I Think the Press Hates Us

“From our standpoint, the press just don’t get us and [from their viewpoint] academics are abstruse,” said Carnegie Mellon professor Jeffrey J. Williams to open a panel called Covering Academe, that could have been alternately subtitled “Why does the press make fun of us?”

The very first speaker, David R. Shumway, also of Carnegie Mellon, articulated the complaint of those who attend and present each year only to be mocked by the media. “Ridiculing the convention has become a holiday ritual for journalists. They note the wackier titles and mock us,” Shumway said.

Shumway limited his comments to the mainstream media and said he believes the reason journalists do not choose to cover, or do not provide good coverage to the humanities is because of an inherent difference between journalism and academia. “Journalists strive for objectivity and work in the ideology of fact,” but academics work in theory and interpretation, he said. Shumway also suggested part of the disconnect may result from competition.

“This turf battle is not going to be easily resolved,” but Shumway said the best solution is that “academics should try to explain better [what they do and why] and be involved.”

Richard Byrne, a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Ed, was supposed to present, but was unable to so prompting Jennifer Ruark of The Chronicle of Higher Ed to read his paper to the audience.

Byrne’s position is that the humanities should be covered by the press when it meets the criteria of being newsworthy and serious. His speech also explained the need for standards within academia and that the press should devote space to issues of academic malfeasance and plagiarism. “Journalists need to dig deep” to find the real stories, wrote Byrne, but he cautioned that it is not the journalist’s job to find an audience for the humanities when it doesn’t exist. “But when it is news, I want to cover it.”

Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Ed made a presentation called, “Outside Looking In,” and asked a pointed question of the gathered academics: “Why are 22-year-olds socialized [within classes] to consider them [the press] mere journalists?” He went on to say that while journalists do sometimes get things wrong, there seems to be a distinctive viewpoint coming from the professoriate that journalists are inferior. McLemee also offered up a solution to this phenomenon and to the image problem of professors and academia in the press. “Get professors speaking honestly and intelligently to journalists,” he said.

Williams, who had opened the panel, also presented “Naiveté,” in which he agreed with the previously mentioned idea that the problematic relationship between academe and journalism stems from their common ancestry and is a sort of family rivalry. He stated that holding onto snobbery because journalism is driven by market forces is unfair. “Journalists are intellectuals too,” said Williams “and they should be in the union of intellectuals [with us].” He also said he would like to see more reporting of cultural events, but that means academics need to talk about what they are doing; and that there needs to be better and more accessible writing by professors, but even more importantly there needs to be more and better editing.

Ruark also gave her own statement as a respondent to the panel, saying that she believes many journalists are “comfortable with professors as philosopher kings” because journalists work within an entirely different framework and for a different purpose. The lack of good press coverage of the humanities is “the case of literary scholars not making a strong case for their studies to the journalists. They need to explain better what they do, why they do it and what is different about it,” said Ruark.

In the question and answer session one listener made the point that perhaps the panel should have included a journalist from a newspaper or other mainstream media, rather than three education publication reporters.

Julia A. Seymour is a staff writer for Accuracy in Academia.