Such dicta have long been at the heart of an education in journalism. Attacks on them send, I know, shivers down spines. Journalism programs do serve a function by repeatedly insisting on the tried and true. But it is, in the end, a limited function. We need a more advanced, more adventurous approach.
Journalism education needs a heart transplant.
N o discipline handles the juggling act between academic and professional concerns entirely smoothly, but many other professionally oriented programs do handle it differently. That's not how it's done, for example, in law school. It doesn't help to give them easy cases. They get pushed out to the frontier in every class they take. Journalism is often taught, in introductory skills courses, as if many of the questions it raises had a right or wrong answer.