Local Man

ROCHESTER, MN — As the New Year rolls in like an inexorable tide, I
have watched the elections, done some reading and made a resolution as
a journalist, a citizen, and a guy.

It’s a resolution about, um, morality.

It’s about how to determine what’s right from what’s wrong,
wholesome from unwholesome, especially in the making and consuming of
the media.

My resolution is about how to tell the difference between good and
evil in the media, which flattens the bumpy richness of life into
a single, thin, fluorescent or inky dimension.

I’m excited but nervous to be writing this.

Because on the one hand,
I’m energized to be speaking openly about morality and journalism. That
breaks an ancient taboo of my own profession, which is always an exciting day’s work.

On the other hand, there are dangers to talking about morality in journalism,
the high-walled kingdom of neutral "objectivity."

Robertson or Chopra?

It’s easy for readers to spot that single word "morality,"
and immediately decide one has succumbed to
rightwing scolds a la Pat Robertson, or to New Age fuzzyheads a la
Deepak Chopra. (The latter being much the greater likelihood for me,
Buddhist as I am.)

But it’s just this pigeonholing of anyone who talks about morals that fuels my drive to find the roots of the problem. Because surely it is dangerous not just for the media but for society.

If the people who create the mass media and the millions of other
who consume it, don’t have a language to talk with each other about
what’s right and wrong, what’s healthy and what’s unhealthy to consume,
what kind of a mass media and journalism are we going to have?

At the very least, by simple logic, we will have a confused mass media
and journalism. And at worst we’ll have a wicked one, chaos always
being exploitable by the intelligent but depraved. 

Simple Question

At the library I found three trusted guides through these tricky
waters — "communitarian" philosophers who explain why topics like
morals, character and virtue are so little discussed in modern society
at large. Not just in journalism and the media, but everywhere.

My guides were Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who wrote ”Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy;” Jonathan Durham Peters, a
professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author of ”Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;” and the
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief but inspiring
essay called ”Spiritual Thinking.”

All three of these writers ask vivid questions to kick-start moral
thinking. One question they all ask in one form or another is:

How come Lady Justice wears a blindfold?

And hey, is that really such a good idea?

The Blindfold Theory

We trust that Lady Justice is compassionate and wise. She’s a role model for us all.

So as we choose which paths to follow in the year ahead, or make any other ethical decision, should we put on blindfolds too?

Is willful blindness the best way to make ethical, wise choices? Is it smart to block from our consciousness all those telling little winks and tics that we constantly receive from the life around us and by which, in reality, we navigate our daily rounds?

Hillary Clinton just won the New Hampshire primary based on a microsecond of tearing up, plus a tiny subtle hitch in her voice that apparently persuaded a few thousand women to switch their votes to her at the last minute.

Lady Justice would have missed it all.

The blindfold theory holds that on the societal scale, the rational process of balancing costs and benefits works better than seeking wisdom from within one’s supposedly subjective conscience and soul.

Does that reasoning pass the common sense test?

I’ve got a big pile of poker chips placed on this question, because as a journalist I’ve worn a mighty moral blindfold for 30 years. It goes by the name of ”objectivity,” the idea that journalists serve the public best by writing about issues as neutral bystanders, rigorously detached from what they observe. Without taking sides, we journalists are supposed to gather facts and deliver them to the public to ”let the readers decide.”

Sandel, Peters, Taylor

I’ve wrestled with journalism’s objectivity problem before. After a fair amount of soul-searching, a few years ago I finally was able to describe (as many others have before me) the ethical shortcuts and rationalizations that journalists make in objectivity’s name.

But until I read my three philosopher-guides, I’d never before felt that I understood the true roots of the problem. So how could I ever have hoped to resolve it?

The three authors are Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who wrote ”Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics;” Jonathan Durham Peters, a professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author of ”Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;” and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief essay called ”Spiritual Thinking.”

For all three writers, the mighty blindfold is called liberal political theory, which is not just a theory of course but the bedrock faith of modern western society. These authors especially deplore the strain of liberalism that has dominated in the past half-century, which they say has removed individuals as moral decision-makers from public affairs.

Depressed Newsrooms

”According to this liberalism,” Sandel writes, ”government should be neutral as to conceptions of the good life. Government should not affirm, through its policies or laws, any particular conception of the good life; instead it should provide a neutral framework of rights within which people can choose their own values and ends.”

By defining individual moral action in society as a choice between ready-made options, which Sandel calls the ”procedural republic,” instead of developing the character of individuals to make subtle, case-by-case decisions, Sandel says society loses in the end.

”A political agenda lacking substantive moral discourse is one symptom of the public philosophy of the procedural republic,” he writes. It has also ”coincided with a growing sense of disempowerment. Despite the expansion of rights in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that they are losing control of the forces that govern their lives.”

