I concur—and I’m a J-school grad.
Journalism is an easy major, if you have any degree of writing and speaking skills. Learning to write for digital platforms (or broadcast) can teach you how to express ideas succinctly and accurately. You can also hone speaking skills that are useful in describing issues, concepts and potential solutions.
But that’s about all a J-school education provides, in terms of positive influences. On the negative side, there’s too much emphasis on context, i.e., presenting information through the desired, progressive lens, so the “news” has the inevitable liberal slant.
There’s also the matter of editing skills (or the lack thereof). Most J-school grads may take only a single course on copy editing, so their ability to correct and improve their writing is marginal at best. Most broadcast journalism students are far more proficient that assembling the video portion of a “package” than writing the accompanying script. Try this experiment: next time you’re watching a local TV news broadcast, listen to the narration or pull up closed captioning, and see how the “words” relate to the images.
Finally, the vast majority of aspiring journos have no real expertise in the subjects they cover, unless they happen to be an ex-lawyer assigned to the court beat. Take a gander at the next Pentagon press briefing on CSPAN and listen to some of the questions. You’ll quickly discover that even the “veteran” defense reporters really don’t have a clue about the military—and the same holds true for journalists covering business, the economy, education and dozens of other topics. They lack both the experience and the education to do the job properly.
Ironically, journalism skills can be a career enhancer in other fields. My writing and speaking skills served me very well as an intel analyst and briefer and many employers (in a variety of fields) list good communication skills as the top thing they look for in new hires. Unfortunately, many lack the basic education (in other topics) that allow them to fully leverage those talents.
Once off the lower rungs, do you agree that journalists live in an echo chamber with little diversity of point of view?
To me the worst so called science journalists. They for the most part don’t have science degrees. They do have egos big enough to think that writing about it is the same as doing it. Plus they are hood winked more often than not.
I started in law enforcement in 1970. By the time I retired in 1999 it was rare to get a recruit that could ‘express ideas succinctly and accurately’ in writing as you described.
I had to fire a few in the field training phase because I could not get a police report that would stand any scrutiny by a defense attorney or court. Problems with details, logic, elements of the crime, spelling, grammar. Things we learned in 4th grade writing book reports.
And this is after a long selection process and months in the academy. Sad