Wire stories and reports from AP, UPI, Reuters without bylines are bad enough. So when I went up to Dartmouth in the fall of 1920, lacking a month of being sixteen, I took it for granted that William Jennings Bryan was a crackpot and Nicholas Murray Butler a profound scholar, that the Reds in Europe were ravening beasts and Socialists here a bit touched in the head. All these notions I erroneously thought were the result of my own ratocinations. I wonder how Liebling would have compared newspapers in 1947 to television, radio, and the Internet today. When I think of schools of journalism, I think of schools of propaganda.
Some people get into professional writing after being trained at schools of communication.
In my opinion, the best journalists come from the School of Hard Knocks. But, Liebling later decided to attend the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University. I expect Liebling's thought on this could be used to justify both support of, or attacks on liberal-arts educations. The press in particular became untrustworthy. We had to get the news as to what was going on in Pittsburgh from the Philadelphia and New York papers.