That sounds like the depressed atmosphere of mainstream newsrooms today.

Disempowerment in newsrooms today takes many forms, all the way from mass layoffs at newspapers that are downsizing, to the frustration of reporters who are assigned to cover celebrity scandals while skipping important civic issues.

Meanwhile, there is neither any substantive moral discourse in newsrooms about these trends, nor any suitable framework to have one. (Only fired and refugee mainstream journalists on the Internet can try that!)

”Satanic” Arguments

John Durham Peters’ critique of liberalism is more radical than Sandel’s, especially on the right to free speech and the lengths to which he believes the media exploit it.

”There is something satanic about many liberal arguments in favor of free expression,” Peters writes. ”Defenders of free speech often like to plumb the depths of the underworld. They tread where angels do not dare and reemerge escorting scruffy, marginal, or outlaw figures, many of whom spend their time planting slaps in the face of the public.”

In a talk at McGill University last year, Peters placed a red laser dot on liberalism in plainer English: ”Liberalism undermines itself by pretending to be above the battle, by pretending to be neutral. Lots of liberals say it’s only a set of procedures and rules. But I would suggest that liberalism is one of the players. It’s not a referee. And that liberalism needs to recognize that it too has a vision. And that even in claiming neutrality it thereby forfeits a kind of neutrality, because by always trying to seek the higher ground it ends up pushing people out of an ethical position.”

Looking back, I have never seen more moral hypocrisy than in mainstream newsrooms, such as at The New York Times where I worked as a reporter from 1979 to 1989, and as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in its Tokyo, London and Hong Kong newsrooms in the 1990s. Of course, I count myself as one of the hypocrites.

Absolutism Corrupts Absolutely?

On the one hand, reporters and editors in all these newsrooms were deeply committed to ferreting out the truth, and sometimes showed great courage in doing so. This behavior alone demonstrates journalists’ deeply personal and moral involvement in society.

Yet at the same time, whenever moral questions arose upon the publication of our hard-won factual narratives, our first impulse was always to exempt ourselves from any further dialog by citing ”objectivity.”

Our job was simply to gather and put out the information we dug up, we told our miffed complainants, and that was the end of our involvement.

The accuracy of the facts that we published, and not any further discussion about the moral shadings raised by the timing or manner of their publication, was the highest moral principle we felt beholden too. ”You’ve got a problem with what we published, talk to our lawyers,” we’d say to anyone who raised questions.

Free speech absolutism was the alpha and the omega of our moral thinking. That was expedient, but was it right?

Reflecting on my newsroom experience in the light of Sandel and Peters, I think that by insisting on such moral disengagement, we journalists hurt society in several ways.

Three Problems

First, we abdicate our leadership role in society as clear, honest, reliable communicators. We limit the valuable contributions that we could make to society as exemplary communicators, by clinging to a hypocrisy that is visible for all to see.

Second, we contribute to journalism’s decline by degrading the public trust that is journalism’s principal foundation.

Third, and worst of all, by our moral obtuseness we fail to create a public space that facilitates robust and open discussion about what constitutes the good life — the best forms of government, the best values and models of human behavior.

A multicultural and global society especially needs such a free and open forum to progress peacefully. If journalism doesn’t create one, what social institution will?

These questions apply to citizen journalists — the millions of bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers and other ordinary folks who are reporting the world around them on the Internet — as much and even more so than to trained journalists.

Because like it or not the institutions of journalism, and with them the traditional journalistic values they once protected, are crumbling. That turns the ethical imperative for creating useful journalism over to the people who account for the vast majority of hours that actually are spent today in society looking around, and then recording and commenting on what’s seen, the essential journalistic enterprise.

So what’s the answer?

Neighbors and Strangers

My philosopher-guides guides offer three variations on a civic-minded theme.

Michael Sandel counsels a revival of republican public philosophy that stresses the formation of individual moral character, much along the lines that Thomas Jefferson endorsed in his agrarian vision of democracy.

John Durham Peters advocates drawing on religious traditions that are in sync with each other and with secular solidarity. ”One of the central principles of the law in Judaism is kindness to the stranger, and one of the central principles of Christianity is love of the neighbor,” he says. ”In some way, [those] are more powerful foundations for thinking about society than liberalism if you want a society with both solidarity and freedom in it.”

Charles Taylor, in his brief but enlightening essay, advocates a communitarian project similar to Sandel’s and Peters’. Yet he cautions that any future peaceful world will require a burdensome body of laws and rules to maintain order.

”We will in many ways be living lives under even greater discipline than today,” Taylor says. ”More than ever we are going to need trail-blazers who will open or retrieve forgotten modes of prayer, meditation, friendship, solidarity and compassionate action.”

My Resolution

Personally, I doubt that any such trail-blazers will be wearing blindfolds.

