Journalism studies : the need to think about journalists’ thinking

Abstract

Journalism trainers and educators (with the emphasis on education) should take the criticism against journalism seriously, including the deep-rooted mistrust of journalism, and use it as a point of departure in their curriculum development. This article paraphrases the early criticism against journalism, after which the two main streams of contemporary criticism, namely critical political economy and professional criticism are briefly discussed. Pierre Bourdieu’s views about the structural limitations of journalism and the fact that these limitations are not questioned by journalists, as well as Kenneth Minogue’s views about journalistic ideology and how it has become transparent and forms the basis of the public’s mistrust of the media, are emphasised. Against this background, it is argued that, to raise the quality of journalism, journalism studies should adopt a more fundamental approach to the understanding of journalism and the journalist’s work. Instead of focussing predominantly on professional skills, there is a need for journalism studies, also in terms of raising its own status as an academic discipline, to focus more on intellectual skills such as reasoning, argumentation, persuasion (rhetoric), contextualisation, the skills of historical thinking, description, interpretation and evaluation. Apart from this, it is argued that South African journalism studies should also focus on the development of an African epistemology for the practice and evaluation of journalism in South Africa.