My article from Monday, The Internet
vs. the Consensus of the Competent, drew several interesting
responses which you can read below, along with some more commentary
from me on the topic, which is one that I rise to easily.
I certainly have nothing against excellence or standards where they
are appropriately applied, nor for that matter elitism, so long as it's
the benevolent sort that reaches down to give a hand up, rather than
the self-serving sort that is oriented toward maintaining gratuitous
walls of exclusivity.
And I hate bureaucracies.
Thanks to everyone who wrote for your thoughtful comments.
re: Credentials
From Tim Baxter
As a degreed journalist - well, almost degreed, I split with two
classes left to go to work - I have to say that was an interesting and
provocative piece there.
I had the good fortune of going to one of the most-respected
journalism schools in the U.S. at Arizona State. The journalism program
there is consistently ranked top 10, usually top 5. Interestingly,
relatively little time was spent on the mechanics or art of
writing.
What they did focus on was the craft - learning to write for an
audience, how to catch and hold readers with ever-shorter attention
spans, and, most of all, how to report what's actually happening
instead of just regurgitating someone else's opinion of what news
should be.
I agree that the vast majority of what they taught could be learned
through other methods, although it would be difficult. I also agree
some people leaving the program couldn't write nearly as well as some
kids just beginning. Ya just can't make a silk purse out of a sow's
ear....
Anyway, one of the great things about journalism is that it's very
much a "put up or shut up" profession. You can wave credentials around
all day long, but it's not too hard for anyone with half a brain to
figure out whether or not you've really got talent by what's under the
byline.
Hi Tim,
I think we're pretty much on the same page, so to
speak.
It would be silly to contend that there is nothing
useful to be learned in journalism school, and I affirmed in the
article that journalism school will teach attendees skills that will
help them to achieve success in a journalistic career.
My beef isn't with people learning journalism skills
that way, but rather with the insinuation that one shouldn't be
considered a legitimate "journalist" unless one has a journalism
degree, a notion that is indeed silly, and in many cases
self-serving.
I'm a working journalist, and I've made what passes
for a living freelancing for the past 15 years. I've been published for
fee in about 50 newspapers. magazines, and Websites, including The
National Post, The Montreal Gazette, Canadian Yachting, The Calgary
Herald, The Toronto Star, Canadian Business, and Mac Today magazine.
I've covered topics ranging from politics, to yachting, to religion, to
alternative medicine, to boat and ship building, to computers, to
environmentalism, to offshore oil and gas development, to commercial
fishing, to culture, to history, and so on and so forth.
Someone - can't recall who - a while back passed on an
anecdote about a cocktail party attended by some of the nation's
best-known and successful journalists. The question was asked how many
of them had journalism degrees. Turns out that only one person in the
room did, and he was a lowly and unpublished proofreader. Kind of begs
the question as to why there are university majors in journalism at
all.
In 1996-97 I served as editor of the Atlantic Canada
edition of The Ottawa Times, a small but feisty political newspaper
based in Canada's capital. We had four unique pages to fill with
regional content in our split-run edition, and we needed some local
writers.
The Ottawa Times had high journalistic standards - its
style and format were modeled after the Times of London - but only a
shoestring budget to pay writers, which presented a problem. Someone
came up with the idea of inviting students from a journalism school at
one of Nova Scotia's universities to write for the paper. While we
could not pay more than a token honorarium, we reasoned that young
writers might jump at the chance to flesh out their resumes with clips
of work published in a serious, nationally-circulated journal like the
Ottawa Times.
We had several bites and eventually did line up a
couple of journalism students to write for the Atlantic Edition of the
Times. Unfortunately, the quality of material they submitted was so bad
that it would have taken us less time to write stories from scratch
ourselves than to try to edit their stuff into tolerable prose. These
people weren't freshmen, either, but second or third year students as I
recall.
Now maybe we got an unrepresentative sampling or
perhaps the token fee we were offering wasn't enough incentive for
these people to offer their best work, but I remain skeptical. We ran
into the same problem with the work of another journalism student from
another school in another province. I hasten to add that I'm familiar
with the work of quite a number of good journalists who have graduated
from both of these schools, but my belief is that they would have
become good writers anyway.
Charles
Journalistic credentials
Martin Sørensen
Just my words, Charles!
How on Earth can you have freedom of expression and ask for
credentials for writers at the same time?
The alternative would be something like the Soviet Union then or
Zimbabwe now.
It is to me reasonable to ask for credentials for work which can be
(physically) dangerous if done wrong, or at least to have the result
approved by someone with credentials. E.G.: electric installations (we
use 230V).
I also prefer that building work is designed by someone with an idea
of structural integrity.
An interesting note: In Denmark, we have a Doctor's degree (not the
same as Ph.D.) which does not require anything but the production and
defense of a dissertation. As an example, a (professional) nurse some
years ago became Doctor of Medicine that way. The degree gives the
right to lecture at the institution which awards it.
I hold a M.Sc. in chemical engineering, and I know very well that
professional disinterest is rarer than most people think.
A good example is the hospitalization and handling of births. In
Denmark, there is a move to concentrate births at fewer hospitals, in
spite of the fact that no one have been able to show any benefit for
the women or the children. The medical careers, though...