My New Year’s resolution is to work as a journalist, to act as a citizen, and to live as a human being without a blindfold.

Instead, I’ll try to simply use my God-given head and heart and eyes.

ROCHESTER, MN — Three years ago, I started teaching basic journalism skills to citizens in community education classes in Minneapolis.

Since then I’ve taught about a hundred ordinary folks — school teachers, government workers, not-for-profit types, retired people, students and many others — the basics of journalistic story structure, ethics and practices.

I taught at the Resource Center of the Americas, a Latino cultural center in Minneapolis, until it closed last August, and now am teaching for the Minneapolis Public Schools Community Education department.

My students take the class for many reasons. Some want to do journalism on the Internet to cover a favorite issue such as health care, human rights, or immigration reform.

Some want to learn skills to use writing not-for-profit newsletters, corporate reports or press releases. And some are simply curious to discover how journalism works, because they’ve been consuming the news media for years without understanding it. 

New Views

The class meets once a week for three hours over six-weeks, writing and rewriting articles between classes, reading and commenting on each other’s work during class. I invite working mainstream reporters and editors to many classes, to describe to citizens their daily jobs, their attitudes towards their work, and to answer whatever questions the students have. 

The class has changed my view of my role as a journalist, of journalism’s role in a democracy, and of the promises and pitfalls of the many forms of citizen journalism that are a part of the news media today.

Here are the seven main lessons I’ve learned from my citizen-students, so far:

1.   Citizens are an untapped source of expertise and positive civic energy that journalists can help unlock. Every one of my citizen journalism students has had years of personal experience in some important civic issue. They are aching to share that knowledge but have been hampered by A) Their cynicism about journalists and journalism, B) A lack of reporting and writing skills, and C) An incipient sense, like a vague but possibly potent memory, of journalism’s role as a foundation stone of democracy. The best possible teachers of these skills and attitudes of democracy are journalists. But journalists and their employers need to rethink their purpose and role in society for that to happen. We need to start thinking about journalists taking weeks, months and even years away from their newsroom jobs, to go into classrooms and auditoriums and public meeting halls to teach and to remind citizens — and to remind themselves — about how to read and write journalism critically and intelligently, and about journalism’s critical role in a democracy. Projects involving journalists fanning out into society in teaching roles would  renew trust between journalists and citizens, and show the way towards new business models for journalism, too.

2.   There is no substitute for a strong, independent, institutional journalism. My students are experts in many fields — mental health, immigration, aging, urban planning, human rights, animal rights, sports, local culture, recycling, water and air pollution, organic food, the legal system on Indian reservations, alternative medicine, and the Minnesota electoral system, to name just a few. But even under the rosiest scenario — with citizens becoming skilled online journalists in all of these areas — the result would be a journalism of special interests, and not of inclusive public interest. Most importantly, such a journalism would not constitute the strong counterweight to government and corporate power that only an organized and healthy professional journalism can provide.

3. Citizens can help journalists reconnect to the wellsprings of their craft. It happened to me. Like many journalists these days, I’m a refugee from mainstream newsrooms, where I worked hard and happily for many years. Until, one day, the relationship just didn’t work any more. Something about too many assignments that served corporate and not civic interests. I haven’t made much money teaching citizen journalism, but I’ve found citizens who care about journalism like they care about clean air and water. It’s energizing.

4.   Journalists need to learn citizenship skills, as much as citizens need to learn journalism. Time and again, I have been shocked in my class to witness the gap that’s grown up between ordinary citizens and journalists. Even highly-educated citizens tend to be ignorant of the simplest facts about how journalism is created. Many students are surprised to learn, for example, that every word in a newspaper is not fact-checked before it’s published. On the other hand, journalists who visit my class, and I myself, sometimes display an apparently ingrained, patronizing aloofness to the students, especially when we’re called on our aloofness. We journalists tend to be super-sensitive when we’re the ones being asked questions. Ordinary citizens know that at least some doctors are relaxed, approachable people. But based on my experience these past three years, few citizens have learned that lesson about journalists.

5.   A good citizen journalism class, like a great newspaper, allows for all types of expression — artistic, poetic, literary, photographic, musical, comical and fun. Because it’s created by human beings, journalism is a diverse and highly personal form of expression. Only by fully embracing that does journalism offer the complete picture of society that it should. I don’t tell students what stories to write, and they repay me by singing their hearts out in every possible way. One of my favorite stories in class was by a Guatemalan immigrant who described buying bottles of "crema" — a fermented sweet-and-sour concoction that tastes wonderful on strawberries — whenever she needed to connect with home. (She brought actual crema and strawberries to class after we read her story and begged for a sample.) Another student wrote about a scrawny feline named Buffer, the pet cat in a home of human castaways, in a way that put the problem of homelessness in a tragicomic new light.

