RIPNYT
There was a curious juxtaposition of stories in this morning’s news:
Mark C. Taylor, former chairman of the humanities department at Williams College (my Alma Mater), and currently chairman of the department of religion at Columbia University wrote in the New York Times: Academic Bankruptcy:
American higher education has long been the envy of the world, but today our institutions are eroding from within and are facing growing competition from countries like China and India, which are developing ambitious plans to enter the global higher education market. Capital can be intellectual and cultural as well as financial; it is vital that American higher education remains the reserve currency of the global educational system. No less than Wall Street, our colleges and universities are in dire need of reform.
Then, who should come along to underscore his point, but his own boss, Lee C. Bollinger, the President of Columbia University
Bollinger was writing in The Wall Street Journal. claiming “Journalism Needs Help”.
You see, this is what happens when you spend too much time in academia.
Journalism does not need ‘help’. Bollinger, ironically makes this quite clear in his very first paragraph:
We have entered a momentous period in the history of the American press. The invention of new communications technologies—especially the Internet—is transforming the human capacity to speak, perhaps as monumentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. This is facilitating the largest and fastest expansion of global economic growth in human history. Free speech and a free press are essential to a dynamic economy.
You bet we have.
And journalism has been on the leading edge of the Internet Revolution.
We have gone from what was essentially an information desert to an information explosion.
Where once there were a handful of sources of information – and almost all of them in private hands and run for profit, we now have millions of sources of information. Indeed, there are now an estimated 240 million blogs online. Shall we compare the so called GoldenAge of newspapers in New York, when there were 17?
Journalism, contrary to what Mr. Bollinger says, is NOT in trouble.
What is in trouble is the old style news businesses.
They are very much in trouble.
In fact, they are dead.
But so what?
Bollinger calls for government aid to bail out what are essentially dinosaur industries that can no longer compete.
Let’s have a call for a bail out of buggy whip manufacturers in the wake of Henry Ford and his disruptive cars.
How will buggy whip manufacturers, let alone wheelwrights survive?
They won’t.
They shouldn’t.
Because no one wants them anymore.
So why should the government underwrite them?
Bollinger seems to believe that there is something magical and special about journalism as it used to be practiced.
His comment:
My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.
is the most telling.
What is he really saying here?
Today we only have a few dozen old white people who are in China telling us what is going on.
I mean, who else can we trust except for a few old white guys to tell us about China?
The fact that there are probably a few million Chinese actually online blogging and posting videos about Cina is inherently worthless to us. We want the stuff from OUR white guys over there – even if most of them hardly speak a word of Mandarin.
In Iran, onlymehdi.com, a blogger in New Jersey(!) takes in and posts 250 videos a day from dissident students in Iran.
Ever see even one of them on the CBS Evening News?
Of course not?
And why not?
Because they weren’t made by one of OUR reporters in Iran – someone who flies into the country, doesn’t speak the langauge, doesn’t know the history or the culture and ‘reports’ to us.
You call this journalism?
We have been in Iraq for nine years now!
How many Iraqis do you think have video cameras? A million? 10 million?
And how often do you think they are making videos of the crap that is going on in their own country?
100,000 a week? 10,000 a week? Let’s take an incredibly conservative number and say 1,000 a week.
that would be 52,000 videos a year for 9 years or 400,000 videos.
How many of those videos have you ever seen on The CBS Evening News (or anywhere else?)
Would none be a good number?
Would none be a good guess?
And how come?
It’s not because they’re not there.
It’s because we don’t want to acknowledge that they have any value.
We don’t ‘trust’ them.
And why?
Because they aren’t WHITE FOLKS LIKE US.
You know, the graduates of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
They are not entitled to report their own lives.
They aren’t smart enough.
Only we are.
But now, their stuff is burying our good white ignorant reporters.
help!
Bail them out.
Keep our people working.
It’s a bit like illegal immigrants when you think about it – only backward.
Very backward indeed.
