It's even tougher when you're trying to teach it!  And the contrast is even more stark when you're teaching some American college students as well as some Central Asian, former Soviet students who can't even conceive of the level of freedom that we're now trashing at home.  I'm just back from a consulting trip to Kyrgyzstan, part of which was teaching a "Masters Class" in journalism to a group of majors at the American University - Central Asia in Bishkek.  It's complicated by the fact that the university is not, apparently, clear on whether it's teaching an "American approach" or doing vo-tech.  This becomes clear when a visitor mentions such things as editorial freedom or originating news through "beats" and hearing that that's not the way journalism is done there!  Also, if you encourage the students to do real enterprise journalism, it might embarrass the university and bring the Ministry of Education down on their heads!  Yikes!

Still, in Kyrgyzstan it's basically understandable ... they're struggling to define their own version of democracy and, of course, that's what makes being in that area of the world so fascinating, especially for the journalist!  What's happening here, in the purported bastion of democracy, to journalism is at best disheartening and at worst a heinous manipulation of a core democratic value for profit.  We should be ashamed, but we're not ... or at least very few of us are ... and we're certainly not about to do anything that might interrupt the revolting exploitation of a once-reputable profession for unseemly profit.

Anymore, it's challenging to attempt specific examples of this excess.  Hell, sitting in my hotel room in Bishkek, I could switch within four channels between BBC World, Fox News, and CNN International.  It was so stark, the difference!!  In Fox you had people who glaringly had not a clue; in CNN, you had people who might have had a clue, but their approach was so superficial and fast-paced that it was a poor imitation of Fox; and then the Beeb, whose reporters are so knowledgable, so willing to impart their knowledge, that areas of the world Americans never hear about come alive in their reporting.  And is there a groundswell in the U.S. that we should benefit from such reporting??
Nope.  So what do we have?

> We have the freedom to be pathetic in the exercise of our potential as a free society.  For most of us, news is the latest robbery, killing, fire, traffic accident that impacted lots of people, or maybe what the White House "says" is news.  Or the weather ... that latest shocking hurricane, or landslides in California, or fires in the West, tornadoes in the Midwest, snow in winter, floods in spring ... I guess there's some value in all of us rediscovering what's been going on for centuries ... except what's now happening due to global warming, which is not likely to get reported.  We are bought and paid for, don't forget.

> There remain the same examples of quality broadcast journalism we've had and, sadly, not improved upon for years ... CBS Sunday Morning (still, though diminished, the quality standard), PBS' Frontline, Tim Russert's Meet The Press on NBC (the gold standard of careful preparation), Gwen Ifill's Washington Week in Review (which consistently offers a clear sense of the Beltway View), NPR (now much too mainstream and a shell of its former self, but still the best radio news we have), the Bill Moyers specials (after leaving NOW a bare skeleton of its former self), the Discovery Times channel (until it succumbed to the profit pirates and ran for the hills), This American Life (a perfectly delightful look at our culture which my esteemed NJ Network colleague characterized as "gay," and which is now sadly moving from Chicago to New York),  and The World on public radio which I conceived and often comes close to its potential, but not often enough.  We need to embrace the world in order to all become World Citizens!

[We just celebrated New Years ... courtesy of Garrison Keillor and PBS!]

> Citizen Journalism.  Heads Up!  This is the coming thing.  The notion is, with the internet and blogs, there ought to be a mechanism for the Great Public to enter into this process and contribute to the information flow.  The issue, of course, is the "gatekeeper" -- Who's overseeing this flow?  Can you trust the information?  Many refer to this as the democratization of the media, with the implication that it is more wholesome, broad-based, and therefore democratic than our current news base.  Its sourcing, diligence, and bias are suspicious, however, and therefore this source need to be, in my mind, well-attributed for what it is.  But there may well be the prospect for a well-defined approach to this form of journalism that controls for potential inaccuracies.  That's where our attention must be focused as the concept unfolds.

> Independent Journalism.  Herein lies the real potential for journalism, with the liberating influence of technology and its evolving miniaturization and decreasing expense.  A person can easily travel the world with a microphone, computer, and tiny digital camera and record the present as it turns into history.  This extraordinary evolution presents opportunities and problems, for former we should take advantage of, and the latter to which we should struggle to apply a structured discipline.  That would be journalism, and it will have to undertake a more comprehensive presence in the new world of news.

May we have the resources and intestinal fortitude for the task ahead!! 

