Journalism school: Has it changed since Trump?

In My Humble Opinion
1

More of a GQ question than IMHO, but I figure a mod will move it to IMHO soon anyway:

Are journalism students in universities now learning things differently in the Trump Era than what they might have been taught in journalism class 20 or 40 years ago? (i.e., is it still the same standards/ethos about things like keeping opinion separate from facts, bias/unbias, responding to readers claiming that something was reported inaccurately, trying to reach “the other side” for comment before running an article, etc.)

Not trying to make this a pro-Trump or anti-Trump thread - just want to ask if the teaching of journalism has changed at all because of Trump.

2

Dunno about J-school specifically, but in academia in general, it takes a while to change a curriculum. You have to submit courses to administration and get them approved, and that can have a year or so lag time.

Here, for instance, is a current listing of classes at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Most of the descriptions look like standard courses that have been on the books for a while, such as Reporting, Reporting in Conflict Zones, Business and Financial News, Computational Journalism, etc.

Edit: Not to say that specific examples and assignments used in such courses might not have a fair bit to do with the current administration, just that I’m not seeing any evidence there of a massive post-Trump rethinking of the fundamentals of the discipline.

3

OK thanks, but…not so much necessarily change in curriculum, but maybe change in tone or style or ethos. Is there now more of a teaching that, “Opposing the bad side is more important than being impartial/objective?”

4

Are you imagining a scenario where the prof pauses in the middle of a lecture on journalistic integrity and gives a big ole wink to the lecture hall?

5

Well, that is certainly an attitude we see in some overtly partisan media such as Fox News, but I don’t think they’re learning it in journalism school:

Within mainstream journalism, though, there seems to be a renewed sense of the importance of journalistic ethics, according to this summary of journalism trends at the end of 2017:

More recently, here’s a set of predictions for 2019 from a research associate from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism:

So it seems that journalism as a discipline is primarily focusing on business models, technology possibilities, and increasing transparency and reliability in reporting, not on deprioritizing journalistic ethics to supposedly promote a particular “side”.

6

I graduated from The Best Damn Journalism School In The World*, the University of Missouri, and I’ve seen a number of graduates who went on to Fox News. That style of news is not what they were taught at Mizzou.

What I think will happen is that more emphasis will be given to teaching journalists that the he said/she said, statement/response style of “balanced reporting” doesn’t work when one side is flat-out making shit up, and that those people don’t deserve balance. Of course, that will require more independent fact-checking, and if there’s one thing people hate, it’s facts they don’t agree with.

*Okay, “best” may be open to argument, but it is factually the first degree-granting journalism program.