I attended a Lutheran ordination last weekend. “Will you give faithful witness to the world?” the candidate was asked. “I will,” she said. There was a laying on of hands, and someone spoke. “Bless Jennette’s witness and work among us that it may further understanding and reconciliation where there is fear and estrangement.” Someone else said, “Discipline yourself in life and teaching that you preserve the truth, giving no occasion for false security or illusory hope. Witness faithfully in word and deed to all people.” The ceremony, which ended in applause and cheers, was as moving a rite of passage as I’ve seen.
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Despite earlier reports, God still isn’t dead, but newspapers may not be as fortunate. Students now learn that news has become content, rendered a half dozen ways, as if it were the innards of a cow, and dished out onto an array of media platforms. The Internet is awash in aggregators, regurgitators, and fulminators. Old-fashioned journalists like to think those multitudes would be helpless without the handful of reporters who actually dig up a few facts, but they wonder: if that tap were turned off, how long would it take for the Internet to notice? On my desk as I type is a new book of essays whose title is tailored to the moment, —30—: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper. The essays were selected by Charles M. Madigan, a splendid Tribune writer who a few months ago took early retirement.
There’s plenty of blame to go around in —30—, and Chicago essayist Joseph Epstein blames the victim. Epstein mulls the “casual disregard” in which newspapers are held, not merely by the hoi polloi but by himself. The business has been blighted by too many university-trained journalists, he proposes, who “emerge from their schools with locked-in [liberal] political views…. Even as they employ their politics to tilt their stories, such journalists sincerely believe they are (a) merely telling the truth and (b) doing good in the world.”
Since Lavine took over Medill early last year, the curriculum’s been rewritten, popular professors have been run off, and Northwestern’s General Faculty Committee has unanimously passed a resolution condemning Medill’s “suspension of faculty governance.” Last week a petition signed by about 80 recent alumni, protesting dramatic changes at Medill without so much as a faculty vote, was sent to the board of trustees, along with a two-page letter in which alumni Andrew Bossone, now working in Cairo, and Camille Gerwin, working in Boston, declare themselves “appalled at the manner in which these changes are being implemented. Because faculty governance has been suspended,” it continues, “Dean Lavine has been making changes unilaterally or with staff members that support him indiscriminately. Those who have expressed dissent have been demoted or forced out.”
In a clear minority was the alum who responded, “I think Lavine is simply trying to narrow that gap between the ivory tower and the real world in a place that has been falling behind the times for years.”
For more, see Michael Miner’s blog, News Bites, at chicagoreader.com.
