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Epilogue
- University of Missouri Press
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173 Epilogue After thirty-four years as a journalist I decided to fulfill a longtime desire to teach and to have enough time to reflect. (There was never time when I was under deadline pressure to do anything but concentrate on the current story and plan the next one.) I accepted an offer of a teaching position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1997 and have been here ever since, first as a visiting professor and then as a lecturer in communication studies. I miss reporting and yet I also don’t miss it. I dream about it at night, but by day I enjoy having more freedom to read and think and help mentor young journalists. One of them, a former student of mine, is a strapping young man who is eager , hard-working (at UM he worked at both WOLV-TV, the student station, and at the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper), fallible (in one story written after graduation he said police had found marijuana in a female singer’s lipstick, and I e-mailed him that he needed to say that police said they found it since the reporter himself hadn’t witnessed the search), and enterprising (he did some intensive digging for his story about anti-torture protesters at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas). As part of his training to be a journalist he was a summer intern at the CNN Washington bureau with my friend Jim Barnett, one of the producers there, and at UM he took my course in Supreme Court news coverage. After graduating he got a job as a reporter on a Florida television station and did live shots of hurricanes, and in one of them he fell down in a hotel parking lot because of the force of the wind. He sent me tapes of his stories from Miami, and wrote in black marker on the cassette box: God bless you, professor. And he sent me a wedding invitation and a photo of his baby son. Maybe I’m reading too much into this situation, the older former journalist seeing himself in the cub reporter, but in many ways what my former student is experiencing sums up some of the main points of this book: that journalism is fun, it is flawed, it is full of surprises, it is hard work, it can bring out the best in people, and, for all its shortcomings, it is a noble profession. At its best, it is the pursuit of the truth. 174 Epilogue Some things have changed in journalism since my day. I am happy to see that there are more women and minorities advancing in the profession. But I am unhappy to see the deaths of some print newspapers and their replacement by Web sites that may not survive very long as legitimate news organizations. I am concerned to see news organizations trying to save money by making more use of unpaid, untrained amateurs instead of careful, experienced, professional journalists. Journalism is undergoing change,and it is difficult to predict what will emerge from this turmoil. News may or may not end up being delivered primarily to cell phones, or laptops, or desktop computers, or perhaps some new handheld devices such as Kindles. How news organizations can generate enough revenue to survive is uncertain. But I do believe that people will continue to want real news. They will continue to seek out a reliable account of the day’s events. They will still want the truth. It will still be difficult for journalists to overcome the obstacles to truth—perhaps even more difficult than before—but they will continue to find ways to do that. Today when I read the New York Times or watch CNN, I can imagine the hardships that the journalists went through to get their stories, just as my former student does today, trying to dig out a few facts, straining to come up with a few bits of truth, a few glimpses behind the closed doors. I see a journalist as being not so much a witness to history as a kind of glorified Peeping Tom, getting tantalizing glimpses that may or may not mean something. I think about the glimpses I experienced: Arafat trying to hug me, Khrushchev voting, Kay Graham at her London hotel as John Mitchell entered prison, the Pope in Gemelli Hospital, Israeli planes bombing Beirut, the coffins of Marines in Beirut, Qaddafi’s deranged look...