6.   Citizens create vital community consciousness through the discipline of writing journalistically. A magical thing happens in the class, every time. Over six weeks, students in the class write one story (or rewrite one) between classes, then share it with the entire class for feedback. This creates a bond of solidarity among the students. A sense of gratitude builds towards each person in class who shares their personal insights and experiences, often at some risk to personal pride. The insistence on telling the absolute truth that journalism requires, often forces students to reveal personal knowledge beyond what they had ever dared to publicly share. One of my students, a retired business consultant, wrote an article decribing his inner struggle at becoming a peace activist, while his son was serving in the Army in Iraq. His story created a sense of solidarity in the room that was mystically strong. This is perhaps a microcosm of how journalism could ideally work in society, creating community day by day. "My view of journalism has changed," one student emailed me after the course. "At its best, it serves like an amazing expansion of our personal experience, bringing truth into our consciousness." Bingo.

7.   I’m the one who needs to change. I began as a journalist in the heyday of Woodward-and-Bernstein in newspapers, and of John McPhee in magazines. So I often get nostalgic for spacious, context-rich narratives when I read the new citizen journalism appearing on the Net. "Giant Puffball Found in Clifton," read a recent headline from the hyperlocal website, Baristanet. Where is the "Why should I care?" paragraph in the story? Not to mention readers’ calorie-free comments like one after the mushroom story: "Shrooms rule." When I settle down, though, I realize the error of my conservative reactions. Change is welcome, adapting smartly is the challenge, and Baristanet itself is a fantastic model. For mixed among its whimsical squibs on cute witches and record-shattering dosas are items reporting on urban trends, crimes, public protests, and so on. Baristanet is doing just what journalism should do. It reports on its community with ethical attention, it has fun, and it follows in word and spirit democracy’s ultimate dictum: Citizens rule.

In the fall of 2006, I participated in an academic colloquium on journalism whose other participants, mostly academics and scholars, took it as a given that journalism stands within a 2,500-year-old moral tradition that starts with Plato and continues through the world’s great religions (the Judeo-Christian ones anyway), and philosophical traditions from the Enlightenment to the present.

That approach honors a profession that, strangely, hardly ever looks at itself that way. In more than 20 years spent as a reporter, editor, and bureau chief in newsrooms in the U.S. and abroad, I don’t recall having had even a single conversation about the morality of journalism.

This made me curious to explore why, and the following blog posts are the result:

1. Why is Journalism Morally Shallow?

2. What is Journalism?

3. Why Do Journalists Sometimes Strut Like Experts?

4. Is Jon Stewart a Journalist?

5. A Journalist Chats with a Professor

6. ADD & Aspergers

7. Healing Love

8. Thinking About Journalism as Teaching

9. Thinking About Language as Spiritual Food

10. A Plea to the White House Press Corps

11. Journalism, the Individual Conscience, and Social Aims

12. Why Journalists Should Meditate

13. A Journalism of Morally Skillful Speech

A recent three-day colloquium on journalism ethics at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul was entitled: "Who is a Journalist?" As the various academics and journalists in attendance debated this question, I found myself, a practicing journalist of 30 years, marvelling at a certain great divide in the  assumptions held by these two groups — scholars of journalism ethics on one side, journalists on the other. The interesting thing was, the journalism scholars viewed the practice of journalism as a moral act, very similar to religion or philosophy or to writing serious literature.

To the journalists, meanwhile, such an outlook was virtually shocking. They  were trained to see the world in morally neutral terms, as a tenet of their profession.

Over a period of three days, I worked with professors who had thought and written deeply on issues ranging from whether journalism could be re-imagined as a caring profession, with similarities to professions like nursing or social work; to the moral stance of journalists who report stories of great consequence (e.g., genocides) that nevertheless are ignored by the mainstream media; to the moral puzzles involved in journalists reporting on "virtual" events in cyberspace as opposed to "real" ones in the real world.

Truly, these are really rich and deep moral questions that intimately involve journalism, which keeps you might say mankind’s daily diary of social breakdown and disease. And yet, my exposure to these explorers of journalism’s moral and ethical depths was matched by a simultaneous realization, that at least in my experience, working journalists have not had the slightest exposure to these questions. Nor, generally speaking, do journalists generally show the slightest interest in them. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is almost a reflex reaction by journalists against academics, not necessarily personally, but rather to the theories that academics build and propose. Journalists make a point of hating theories and glamorizing facts. It’s a really unfortunate trait that weakens the profession.

In ten years as a reporter at The New York Times, and five as a bureau chief at Bloomberg News, I don’t recall a single newsroom conversation or meeting I ever attended that was called for the purpose of making a careful application of moral principles to a specific story.

