03-03-2011, 02:51 PM
Grace62 wrote:
Ted, I fully appreciate your desire to make it easier for people to tell who is objective, and who is not, when it comes to news reporting. However, journalism is not like surgery, in so many important ways. Could a person become a surgeon without going to medical school, without doing a residency, without a state medical license, and without passing the board exam? We have those things in place due to the nature of the job, and the fact that they could kill someone.
In journalism, it's really kind of a free for all in terms of qualifications. Walter Cronkite didn't graduate from college, Edward R. Murrow worked in education before broadcasting and had no journalism degree. Many prominent journalists lack what might be considered the right credentials, so you couldn't base much on that. How much of their writing would you have to evaluate before you declared them "certified?" How many people in broadcast news even write their own stuff? What about talking heads who just read what producers write? Would the producers get the letters, the public doesn't even know who they are. Would the network get the letters? That doesn't make much sense.
As to your last question, no, others cannot do our critical thinking for us. We have to evaluate information freely and make the best decisions that we can. We don't need a filter for this, because that would impede the free flow of information. That we have a lot of information and that it is sometimes wrong is both the gift and shortcoming of a free and open society.
I'm thinking we've both laid out our points of view fairly comprehensively - there probably isn't much new territory to tread here. So, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. :-) Thanks for the interesting discussion.