A scathing post about journalism school educations by Greg Lindsay (first posted at Mediabistro; I saw it at Alternet).

An excerpt:

You thought you were buying a set of skills, credentials, and quality time with the placement office. And you did. But your professors also sold you a mindset, a worldview, an ideology--one in which newspapers are God's work, bloggers are pagans, and your career trajectory is a long, steep, but ultimately meritocratic climb to a heavenly desk at The New York Times or 60 Minutes. Accepting any of this as gospel truth will almost certainly cause permanent damage to your budding careers.

To have made it this far, you've had to inhale the usual bromides like "the reporter's job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"--a noble sentiment that overlooks the fact that anyone who can spend $30,000 on j-school should be considered "comfortable." You've been trained to be skeptical of every truth and every detail ("If your mother says she loves you, check it out") but you've been steered away from skepticism about j-school itself. So think of the following as a quick adult education course.

There is one book on the syllabus, On Television. It's a collected pair of lectures by the last of the French philosopher-rock stars, Pierre Bourdieu, whose life's work was discovering the hidden exchange rates between money, education, and culture.

On Television was a takedown of the TV news business, and of media careerism in general. His argument was simple, powerful, and pissed off a lot of French journalists back in the mid-'90s: media careers, he argued, aren't governed by the search for truth, justice, and transparency, but by institutional and peer pressure. "In other words, if I want to find out what one or another journalist is going to say or write, or will find obvious or unthinkable, normal, or worthless, I have to know the position that journalist occupies" in the media landscape.

Bordieu points out that just as every media outlet competes for readers, viewers, and advertisers, every journalist competes on a personal level for professional respect, greater responsibilities, a better title, a better salary, etc. This should be eye-rollingly obvious--it's office politics, people--but was never discussed in my two years of j-school, unless I count my professors' curt dismissals. Why?

Because journalism as we know it and j-schools are themselves caught up in a larger struggle for relevance. Newspapers are facing a permanent decline in readers and prominence. Not one of the broadcast news anchors you grew up with will be behind the desk tonight. You are the only hope for the future they've got; they're desperate to make believers out of you.

Bourdieu also explains (albeit in a different book) that an up-and-comer in a cultural field like media or academia has to make a choice: Do you side with the establishment in hopes that you will someday inherit it; or do you subvert the status quo by creating something new in hopes of winning a place at the table down the road?

In case you haven't already figured it out: By enrolling in j-school, you (perhaps unwittingly) picked the establishment. Any guesses as to what's on the other side? Bloggers, for one. The debate about whether bloggers are journalists ultimately boils down to a struggle about whether the former should be granted the privileges and pay packages of the latter. Bloggers are outsiders seeking status the only way outsiders know how: by prying it away from those who currently have it. The mainstream media (now abbreviated "MSM," if it hasn't come up in class already) rejoins with debates about ethics (a j-school favorite) and other red herrings, but don't be fooled.