Sure, we journalists have ethics codes, and we make quick reference to one or another item on the list when a problematic story comes up. But usually, that’s the extent of the process — a cursory scan of a very small list, then choosing one item from the list to wield thereafter not as a light to guide deeper moral inquiry, but rather as a shield against the complaints and fiery emails and threats of lawsuit that may follow publication.

Nearly always, the so-called ethical discussion is limited to the small circle of people who are directly involved in the story — e.g., those quoted or interviewed as sources for the article, the reporter, and those whose work or reputations might be affected by the story. The wider ripples of journalistic work into society at large or on constitutive groups such as, say, children or women or immigrants, are considered beyond the practical, or indeed the properly moral, ambit of a journalist’s daily work.

Morality in newsrooms is a very practical business, tailored to maintain deadlines and reputations and the rolling of the presses day and night. It’s a business at the end of the day, and ethics must serve the business as everything in a business must. As one of the colloquium’s journalism scholars with summed it up, with a casualness suggesting he was uttering a cliche in his circles: ”Ethics codes are post-hoc morality.” Bingo.

Is a blogger a journalist? Is John Stewart or Stephen Colbert a journalist? How about the neighbor lady who attends every meeting of the local school board and then sends detailed reports of those meetings to all her friends? Or the retired airline stewardess (true story) who took up Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as a special interest and now writes a blog that even experts consider authoritative?

Fast-forwarding to the end of the conference, when something like a consensus view emerged, most of colloquium participants had either embraced, or appeared to be drifting, towards the conclusion that ”Who is a Journalist?” is really not the most useful or relevant question. The more useful question nearly always, we seemed to agree, is ”What is journalism?”

The latter question keeps attention focused on the usefulness of a text, as opposed to the credibility of a person. And that focus in itself seems a paragon of usefulness because, as we all know, people are famously fickle and ever-changing in their views.

More to the point, whether they are presidents or parents or friends, sometimes people are credible and sometimes they are not. Even Moms tell stretchers from time to time, though they’ll never tell you when they do.

Then again, people are basically unknowable — especially ones you haven’t met before, who make up 99.9% of the people who write for the world’s newest and already most popular publishing format for news, the Internet. So whom can you trust? Especially in a world where, thanks to the Internet, nearly anybody can be a journalist at any time, asking ”who is a journalist” sets the bar far too high above the limit of possible, practical knowing.

Whereas a simple journalistic text, for all its problems as a container of possibly social useful meaning, is much easier to assess. The facts are all there, the quotations are all there, the assertions are all there. Each of these can be placed under a microscope of close and sustained attention, plumbed for shades of meanings and associations,  compared to other texts, and above all tested by the reader against reality.

Seen in this way, from the standpoint of the possible social utility of a journalistic story, asking ”what is journalism” instead of ”who is a journalist” emerged as much the superior question to ask.

The colloquium participants offered many definitions of journalism over our three days together, but nearly all of them touched on the notion of writing for public distribution about public issues, with the intention to help or heal. Working from such a definition, determining whether a given text is journalism or not is quite straightforward: Is it about a public issue? Is it written for public distribution? Is the writer’s intention to help or heal?

Getting an answer to these questions, moreover, is no mere matter of purely philosophical or abstract import, because an answer in the affirmative means that a reader is holding a piece of writing that contains some possibly useful information or ideas for society which is, furthermore, worthy of some level of trust.

Exactly how much trust to accord to a given text is a second-level question, drawing in other considerations, that lead to a second-level answer: is a given text good journalism, or mediocre journalism, or bad?

Indeed it became clear to many of us, only a day or so into the three-day colloquium, that the question ”Who is a journalist?” was a question of  the highest abstract order, unlikely ever to yield much practical result. Because it is like asking, as some philosophers do, ”What is a coffee cup?” or ”What is an automobile?”

Well, who the heck knows? If you take the engine out of a car, is it still a car? Now take away the doors. Still a car? Now the windshield, bumpers, dashboard, seats, chassis and wheels. Have we still got a car here?

But at this point of course the absurdity of continuing such a line of questioning, at least from a practical standpoint, becomes clear. We could have spent three days peering around every corner in some Platonic heaven, looking for a ”pure” journalist in a trench coat and fedora.

But where would that get us, back here on earth?

Instead, we quickly saw the advantages of surfing to a web site, choosing an article, and asking: i’s this journalism?”

Has journalism come to the point that the equal rights of citizens are sometimes in conflict with the special privileges legally accorded to journalists?

The excellent presentation given by Erik Ugland and Jennifer Henderson made me consider the question. They made the point that the law addresses the question from at least three different standpoints — constitutional law, statutory law, and the quasi-legal realm of rules established to regulate access by journalists to people in power.

Many arguments over who is a journalist result from people arguing from different of these standpoints, without being clear or even conscious they are doing so.

