Find Insurance Online

In a few days during July in 2010, the American media was obsessed with Shirley Sherrod, who in a tightly edited video clip had made apparently-racist statements about not helping a caucasion farmer because he was caucasion. She was quickly fired by Tom Vilsak, the US Secretary of Agriculture, who, like the journalists and the NAACP, had failed to look at the full video.  The day after Sherrod was fired, the NAACP looked at the full video and realized that she was actually a racial healer rather than racist.  In the fuller video, she said, “I have come to realize that we have to work together … we have to overcome the divisions we have.”  Even as she used questionable language, such as “his own kind,” it should not be forgotten that the clan killed her father.  In other words, she deserves some slack.  At any rate, it was not long after the NAACP’s about-face that the agriculture department and the media were doing also doing an about-face. According to the NYT, “the White House and Mr. Vilsack offered their profuse apologies to her for the way she had been humiliated and forced to resign after a conservative blogger put out a misleading video clip that seemed to show her admitting antipathy toward a white farmer.”

Bill O’Reilly of Fox apologized—though while suggesting that Sherrod “very well could have seen things through a racial prism” and had been “blatantly partisan” on the job possibly in violation of the Hatch Act so she should not work in government.  O’Reilly was apologizing for not having done due diligence in “reporting” the story by watching the entire video before making a judgement. Like so many other journalists, he lept at the story without adequately checking the source—the video or Sherrod herself.  Even as the journalists were apologizing for their bad work, they wanted to distinguish themselves as journalists from the “blogger” or “activist” who had posted the edited video clip in the first place. O’Reilly promised his viewers that they could still come to him for good journalism even as he had gotten the story wrong.

Beyond the momentary obsession that the media enjoyed at Sherrod’s expense—the obsession itself being a problem missed by the journalists themselves—this case allows us to glimpse how journalism changed so much in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The case put journalists in the position of distinguishing themselves from bloggers when both had engaged in bad judgment. Hence Bill O’Reilly’s statement that his viewers could come to him for good reporting (rather than have to rely on bloggers) in spite of the fact that he had just engaged in bad journalism and may have done Sherrod another injustice even in his apology. To be sure, the blogger had erred in posting such an edited video clip without providing the context.  However, given the opining of many mainstream journalists who work for media companies and the actual news provided on blogs, the line between “journalist” and blogger are blurred.  Hence the journalists working for media companies were sure to distance themselves from the blogger, who they said was not a real journalist, even though they had all made the same mistake. Were there a clear distinction to be made between the journalists and the bloggers, the former would have done better work—but they didn’t.

Back in 1984 when Daniel Schorr was working at CNN, he objected to the network’s plan to couple him with John Connally, who had been the Governor of Texas and a Secretary of the Treasury, to cover the Republican Convention. It was improper, Mr. Schorr said, to mix a politician with a journalist. In 2010, journalists were saying that it was improper to mix a journalist with a blogger. By then, many television journalists were giving opinions, and were thus closer being politicians, while many bloggers were providing news even before the networks. Lest the journalists point to their educational credentials from schools of journalism, how many American journalists in the nineteenth or even the twentieth century majored in journalism?  Is learning on the job at a newspaper so much different than the entrepreneurs who free lance at their own blogs to provide news?  If these are so different, why didn’t the “journalists” in the Sherrod case catch rather than perpetuate the blogger’s mistake? The proof is in the pudding.

The fact is that many bloggers are able to provide news because a person does not have to study journalism to have access to some information that is new. As a blogger myself, I have not found myself in this position—hence I confine myself to providing analysis based on my years of formal education and on the news provided by others—bloggers or “journalists.”  I must admit that I am more apt to trust the news from a company simply because there are institutional requirements for verifying stories, though as the Sherrod case shows, a media company’s procedures are not always sufficient. The difference between a news company and a blogger is perhaps in the checking or verification function, rather than so much in the getting of news (though the companies have more resources).  Even so, news can come from a variety of sources—not just from people who have a BA in journalism.  As a consequence, there is more of a need for verification—precisely because there are so many blogger/entrepreneurs operating. To dismiss them by saying they are not really journalists is an over-reaction and ill-founded. However, to insist on due diligence and verification on any report is even more pressing. Perhaps rather than have their journalists invoke artificial diremptions, news organizations could hire or contract per piece with many of the bloggers who are providing news so the latter could have access to the organizational wherewithal to verify stories.  These bloggers would then have the advantages of being entrepreneurs and of having the wherewithal to do due diligence.

Daniel Schorr, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News and an aggressive reporter who got into conflict with censors, the Nixon administration and network superiors would likely see the advantages that bloggers have in terms of freedom, while being worried (as I am as well) concerning the due diligence limitations faced by the entrepreneurs. He got his first scoop, which earned him $5, when he was 12. A woman fell or jumped from the roof of the apartment house where he lived, and he called the police, interviewed them about the victim and then called The Bronx Home News, which paid for news tips.  Had there been an internet, he likely would have been a blogger. Would that have made a difference?

