Journalism Is Itself a Religion - Page 7

Which led to Tim's mini-epiphany. I see it as the statement of a journalist disappointed in what newsroom religion taught him about larger matters:

I practiced journalism, but I knew almost nothing about it - although I thought I did. Hindsight, of course, clarifies and age, if we allow it, deepens perspective. Still, while working in a role dedicated to informing the public, I had precious little information about my own profession, about its best practitioners (or greatest charlatans), about its history and role in the development and preservation of democracy, about its standards or even about the people I intended to inform-- the community around me.

I practiced journalism, but I knew almost nothing about it. What do these words mean? Certainly Porter knew enough to do the job, and get promoted to newsroom management at the San Francisco Examiner. The nothing he knew means nothing deeper than news, nothing to connect the "job" to larger things, which in turn shine a bigger light on journalism. The "preservation of democracy" is one example, a larger thing. But are belief and practice in daily journalism constantly wrestling with democracy's preservation? Porter searched his experience. He did not find much of that.

He took time off. Started a weblog. Began to read and reflect on journalism, and on a certain professional emptiness--a missing knowledge, a missing purpose--he had not known was there before. If you read First Draft, you may see how Tim Porter got religion again about journalism. Which, in my reading, came only after a loss of faith.

Five: First Amendment as Press Religion

There is one matter on which is it permitted, I think, to be an absolutist in the newsroom. You can even be admired for it. And that is First Amendment absolutism, with its obvious appeal to journalists. The events at Columbia's J-school were about this part of the religion, which has an epic legal narrative attached to it, a story about freedom of the press shared across the press establishment and taught to thousands of students every year as gospel, more or less.

Lee Bollinger knew that story because in his other life--legal scholar, specializing in the First Amendment--he had written a book about it, Images of a Free Press (1991). The point of the book is that journalists have one "central image" of the press, standing guard against an atavistic state and serving as the eyes and ears of the public. Hands off the media in the name of the public's right to know is the biblical lesson most journalism students absorb. It isn't wrong, Bollinger argued. But it is only one kind of wisdom.

Article Author: Jay Rosen

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