We absorbed such things as how to be fair and responsible through osmosis observing what colleagues said and did. I guess that was in part because it was assumed everyone knew right from wrong, but also because the overriding preoccupation was on getting the paper out, so what to cover and comment on took far greater precedence than reflecting on journalistic values. I suspect that still is true most places. A great strength of academia is that journalistic values are not slighted. If students don t know the journalistic equivalent of the Ten Commandments by the time they graduate, they ve been goofing off.
Journalism is important, perhaps never more so.
At a time when the public is awash with docudramas, films that fictionalize real events and biographies that take liberties with the facts, the public needs sources of information it can trust. Press performance sometimes falls short, but the mainstream press is committed as an institution to the goals of truth and accuracy, to telling the story, as much as humanly possible, like it is. That commitment comes in no small part from the training J-schools provide. So I was especially gratified the other day to have a student articulate that. In my course, I ask students to read a variety of materials and to submit summaries, along with any comments.