The constitutional and statutory traditions are the essential ones from a long-term societal perspective and break down roughly as follows:

The constitutional perspective, embodied in practice by the U.S. Supreme Court, proceeds from basic ethical principles towards the establishment of certain guaranteed rights for all citizens.

The statutory perspective, carried out mainly by appellate and state courts, applies established laws as a basis for creating policies that confer special privileges on different groups or occupations (e.g., journalists).

A critical difference between the two perspectives is that the constitutional outlook is egalitarian, aimed at safeguarding the rights of all citizens, whereas the statutory perspective is aimed at safeguarding the privileges of certain groups based on their demonstrated degree of expertise.

Journalists are not licensed but statutory laws, varying by jurisdiction, often make a case for privileging journalists based on their demonstrated level of expertise.

What interests me is that last word, expertise.

A strong tradition in journalism scholarship identifies the exalted role of the expert in ”objective” journalism as a source of many modern journalistic ills. Especially, the estrangement of the reader from a journalism that appears to be interested only in the views of doctors, lawyers, high government officials, any ”expert,” or the author of a recently published book.

Usually, discussion of journalism’s ”expert” problem is limited to asking why journalists favor experts so heavily as sources for information, and how skewed and unequal a picture of society results.

But what interests me, after listening to Ugland and Henderson, is how the law labels journalists themselves as experts in a practice called journalism.

This suggests a kind of unresolved paradox at work. Journalism’s highest ideals are egalitarian, but somehow its practitioners are specially privileged. A journalist should show the world as it is, but the law tells him that he has an elevated position and view. He stands above the world in a special way.

Doctors face a similar paradox. They’ve got to understand their own ordinary physical selves well, in order to understand their patients well. A good journalist, like a good doctor, should compensate for his legally elevated social status by understanding his role as an ordinary citizen well. It’s really the only option he has, to stay rooted in the street-level citizen’s view. One might expand on this just a bit to say that a good journalist, like a good doctor, needs to keep in view his essential humanity, his complete vulnerability and ordinary nature as an individual human being.

But the evidence shows that journalists often lose this view. They posture on television, they pose in magazines like celebrities, they elbow for the best seats at press conferences, and they write puff pieces about powerful people in order to maintain access to them. The editor of the Washington Post brags that he does not vote, in order to maintain his special, neutral, privileged ”journalist” status.

The point is that journalists appear to confuse their constitutional and statutory roles, and especially to identify themselves personally with the high status that the latter confers on them as journalists, instead of the rights and obligations implied by the former.

The journalism profession is based on principles and rights, but journalistic practice reeks of infatuation with privilege. Journalists humbly talk equality, but arrogantly strut like experts.

When Jon Stewart, the host of the comedy TV news program The Daily Show, calls the scary-looking newspaper columnist and TV pundit Robert Novak a "douche bag for liberty,” is Jon Stewart being a journalist?

It certainly doesn’t sound like he’s being objective, of course. But then again, doesn’t Stewart’s phrase also sound like it contains a grain of truth? More truth, even, than you might expect to encounter in an average mainstream TV news program on network or cable channels? What’s up with that?

Exactly when did sarcasm become the new sincerity?

Kris Bunton, a professor of journalism at the University of St. Thomas, told the colloquium that more than half the students in one of her recent undergraduate class raised their hands when she asked them ”How many of you think that Jon Stewart is a journalist?” That was her wake-up call to the true depth of a sea change in journalism, and public attitudes about journalism, that many of us have experienced recently.

Several of the colloquium participants reported that their ”aha moment” came via an academic research study conducted last summer by the University of Indiana, which compared the news content of The Daily Show to mainstream network and cable TV newscasts. The result: the Daily Show reported as much or more actual news as its journalistic counterparts.

The Daily Show is a great example of the usefulness of the ”what is journalism?” approach, as compared to asking ”who is a journalist?” Because asking whether Jon Stewart is a journalist is an invitation to engage in endless on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand answers that amount to measuring the distance between the guy we see on TV, and the pure journalist guy in Plato’s heaven.

In some ways Jon Stewart is like the journalist in Plato’s heaven, and in some he’s ways not.

In either case, though, who cares? Just as who cares what a car is, as long as it gets us to work in the morning? By contrast, as soon as you shift the question to asking "is this journalism?”, useful answers begin to appear.

The Daily Show a couple of months ago spent a solid seven minutes reporting on a speech delivered by Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who chairs a Senate a committee with influential oversight over Internet matters. The speech went virtually unnoticed by network and cable TV news channels.

Yet the Daily Show highlighted the speech because it transpired, upon listening to the Senator, that he hadn’t a clue what the Internet is, or how it works. He used absurd metaphors, including ”the Internet is a series of tubes,” to blunder his way through a speech that amounted to posturing on behalf of special media business lobbyists who had obviously plied him recently.

