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[ 151 ] Chapter 6 Professionalizing the News in Peace and War, 1900–1920 There are reporters by the thousand who could not pass the entrance examination for Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale. It is this vast and militant ignorance, this wide-spread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and so generally disreputable. —H. L. Mencken, 1941 Can journalism be taught? By the time H. L. Mencken pondered that question in his memoir of his early days in the newspaper business, a campaign had long been under way to try to elevate the practice of journalism in America, largely by improving the training of each new crop of reporters. Some even hoped to—someday, somehow— make journalism into something approaching an exact science. If they could not accomplish that lofty goal, at least they might be able to address practices like reporters’ faking the news, drinking on the job, and taking payoffs from people being covered. Maybe they could begin, at least, to turn journalism into a real profession, like teaching or the ministry, or like law or medicine. By the late nineteenth century, those last two fields were well on their way to full professional status , with well-defined bodies of knowledge and systems of licensure that legally defined who could practice in those areas—and who could not.1 The earliest efforts to professionalize American journalism can be traced back at least as far as 1869—and to a perhaps unlikely source. That year marks the date when classes for journalists were first offered at a school in Virginia called Washington College. Now known as Washington & Lee University, the college was the first place of employment after the Civil War for the defeated Confederate general Robert E. Lee. According to one account, Lee “shocked his colleagues and the editors of his day” when he proposed offering instruction in [ 152 ] CHAPTER 6 the techniques of “printing or journalism.” Before he could execute his plans, though, Lee fell ill and died in 1870. Within a decade the journalism program fizzled, but it marked a starting point in the instruction of journalists in American higher education.2 In proposing to teach journalism, advocates of instruction first had to overcome a deep skepticism within the field. From the very beginning, journalists had had a tradition of learning by doing. A few editors in the late nineteenth century held the view that there would be no harm (and potentially some benefit) in a young man’s attending college for a general course of studies, provided that he was willing, after graduation, to start at the bottom in the newsroom.3 But practical training, on the job, under the eye of an editor was widely considered the gold standard. Frederic Hudson, an editor at the New York Herald in the midnineteenth century (and one of the first modern historians of journalism), typified the old school of thought when he wrote that the newsroom is “the true college for newspaper students.” At the time he wrote that, in 1873, this was indeed the prevailing wisdom. “Professor James Gordon Bennett or Professor Horace Greeley would turn out more real journalists,” Hudson wrote, “than the Harvards, the Yales, and the Dartmouths could produce in a generation.”4 Such skepticism remained the dominant view until early in the twentieth century.5 A classic statement in favor of on-the-job-training came from Horace White, an editor of the Chicago Tribune. In an article in the North American Review in 1904, White vigorously stated the case against academic journalism education. “I maintain . . . that the university has nothing to teach journalists in the special sense that it has to teach lawyers, physicians, architects and engineers.” All universities teach English composition, he observed. After that, what does a journalist really need? The main requirement for journalistic success was “a nose for news,” according to White, by which he meant the ability to recognize and rank the importance of events. Citing himself as a case in point, White noted that he had attended college before entering the newspaper business in 1854 and had never taken a single course in journalism. His insinuation was clear: if such an approach was good enough for him, it should be good enough for succeeding generations of reporters.6 The editors of the North American Review then invited Pulitzer to reply. In the May 1904 edition Pulitzer began by noting that he had given the question of journalism education considerable...

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