A Modest Proposal: One Way to Save Journalism and Journalism Education.

AbstractThis essay suggests that because anyone and everyone can now be a "journalist," the standards of the field of journalism have been greatly diminished. To regain respect for the profession and retain stature in the academy, journalism education should offer an assurance of the legitimacy of journalism program graduates by recognizing only programs with appropriate personnel, infrastructure, and the financial means to assure the quality of their graduates, and then award an official appellation such as "certified" or "credentialed." Academia and the profession must join together to agree on the appropriate requirements.Keywordsaccrediting, licensing, certified, credentials, journalism educationCyrus joined our family recently from the local Humane Society, and part of the dog adoption process required that we take him for a health checkup. At our familiar vet- erinary clinic, Cyrus was examined by a doctor of veterinary medicine whose certifi- cate showed that she graduated from one of the twenty-eight veterinary medicine schools in the country.1 She assured us of Cyrus's good health, prescribed some pills, and charged us about two hundred dollars.When we sold our first house, we used the services of a real estate agent who is a graduate from my own institution's school of business. In addition to that achievement, she is also a certified Realtor, meaning she is a real estate professional who is a member of the National Association of Realtors (NAR).2 She told me that to keep her real estate license, she has to take classes every year, and to maintain her membership in the NAR, she must take about thirty hours of course work. "It's a tool to maintain professional status," she said.These examples trace roughly the boundaries of a taxonomy that has been applied to journalism: It is a field that requires preparation less rigorous than medicine but more substantial than that of a real estate sale agent. Yet, both medicine and real estate sales require a "license," a public assurance that the practitioners hold some legitimacy.Journalism, on the other hand, has nothing like that in America. The purpose of this article is to suggest the hitherto unthinkable, that maybe for the good of both the field and our form of democracy we might consider offering the consuming public some assurance of quality.We traditionally and by almost knee-jerk reaction challenge any such limits because we have the First Amendment. That wise document guarantees everyone a right to freedom of expression, and as Richard Gingras of Google observed in his keynote address to the August 2012 annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, "there are no longer any barriers to publishing- everyone has a printing press. There are no gatekeepers. Technically, anyone can pub- lish and have his or her expression available to anyone in the world."3 That means the teen blogger in his parents' basement has access to the web and publication fully equivalent to that of a veteran correspondent covering the U.S. Supreme Court.The resulting journalism environment has led to disarray that should concern all of us in the field, either practitioner or academic. A large amount of quality journalism still exists, but it is rapidly being overwhelmed by fables put forth as real journalism, such as reporting about heroic Jessica Lynch, the young soldier captured and then rescued by the United States after she emptied her rifle at attacking Iraqi forces that had ambushed her truck convoy, a story later determined to be largely a fabrication. Indeed, the Iraqi war's prosecution mostly owed itself to an unexamined threat of weapons of mass destruction. Other all-too-common examples include such perversi- ties as stories on the "hoax" of global warming, a.k.a. climate change, supplied on equal footing with the great mass of scientific evidence that confirms an alteration of the planet's atmosphere. …