The glaring gap between the Senator’s legislative power on Internet issues, and his actual knowledge of the Internet, seemed newsworthy to The Daily Show. Indeed, in any journalism newsroom, such a judgment, if the newsroom truly operated under the principle of serving public interests, would be entirely correct and uncontroversially so. It would be entirely in keeping with a definition of journalism as an activity that brings matters of important public interest to everyone in society.

Therefore, that The Daily Show highlighted the speech and the mainstream news did not, means that in this case (as in many others), The Daily Show was producing journalism and that mainstream news organizations were not.

From such a view, the fact that the truth of the matter was offered to the public in the form of parody, as opposed to the form of ”objective” journalism, matters not a whit. Obviously in this case a comedian delivered the truth, and the Platonic man-in-a-trenchcoat did not.

That many young people say Jon Stewart is a journalist is therefore deeply encouraging. That’s because those students obviously care more deeply about the truth than do about the form in which it’s delivered. They obviously know the truth when they see it. They’ve got eagle eyes for bullshit served on a silver platter, and also for truth that’s buried in the muck.

That they are scavenging the muck in droves is a bright omen. That the truth is so rare a commodity today that its appearance on a comedy show amounts to breaking news — a dog bites man oddity — is a dark one.

John Pauly, dean of the Diederich College of Communications at Marquette Colleges, and I walked from our hotel to lunch one day down Nicollet Mall, straight past the bronze statue of Mary Tyler Moore.

But it wasn’t 70’s television we were remembering. Rather, we were bemoaning journalism’s almost childlike refusal, or maybe it’s more akin to an allergy, to theory and everything about theory.

Working journalists routinely denigrate two classes of people above all — public relations people and academics. The first group are ”flacks,” hired guns, propagandists, craven salary-workers who’ve sold their creative souls to the devil. That working journalists spend huge chunks of their working days reading press releases and pitch memos, attending press conferences and PR events, and working their public relations sources for  contacts and information — all of this decreases not a whit their condescending attitude toward denizens of the public relations world. Indeed it probably increases their disdain, as most journalists secretly feel guilty about relying so heavily on PR specialists for guidance and information. But here is the really interesting bit: PR in a general sense controls the media because PR operates using a conscious, sophisticated, and road-tested theory of the media and society, while journalism as a profession doesn’t, and individual journalists don’t.

This is where journalists’ knee-jerk disparagement of PR people, essentially an expression of their disdain for thinking theoretically, overlaps with academe. That journalists should disparage academics is at first blush surpassing odd, because they do such similar work, towards such a similar aim. Both journalists and academics to do research into the world in order to understand it. Both are motivated in essence by a burning curiosity about the world and its workings. Both want to objectively understand their object of study, which is the world.

And yet — is it genetic? learned? caused by sunspots? — a difference in their essential existential posture appears to ineluctably divide journalists from academics. And this difference has to do with the ultimate value that one camp gives to facts and physical things, and the ultimate value that the other accords to ideas and theories of explanation. One could state the difference this way: for a journalist, facts in themselves possess an inherent, transcendent worth. The one thing that is most desperately needed by all people, a journalist believes, are the simple facts. The damn difficulty of discovering those facts, to a journalist, is in itself a kind of proof of their ultimate worth, and a justification that all procedures and methods of research should serve the discovery and illumination of fact. A journalist sees himself as a heroic figure bringing streams of fresh, clean, purifying facts to the masses of people nearly parched to death by political and corporate propaganda and corruption.

To an academic, this all looks bass-ackwards. The explanation of a fact, and not the fact in itself, to an academic appears self-evidently to be the superior goal. Facts are important, the academic says, but what good are facts without explanations for why those facts have arisen, for how they are patterned, and for what pattern they might take next? A tiny percentage of working journalists, and a tiny percentage of academics to whom journalists have grudgingly accorded respect, have taken the point. The most prominent of the latter group is the late journalism professor, James Carey, who explored journalism’s antipathy to theory and explanation in his famous essay, ”The Dark Continent of American Journalism.” If journalism’s goal is to find out ”who, what, when, where, and how,” Carey said, the dark continent of the profession is the oft-ignored stepchild on the list, the one most times tentatively formulated as ”and, sometimes, ‘why.”’

This is far too limited a format to accommodate a thorough — dare I say rigorously objective? — consideration of the ”why” of the journalism-academe gap. But as a journalist for most of my adult life, I am perhaps qualified to offer a personal theory as to why journalists, almost genetically it seems, are inclined to value facts so highly. It is because at some time in their childhood they came to believe that the facts about life were being withheld from them, as candy or toys or parental affection might be withheld. And this withholding of fact, at this stage of life, instilled within them a burning desire, even a rage, to have those facts they desired. The essential immaturity, even delusion, that is part and parcel of this burning desire, in no way diminishes its power as a motivating force. For such a journalist, then, every act of journalism, in which previously-hidden facts are brought to light, is both a greedy personal devouring of a sweetness that’s been desired from a primordial time, and simultaneously an act of revenge against those who originally withheld that sweetness from a child.

