You can train an athlete, a sharpshooter, an airplane mechanic, a neurosurgeon, a computer programmer, and perhaps a hard-news journalist. But unless you have as your goal someone who will replicate a certain set of actions to achieve a predetermined result, you can’t (or shouldn’t) train a philosopher, a psychoanalyst, an artist, or a critic. […]
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In my previous post I discussed Thomas E. Patterson’s just-published book, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism (Vintage Books, 2013), which puts forward the radical idea that journalism as a practice would improve dramatically if journalists actually knew something about the subjects they covered. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at […] The dumbing down of our culture and its citizenry has achieved a momentum that seems inexorable and may prove irreversible. But some it happens deliberately, by choice. For example, the newly appointed editor at the website BuzzFeed, Isaac Fitzgerald, has actually banned negative book reviews. He expects contributors to “follow what he calls the ‘Bambi Rule’: ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.'” […] My first posts for the year wrapped up my coverage of Election 2012 with commentary on images of the second inauguration of Pres. Barack Obamai in January ’13. Subsequent topics included the sources of artspeak and photospeak; social promotion and grade inflation in post-secondary art and photo programs; Robert Heinecken’s contributions to the medium; the Kennedy clan pimping J.F.K, Jr. to the media from childhood on; the photographers who replicate the work of painters; the myth of the “photo community”; rude and unprofessional behavior from the Lucie Awards, and more. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Toward Knowledge-Based Criticism (1)
It may seem preposterous to have to advocate for and even defend “knowledge-based journalism” against ignorant or dumb opinionation. But we live amidst a growing faith in the reliability of what Jaron Lanier and others refer to as “hive mind,” the collective wisdom (and lack thereof) of whatever amorphous and usually anonymous aggregate one might encounter in an online forum or the listener base for a call-in talk show or the habitués of your neighborhood sports bar. […]