Something to be thankful for

I found this piece a few weeks ago on the excellent website Longform.org (which I suggest you check out if you're into long, interesting stories on any subject imaginable). It's a Michael Lewis piece from 1993 called "J-School Confidential." I suggest we all read it and be thankful that Hillsdale's journalism program isn't, as the climax of this article states, bullshit.

With a nip here and a tuck there, the inadequately schooled journalist could easily make the Columbia School of Journalism sound like a seven-month extension of this anecdote. Perhaps I am that journalist. The essential point here is that the desperate futility of journalism instruction becomes clearer the closer one gets to the deed. At journalism school, one does not simply report a story. One develops a "search strategy for mass communication" (see chart above). The principal text used at Columbia, in a section called "Truth Telling," offers the mathematical formula: Story=Truth + X. "The story is never the full truth," it intones. "There is always an X, a missing ingredient. Actually there is not an X but a series -- X1,X2,X3,X4...." This sort of irrelevant blather infects the entire curriculum.