So there is my theory covering the journalistic side. I couldn’t speak for academics. But I have a hunch that in some way, academics in their maturity are searching not for the sweetness itself that originally was withheld, but instead for an explanation as to the why it was withheld. Ideas, anyone?

Maybe John had inadvertently given me an answer when, as we walked down Nicollet Mall, he offered his theory that every profession is in some way a mirror image of a physical or mental disease.

I had mentioned to him a remark once made by Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, that he saw himself presiding over a news staff of some 350 reporters who all suffered from advanced Attention Deficit Disorder.

Oddly, he said this in a confident and even proud tone, one that anticipated he would receive not the slightest disapprobation, but instead the good-natured agreement, of every colleague whom he had just labeled as mentally ill.

John’s response to this anecdote was that he’d long believed that academics often conducted themselves like high-functioning sufferers of Asperger’s Syndrome. That is, he said, they have a freakish talent for conducting prolonged, abstract discussions within themselves. They gravitated to professorships because the academy values the literary renderings of such inner conversations, if conducted at a high enough level.

As we walked down Nicollet Mall that misty, drizzly Minneapolis Monday morning, I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye that what was happening that very moment was that an ADD victim was having a jolly good time in conversation with an Asperger’s sufferer. And that in addition to having fun, we seemed to be learning from each other.

Hope for the world, I thought!

If the profession-as-disease theory that John and I had developed is correct, both journalists and academics would appear to have ingeniously turned lemons into lemonade for themselves personally, by transforming personal failings into professional strengths. Each found for themselves a profession that rewards personal traits that in other realms of life would be handicaps.

The parallel goes even deeper. Probably both the lifelong search for redeeming facts about society by journalists, and the search for redeeming theories of society by those of an academic bent, arose to compensate for an original loss, and a painful feeling therefore of lack or rupture or rift, caused by a sweetness originally withheld. To heal that rift the journalist went outward into the world in search of facts, while academics went inward towards theories.

Possibly each of these searches is but a version of the same essential search, which is to finally replace the sweetness originally withheld. And, quite possibly, each version of the search is based on a similar misunderstanding, one might even say a delusion which is that both might believe his search is ultimate and superior to the other.

It may well be that if both the journalist and the academic were truly rigorous in their observations of themselves and the world, they would find that neither facts nor theories in any way resemble that original sweetness that they miss, and therefore can never heal the gap. Facts in themselves, after all, are nothing but dots on a graph, data points of a chaos. And theories are nothing but lascivious modes of distraction, a dawdling in Plato’s heaven while the specific, heavy, dreadful work of the world awaits below.

What is my guess as to the true nature of the original sweetness withheld?

Love, is my guess. I’d further suggest that journalism — to speak from my corner of the discussion — would get a lot better if journalists paused for a moment to consider love as an elixir of social healing, and its rightful place inside their narratives, as an ingredient mixed perhaps right into scene and character and plot and voice, as catalytic chemical primer that would bind all the elements of story into tales of news and drama that were at all at once compelling, trustworthy, and socially of use.

I do not refer to love in the gushy ”in love” Hollywood sense, but rather to love as a muscled, active principle, an intelligent coursing force that we all very naturally know. It is a love whose action upon life works like blood, or intention, or prayer, or the void of space, or the oxygen-bearing layer of atmosphere that thinly surrounds our earth.

It’s love as love has been defined by the greatest hearts of humanity in their wrestling with life — love as Plato’s ”eros” or Christ’s ”agape” or Buddha’s ‘’sympathetic joy.” It’s a love that’s both a fact and a theory and beyond both, the love that every one of us, no matter how mighty or privileged or blessed we are, or how occupied by pressing practical duties, must humbly acknowledge is the very root of existence and therefore is the deepest cause of those specific expressions we come to know as ”me,” and ”my accomplishments,” and ”my daily life.”

No matter the distance between such personal minutiae and the greatness (or perhaps it is the humility or even the voidness) of this love, we all know this is our job. We need to connect the dots between our smallness and this greatness from time to time, or else we become untethered, meaningless, anxiety-ridden, absurd. And at the local level, lacking love or meaning, we will also naturally become cruel, and our lives will be a suffering hell. Our academic papers will be nonsense and our journalism, crap.

So in this way we circle back to the practical need to understand the muscled, coursing, embracing, actual force of love for the sake of own lives and professions — in this case as academics in search of perfect theories, or journalists seeking perfect facts.