The most extreme "backwards" case is the Netherlands, where 1/3 of
births take place in the home. The Netherlands also have one of the
World's lowest infant mortality rates, around 50-60% of the US as far
as I remember... I get carried away.
Keep up the good work, both of you, credentials or not.
brgds
Martin Sørensen
PS: LEM is the only Mac site I check almost every day.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and for the
interesting stats on infant mortality. I categorically reject the
"consensus of the (supposedly) competent."
Outcomes analysis affords a more lucid perspective and
reality check:
We have ceded our personal responsibility for care of
our bodies to medical experts. Result? Rates of degenerative
disease are worse now than they ever were, despite nominally increasing
life expectancy (which doesn't look nearly as impressive when you
discount the genuine and substantial decrease in infant mortality,
which skews the averages up), and vast numbers of people living in
medication-dependent "normal bad health."
We turn over responsibility for teaching our children
to educational experts. Result? Between 30 and 50 percent of North
Americans are functionally illiterate. We have a population unequipped
to think for itself, ignorant of literature and history, and sitting
ducks for the cynical manipulations of advertisers, politicians, and
other demagogues.
We have defaulted responsibility for maintenance of
healthy psyches and repairing personal relationships to psychological
experts. Result? General emotional health is alarmingly bad, marriages
and family life are in ruins, and suicide is at an all-time high.
We abdicate responsibility for faith to supposed
religious experts. Result? The churches are either emptying in droves -
the erstwhile faithful repelled by theological higher criticism and
moral revisionism - or majoring on the dissemination of religious
kitsch and showbiz.
Splendid results achieved by expertise!
Charles
The Internet vs. the Consensus of the
Competent
From Algernon
I agree wholeheartedly with your column. I must add that Low End Mac is one of the best sites around,
probably because it is written by "amateurs" with amateur concerns,
lives, and even equipment.
Hi Algernon,
As my article indicated, I harbor healthy skepticism
about credentialed expertise, no doubt stemming partly from a lifetime
of being a dedicated amateur and dilettante in an eclectic range of
fields. The late Richard Weaver, an astute philosophic commentator,
observed that: "The specialist stands ever at the borderline of
psychosis . . . Specialization develops only part of a man; a
man partially developed is deformed . . . suffering from a
severe fragmentation of his world picture...."
The cult of expertise all too often becomes an
exercise in gatekeeping and contrived professional elitism which
requires that confidence in lay-competence must be undermined, and
people indoctrinated to hold credentialed expertise in a regard that's
inflated out of all proportion to reality.
Specialization is not merely an abdication of
intellect, but also a pernicious danger to society. Obsession with
isolated parts obscures the whole, inhibits critical thought, makes
people moral and philosophical imbeciles, and leads to a fatal
confusion of fragmented factual knowledge and ideological formulae with
wisdom.
As Theodore Roszak put it in "Where The Wasteland
Ends," where everything - everything - has been staked out as
somebody's special field of knowledge, what is the thinking of ordinary
people worth? Precisely zero. For what do they know about anything that
some expert does not know better? There are even experts on their sex
life, their dreams, their relations with their children, their voting
habits, their morals and manners, their tastes, their needs."
It's way past time we reclaimed the consensus of lay
common sense.
Charles
Internet vs. the Consensus of the Competent
From Magilum
I bet the other site was Applelust. The writer was
likely David C. Shultz. That guy/site has been decried for its
pretension and self-aggrandizement before, by Dave Egger of Mac Monkey. I don't give that site [Mac
Monkey] a lot of credit, though I do agree with them on Applelust.
Hi Magilum,
Dave Schultz is a friend of mine, and I've written for
Applelust. However, friends can disagree on certain issues and modes of
approach.
I expect that Applelust appeals to a certain type of
reader, and there's certainly plenty of room for that.
Since I wasn't privy to the exchange beyond what Dan
quoted in his column, all I was commenting on was that
specifically.
Charles
...consensus of the competent...
From Wayne Preston Allen
Right on the mark. I have been logging the incredibly bad articles I
am tricked into reading on the Internet, and every one of them has been
produced by a professional writer publishing in a mega-media online
publication. They are characterized by laziness and bias, presumably
bred by the tech business bubble and its squandered billions....
Keep on truckin...
Wayne Allen
Hi Wayne,
A couple of years ago, Applelinks reader Craig Cox
observed that "Having grown up in a newspaper family and working in a
real newspaper, I can tell you flatly that there is no integrity in the
'news' media. They constantly suppress news that they determine harmful
to their advertisers or doesn't support their utopian view of the
world."
"No integrity" is pretty strong, and I have been
privileged to work with quite a number of people in journalism whose
integrity I respect, but Craig has a point.
"Objectivity" is a great sacred cow and particular
conceit of journalists, and the objectivity posture trained journalists
are taught to assume is more than disingenuous; it is an extremely
handy artifice for camouflaging blatant advocacy and propagandizing
behind a smokescreen of faux professional piety. This is something I
refuse to do. Even when writing straight news or technical pieces, I
never attempt to hide or disguise my voice. I obviously don't think
there is anything wrong with advocacy, so long as you do your best to
be scrupulously fair, and don't try to pretend that you're merely an
unbiased fly-on-the-wall. For all I know flies may indeed be unbiased,
but humans aren't, even when they think they are.
Charles
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