OK, that isn't quite the title of this call for a "philosophy of journalism" from Carlin Romano, whose unhappy forays into philosophy we have noted before, but it is hard not to think this question doesn't lie behind Mr. Romano's latest musings, given that he's a reader of this blog:
If you examine philosophy-department offerings around America, you'll find staple courses in "Philosophy of Law," "Philosophy of Art," "Philosophy of Science," "Philosophy of Religion," and a fair number of other areas that make up our world....
Why, then, don't you find "Philosophy of Journalism" among those staple courses? Why does philosophy, the academic discipline charged to reflect the noblest intellectual enterprise, avoid the subject while departments teem with abstruse courses mainly of interest to the tenured professors who teach them?...
How can it be that journalism and philosophy, the two humanistic intellectual activities that most boldly (and some think obnoxiously) vaunt their primary devotion to truth, are barely on speaking terms?
The explanations require a sociology of both professional philosophy and journalism, too large a project for this space, but worth thumbnailing anyway....
Unlike science, journalism long carried (and still does for many) the association of superficial intellectual goods. That made linkage with it unappealing to professional philosophers, whose egos and identities are deeply connected to an image of themselves as intellectually superior to other professionals....
Other factors—highly human ones—also kick in, reflecting mainstream American values. A vast and mutual reservoir of condescension exists between American journalists and philosophers. Many philosophers think of journalists as B or even C students (we're talking pre-grade-inflation here), people who have committed themselves to simplistic narratives of the world shorn of nuance and qualification, fond of every fallacy in the book, all made worse by the pompous, officious, in-your-face personality associated with reporters in the popular imagination...
Journalists, in turn, often regard philosophy professors (though not all humanists) as mannered figures, badly informed and out of touch on matters outside their academic competence, insufficiently quick-witted on their feet, irrelevant in their influence on the public, and ludicrously inefficient in their Anglophilic and pedantic diction....This makes philosophers, among other things, impossible guests on talk shows and hopeless sources for quotation....
As someone who has tried to live a life in both fields for 30 years, I find journalists understand this state of affairs better than philosophy professors do. The former note the scorn directed at them by the latter and largely laugh it off. The latter often falsely think they are held in higher regard by fellow professionals than is the case.
This is amusing on many levels, from the idea that Mr. Romano, who is wholly in the dark about philosophy (as we've seen before), has been living any kind of life in philosophy, to the idea that what afflicts philosophers is that they aren't "quick-witted on their feet," to his trademark anti-intellectualism in dismissing the core concerns of philosophy for millenia. If, in fact, Mr. Romano is able to "laugh off the scorn directed at" him by philosophers, it's far from obvious from this self-serving display. In any case, Kathryn Norlock, a philosopher at St. Mary's College of Maryland, who called Mr. Romano's piece to my attention, offered the following pertinent observations about it, which she gave me permission to share:
Like Romano, I am keenly interested in seeing more philosophy classes attend to media, but perhaps that’s why I find this discussion of its importance so disappointing and baffling. Setting aside my annoyance at “thumbnailing” being a verb now, is it really the case that by not covering one aspect of the world, philosophers have abdicated our responsibility to cover it at all? And at a time when most philosophy departments “teem” with introductory survey courses in which we professors earnestly try to cover a great deal of the world in service to students majoring in other departments, where are these “ossified departments” which abound in “abstruse” elective courses serving only professors’ interests? Ah, I see, Yale is the only department the author mentions by name! That answers that question. My bemusement only increases when the author reports that journalists “note the scorn directed at them” by philosophy professors. This is just bizarre, as every philosopher I know reads a newspaper on a daily basis, and has never expressed scorn regarding the profession. Perhaps the author confuses scorn for individuals’ particularly bad outings with scorn for an entire enterprise, in which case, I hope my impatience with Romano’s characterizations is not taken as derision for all philosophers (for then, I would be denigrating myself).
As long-time readers know, I, unlike Professor Norlock, share Karl Kraus's dim view of journalists ("No ideas and the ability to express them: that's a journalist!"), but there are obviously honorable exceptions, even if Mr. Romano is not one of them. As to why "philosophy of journalism" is not a major topic of philosophical study, I would have thought the answer obvious: it's not a central or substantial intellectual or cultural practice, unlike science, art, or law. The idea that "philosophy of journalism" would displace the central subjects of the discipline for millenia--metaphysics, epistemology, value theory (the ones too "abtruse" for Mr. Romano to understand)--is sufficiently silly that only a journalist could propose it. Summon Mr. Kraus!
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