cultural studies
McKenzie Wark
Myles Breen (ed)
Journalism, Theory and Practice
Macleay Press $24.95pb, 374pp, 1 876492 02 3
THE BEST THING in this book comes almost at the end. If the problem is thinking about how to educate journalists, it helps
to know something about journalists.
Professor John Henningham provides a handy thumbnail sketch.
There are about 4500 journalists in Australia. That works out at
250 journalists per million people, as compared to 450
journalists per million in the US. About 66% work for newspapers,
still the biggest employer. While many fear that Rupert is taking
over the planet, only 25% of Australian journalists work for
Murdoch companies. Not surprisingly, most favour limits to
foreign ownership and cross media ownership. Women make up about
33%, about the same proportion as of the workforce as a whole.
On the other hand, only 19% of journalists are foreign born,
compared to 24% of the population. Henningham reports that women
and minority journalists are still likely to feel that gender and
ethnicity counts against them in their career advancement.
Henningham thinks that journalism is becoming more like a
profession than a trade. By his own evidence, there is still a
way to go. By the 90s, 35% of journalists had a degree, but this is a lower proportion than for other professions, which Henningham puts at 60%. 'In the trend towards becoming a university educated workforce, journalism in Australia lags well behind the United States, where 82% of journalists have a degree.' While 59% of journalists give journalism a high rating for ethical standards, only 8% of the population agree. Given that Henningham's research shows that most journalists don't mind 'badgering' informants for a story, perhaps the public has reason to be sceptical.
Henningham lists four criteria for professionalism: possession of an ethical code, a specialised body of knowledge, an effective professional association and a service ideal. One of Henningham's most interesting findings is that 'few of those working in journalism were motivated by concepts of public service'. It's as low as 4%. So on that criteria, journalists are pushing it uphill to claim professional status.
This book is meant to be a contribution to another aspect of professionalism, raising the status of journalism education. While there are many excellent programs in journalism at Australian universities, and many fine journalism scholars, I think even the contributors to this book would agree that the status of the field is not all that high. Breen's collection is a bit of a mixed bag. At best, we get useful information, as in the Henningham chapter. At worst, we get tirades and resentment, which makes one suspect that journalism education really is a bit of an intellectual backwater.
The rot sets in with Breen's introduction, which feigns even-handedness, but then draws up imaginary battle lines between the 'journalist's realist view of the world' and 'corresponding empirical methodology' on the one hand and 'the cultural studies style of obscurantist writing' on the other. News 'veterans' are contrasted with purveyors of 'fashionable' and 'currently popular' ideas. This transparently rhetorical juxtaposition does nothing to open a space for debate. Perhaps if Breen got off his realist high horse and studied the reality of rhetorical form, he might come up with more effective and persuasive prose.
Breen writes of one of his contributors, apparently meaning to be kind,
that
his theory is very accessible to scholars with a traditional education, as Burke owes more to Aristotle than perhaps any other philosopher, and Australian legal tradition still argues in largely Aristotelian terms and borrows from an almost Euclidian dependence on logic.
It's almost as jargon-laden a sentence with as complex a structure as those usually pulled out of cultural studies writing for ridicule. The only difference being that it cites Aristotle and Euclid rather than Deleuze and Guattari.
Martin Hirst contributes the most embarrassing moments to the collection, writing about gonzo journalism in a pastiche of gonzo style that can only be described as bad postmodernism. This description of it may annoy Hirst, as the point of his macho, dick-waving rant is to show why gonzo is superior to postmodern journalism. (My own writing serves as an example of the latter). The contrast is so poorly drawn that it hardly advances the argument. Hirst fails to establish why writing about, say, images of the military industrial complex in cinema is a less useful way of talking about its existence than writing about oneself, which is the leading characteristic of the gonzo style. A lot of people have seen films that are about warfare and empire, and a lot of people find them interesting. Unlike Hirst, I think that's a more promising start for dialogue with a reader, for a community of sense-making, than heaping up clichés about me, me, me, as Hirst does here.
Hirst manages to mention in passing three significant Australian contributors to gonzo journalism, John Birmingham, Linda Jaivin and Paul Toohey, but doesn't even bother citing, let alone reading, their books. If the point of journalism is to get the facts right, then this one needs a correction: 21C magazine did not begin publication in 1995, but in 1991.