God!  What an embarrassment!  I'm recording the potentially fascinating Diane Sawyer special on North Korea, and I notice that there's a program on Neil Diamond on Channel 16.  As it turns out, this is QVC and poor Neil is on there having to sing songs and deal with the most ridiculous host I've seen in a long time as they pitch the latest CD set from this legend.  Incredible to watch, and equally painful.  I mean, this brings media whoredom right into the living room.  You can literally see the pain in Neil Diamond's eyes as he talks with the failed public-access host now doing QVC.  I'd rather be buying a multi-head screwdriver.  Absolutely pathetic.

Since this is Friday, I've also been watching the end-of-week "soaps."  The assessment of the week's news is, as usual, discouraging ... especially as it relates to alleged journalists NOT asking the key questions.  First, the reliable BBC World News actually LEADS its newscast with a simply insightful report on what life's like in Baghdad.  The story isn't as important as its placement.  No way would a U.S. newscast lead with that story, even though its infinitely more revealing than another here-they-come-there-they-go report on the damn Iraq Report which has been reported for a week now and was really an elucidation of the obvious (thus completely eluding our President ... DUH!).

Later, on the over-priced NewsHour, we have the Conservative Rich Lawry saying the Iraq Report was just Rumsfeld Redux!  Again, rather than tackling the absurdity of that assessment, the main objection I have is that the fading liberal Mark what's-his-face doesn't even tag him on it!  Instead, we get our usual endless nonsense, instead of a statement of "wrong!" -- it's not a liberal perspective, for Christ's sake, it's just wrong -- no way did Don Rumsfeld think we should completely restructure our forces to train Iraqis and talk to both Iran and Syria!  I mean, it's not even close ... nobody even thinks they ever heard him say that.  Regardless of ideology, it's simply false!  That's it:  False!

Increasingly, I think this may be an issue of the correct words.  I know this is an age-old discussion of journalism, but perhaps more than ever before, the use of correct words could mean survival ... at least of meaningful journalism.  This has been enhanced by the internet and blogs, and now the arrival of Citizen Journalism. 

So, what is a "professional journalist?"  Can we say it is somebody trained professionally in the craft of succinct writing, topical research, editorial judgment, issues development, and advanced experience in a specialty?  Can we then say there is a class of citizen-reporters or writers who write regularly on issues of community, national, or global significance and therefore have an implied resource of experience in thinking and researching those issues?  And then can we say that there is another, lesser class of general writers/bloggers of personal experience and opinion that is, nonetheless, meaningful contributions to the democratic-citizen dialogue?  Does this start to describe a new lexicon of "contributory information" that, as a whole, signficantly adds to the democratic discourse?

I think we need this kind of investigation, because we can already see the distraction and discord of a multitude of alleged journalistic activity.  I'm happy to have all sorts of "citizen journalists" out there writing away ... as long as they aren't considered, nor do they consider themselves, real journalists.  They're not.  I agree with Sam Freedman of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on this, although I don't agree with his underlying elitism.  While I used the word "class" throughout the previous paragraph, I don't see this as a "social class" issue, which is the implication of many in the Journalism School community.  It's not that untrained "journalists" are "lesser," just that they're different in their training.  Is somebody who went to Canada during Vietnam "unAmerican?"  Nope.  But they're different from those of us who did serve in Vietnam, even though we disagreed with the war.  And it's incumbent on anybody who wants to talk about this issue to define these kinds of differences, or their opinions have less significance.  That's the intellectual deal.  

As the information -- journalistic -- environment changes in terms of how we define and understand the sources and veracity of our information as citizens, it is equally incumbent upon us (or someone!) to define those sources so we can assess their credibility and authenticity.  As the self-described arbiters of news in our society, I would maintain that it is up to us to describe and define these levels of information communication.  And I think we need to add into the equation the complex dimensions of international news and communications.  For example, if in Kyrgyzstan reporters only get news published/broadcast by  fees having been paid, then how does this redefine the varied credibility of information in one medium compared to another?  Is this another form or kind of "journalism," or is it something entirely different?  Is its impact on its consumers completely or partially different?  Do those consumers actively control for this difference?  How?  And how widely?

Does this suggest that "international journalism" requires an entirely distinct nomenclature to control for these (in our terms) "aberrant" forms of the craft?
How can we include the recognition that our approach cannot be the sine qua non of a journalism definition?  What is "journalism" can be determined to have started somewhere else, and therefore our form is the "deviant" form?

I've lived my professional career believing in it; but that is no longer possible in our contemporary money-defines-truth environment.  My instinct is to think that capitalism as the driving force of our democracy is either fundamentally self-destructive or at least unworkable as something that can work on behalf of the majority.  If we as journalists are fundamentally reliant on capitalism for our livelihood, how can we ethically (or rationally) presume to report the facts impartially??