals—comes to $59,404 according to Mac Donald, though 85 percent of the students receive some financial aid, with packages ranging from $1,000 to $50,000...
...His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com...
...it is his by adoption...
...None of them recognized the phrase "Christmas Eve in Cambodia"—though Shapiro not only got the allusion but knew the date of the John Kerry Senate speech in which he made the false claim about his Vietnam war experience...
...Authority has drained from journalism for a reason...
...In September it had not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Cail-laux for the shooting of Gaston Calmette...
...Their backgrounds are interesting...
...Fundraising," says Richard, "is about relationships, about earning people's trust...
...program and 27 in the M.A...
...On day two, the New York Times Company announced a cut of 500 employees from its already pared down workforce of 12,300...
...Lemann "has a vision," he adds, and "there's a general consensus that having journalists who better understand what they are doing is needed...
...This vision, from which the quotations in the school's entrance lobby are excerpted, can hardly be read with a straight face these days...
...It is the meta-class for the new track, and is co-taught by Lemann and associate dean Evan Cornog, as well as a series of academic and media guest-lecturers...
...Soon Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, arrives...
...My second classroom experience is in an M.A...
...Lemann has also instituted an ambitious new Master of Arts course of study, which has provoked deep suspicion in many of the school's alums and among the faculty...
...Census Bureau, Columbia's Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs Kenneth Prewitt, on the use of race as a classifying device...
...The scorn on the center-right for the "objectivity" and "professionalism" of the mainstream media is deep and sincere...
...After the class, a few students linger...
...He fences his instructions with cautions about engaging the bereaved ("You need to know, but you can't be a vampire") and tips on tracing the details of the life to be profiled...
...What's the rule...
...Lanie Shapiro was in PR for Simon & Schuster and Random House...
...If ever a class is given on the elegant insertion of the thin edge of a wedge, this would make a fine piece of assigned reading...
...The 1999 graduate of Kenyon College had done a little campus radio before heading off to tend bar in Alaska...
...Two-thirds of the M.S...
...CSJ's associate dean of university development and alumni relations, Jeffrey H. Richard, briefed me on Lemann's work as change agent and chief fundraiser...
...When I trot out my list of "parameter" questions I use to test for basic ideological disposition—Wallace doesn't own a gun...
...The orator that reaches the American democracy is the newspaper...
...In San Francisco he got hooked on city hall gossip, and though he was no fan of Mayor Willie Brown, or of "corporate power allied with politicians" generally, he's certain he'll be able to bring fairness to his future job as a political reporter...
...grads will be willing to stay a second year and also go for the M.A...
...But the widespread perception in the country is that the prestige newsrooms are filled with the latter pretending to be the former...
...An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve the public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery...
...class, "Evidence and Inference," which includes all 27 students...
...In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess...
...Prewitt's lecture is a fascinating look at the introduction of racial categories into the census and the evolution of those categories, as well as the limits of the utility of that data...
...Upon entering Harvard in 1972, he immediately "comped" for the Crimson, only to be rejected in his application to join Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author, most recently, of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That Is Changing Your World...
...The 16 students are not evenly split—there are 14 women and just two men...
...They're like the cheater in the clubhouse, whose every mention of a great round of golf is met with rolling eyes and knowing nods...
...Now 51 and two years into a new career, Lemann will need the same persistence if his legacy as dean is to be something other than a footnote in the history of the decline of American media power...
...program will accept not only holders of the Journalism School's M.S...
...On that same day Knight-Ridder slashed its Philadelphia papers' editorial staff by 75 positions at the Inquirer and 25 at the Daily News...
...You can't draw conclusions that our opinions will influence our reporting," she says, launching into a familiar defense of the ability of journalists to put aside their points of view...
...I concluded by asking them if they "think George Bush is something of a dolt...
...either you can or you can't follow a case citation sequence or decode an annual audit report—and thus ignite a demand among editors not for the bright young reporters from campus newspapers, but for really smart alums of graduate schools of all sorts who can be tempted into the field despite its pay and present status somewhere near the carnival barker's...
...Hoyt contributes key bits of experience, and the students are curious and attentive to these practical lessons...
...The press alone makes the public interests its own...
...It is dangerous to think you are objective...
...After another year of meetings with industry types, he launched a second degree track: a year-long Masters of Arts program open only to practicing journalists, aiming to enhance and deepen their skills...
...You can't read and understand these studies if you don't know how regression analysis works...
...Richard expects that corporate America will welcome—and fund—the emphasis on more sophisticated skills, but is careful to underscore that no gift from industry can be accompanied by any hint of compromise or strings attached...
...Six of the 16 were English majors, two studied history, and the balance spread across the humanities...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 19
