Exceptions to the Rule

WHETHER FORMAL education is necessary or not is a question often raised about journalism more than about other callings and professions–and it’s often raised by journalists themselves.

The necessity of formal education is so universally assumed when it comes to doctors or lawyers, or accountants and engineers, that the question never arises. The often unstated reason is that the work of these professionals has such an impact on people’s lives that they require college degrees and even State regulation and licensing. A doctor without certified skills can kill, and a clueless lawyer send a client to prison for life. A building constructed by a bad engineer can collapse and kill the people in it; and tax returns filed with the help of an incompetent accountant can destroy a company and cost its employees their jobs.

No one has ever asked if these professionals need the formal education some journalists are so certain their fellow practitioners can do without. But journalists themselves, on those occasions when the press and the media are criticized for some failure or another, usually introduce the subject, in the conviction that the question is rhetorical rather than real: i.e., they think the answer is self-evidently “no,” formal education isn’t necessary for journalists.

To support that view they cite the examples of exemplary journalism practice by individuals, in the Philippines and in other countries, who received no formal training on such fundamentals as newswriting and news values, or even press law and ethics.

Such examples abound in other countries as well as in the Philippines. Ernest Hemingway went into journalism without formal education in it, armed only with the talent for writing he had demonstrated when in high school. Walter Lippmann went to Harvard, but attended no courses in journalism, becoming, nevertheless, one of the most influential columnists and social critics of his time.

In the Philippines, the reformists of the propaganda movement, among them Rizal, Graciano Lopez Jaena, and Marcelo H. Del Pilar, did not sit in on college courses on news or opinion writing, but were nevertheless able to comment intelligently on the events and issues of their time and place. Some 70 years after del Pilar et al. came Nick Joaquin, who never went to college, much less attend journalism courses, but who nevertheless produced several volumes of articles of unquestioned writing excellence.

From these cases and others can two, though somewhat tentative, conclusions, be drawn. Writing being among journalism’s most essential requirements, writing skills do help make good, even exceptional, journalists, as the examples of Hemingway and Joaquin demonstrate. But so does a background in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as a life spent among books, as in the case of Lippmann. A capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, and the intellectual integrity to disseminate and defend the former even at the cost of fortune and life itself are equally indispensable, as del Pilar demonstrated.
But these examples and others constitute a mere handful relative to the large number of practitioners journalism, a calling that has millions for audience, needs. They are exceptions rather than the rule—and the rule, as the reach of media lengthens and deepens across the planet and more and more men and women with limited training and experience make journalism their careers, is too often the opposite. Not only does bad writing predominate across borders; even worse is the dominance of such vices as inaccuracy and lack of fairness. In the Philippine setting the absence of formal training is evident in too many practitioners’ inability to distinguish between opinion and fact, and even worse, between contextualization and unknowingly taking sides in a news report.

Formal education is not the only answer to these realities in the Philippine press. Even without formal education a reasonably intelligent journalist can eventually arrive through independent study at an understanding of, say, the ethics and professional protocols of journalism practice.
But while that can take years, the structured learning formal education provides can significantly shorten the time and effort spent in unstructured self-study. Even more significantly can formal education develop the kind of understanding needed of society and other human environments about which the journalist is called upon to report and comment in furtherance of helping his or her fellow human beings understand the world so they may acquire the freedom to change it.

A doctor can kill a few patients; a lawyer can send innocents to prison. An engineer can bury hundreds under the rubble of ruins, and an accountant ruin a business and deprive hundreds of their jobs. But in a media dominated world a journalist can file a misleading report that can lead entire nations to a war that can kill millions—or can help prevent it by reporting all sides, and by that respect for the facts the responsibilities of the profession demand.

Is the formal education of journalists necessary? The answer is not an unqualified “no” but a qualified “yes.”

In journalism as in other professions reside the exceptional few whose experience and background have armed them with the skills and insights reporting the world and commenting on it require. But because the needs of journalism far exceed the number of these exceptional few, and as information on a mass scale becomes more and more the necessary condition all of humanity needs to achieve the freedom that can only be possible through information and understanding, formal education can provide the many who’re not as lucky the same opportunity to explain the world, and to explain it well.