While good to a point, a profession’s gate-keeping can be readily subverted into simply keeping people out who are otherwise doing good work. In spite of the Sherrod blogger, other bloggers have been providing news—otherwise, the media companies would not be citing them as sources. Rather than fighting the bloggers, the “journalists” who got the Sherrod story wrong might offer a hand; they might just find that they will be helped in return. News is like water in a stream—there are many feeder streams.  Moreover, the nature of news is freedom,which is inherently broad rather than circumscribed.  This is particularly so in a high-tech world where the internet has had a democratizing effect in expanding the sources of news and analysis.  In this context, we might be wise to remember Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson concerning the need for an educated electorate rather than try to monopolize information-getting to those in the club.

Source on Schoor: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/business/media/24schorr.html?_r=1&hp
Source on Sherrod: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/us/politics/22sherrod.html?scp=1&sq=sherrod&st=cse

 "Professional" is a cherished word in modern American society. We are all professionals.  On Craigslist, people use the word to signify that they are not students. Technically, the term applied to highly trained professions in which the extent of training meant that only one's peers could be one's boss. A manager trained at a business school is hardly able to supervise a surgeon, for example.  Only other surgeons can evaluate how well a surgeon does in the operating room.  This differs from a janitor, for example, whose work could be assessed by a manager who has not been trained to clean. Our misuse of the term "professional" can be viewed as an inevitable expansion that plays on the value that we accord with vocation in particular and money in general. That is to say, we look up to executives, physicians and lawyers because they make a lot of money.  Accordingly, other professions want to be known as professionals.  The term thus comes to mean "mature," which can indeed apply to anyone.  Beyond the misuse of professional, the value we put on the moneyed professions (and wealth) has blinded us to the place of the first degrees in schools of medicine and law.  As the first degrees in academic schools, the MD and JD are undergraduate (before graduation in those fields) rather than graduate. That those two degrees are viewed as doctorates by many of their holders in the United States (not so in Europe) illustrates how self-serving the value of being a professional can be.  Essentially, it is the value on wealth that has usurped academic distinctions, resulting in false-entitlement. If those who have not earned doctorates would feel insulted rather than ashamed when called on their ignorance, the extent of arrogance in the value on professionalism and wealth could finally be seen.

It would surprise virtually every American (but only a few Europeans) to know that neither the JD nor the MD degree is a doctorate.   Each one is the first degree in its school, or discipline.  Yet we presume them to evince advanced knowledge, even allowing people with two undergraduate degrees to be "professors" (really instructors) in American law and medical schools. In the school of law, the sequence of degrees is: JD (same as the LLB), LLM (hint: M...Masters), and JSD (Doctorate in Juridical Science). The JSD degree includes advance study, a comprensive exam (an academic exam graded by faculty--not a industry-qualifying exam like the bar), and a defended dissertation. A doctoral degree must be the terminal degree of a field, contain a comprehensive exam, and include significant original research in a defended dissertation. The JD misses on all three points. The title of the first degree in law, the LLB (bachalors in letters of law) was replaced with "JD" largely for marketing purposes in 1901 in the founding of the U of Chicago law school (by three Harvard professors) because prospective students were complaining about having two "B" degrees after seven years of school.  People don't like to think they have gone to school for seven or eight years for two undergraduate degrees, but this is precisely what they have done. Nevertheless, the new law school in need of students complied with the "customer" complaint with a feat of mirrored marketing that was perhaps intentionally ambiguous.  To eviscerate the ambiguity in  Juris Doctor and a doctorate, one must look beyond the mere words.

In medicine, the MD is the first degree. Substantively, it contains survey courses and some seminars, just as in a BA or BS program in liberal arts or sciences. The D. Sci.M. is the doctorate in the field of medicine, and the M.D. is a prerequisite (so the latter cannot be the terminal degree of the field).  The fact that some schools give the D.Sci. M. degree as an honorary degree does not mean that it does not exist elsewhere as the real, terminal degree. Particular medical schools may give the degree as honorary where there are not enough prospective students interested in a doctorate in medicine. 

In divinity schools, the M.Div (before 1968, called the BD) is the undergraduate degree. It is followed by the STM (the masters) and the DD.   When the BD name was changed to the M.Div name, a perhaps-deliberate ambiguity was created wherein one apparent masters would be followed by another (M.Div. and STM).   It evinces a category mistake to have two masters degrees with one being substantively prerequisite to the second. Substantively, the M.Div. program consists of a year and a half of survey classes, followed by senior seminars (just as in the undergraduate law, liberal arts & science, and medical programs).  To regard a graduate with a M.Div., JD, or MD as having achieved advanced knowledge in the respective field is a fallacy perpetuated by the superfluous esteem we heap on the "professions" on account of their association with money (the religious vocation being revered for sacrificing the vaunted wealth).

It makes no difference how many degrees a person has in other fields before commencing study in a professional school. In beginnning to study law, medicine or theology, one begins with survey courses. Furthermore, it doesn't matter whether one's particular school or even country offers the doctorate in the field.  Try telling people that your BA is a doctorate in English because no Ph.D. in the field is offered at your college or even in one's country.  Every field (just like life itself) has a first degree and a terminal degree.  A student does not obtain advanced knowledge in two or three years in a law, medical or divinity school, but only a first degree's worth in liberal arts and sciences.

Sadly, we as a people have esteemed the physcians and lawyers so much that we have vaunted them by unwittingly appreciating their degrees into the stratisphere.   One degree in a given field does not a doctor make.   Europeans have been correct in refusing to call an American physician, "Dr. Smith."   The fact that Mr. Smith would take offense just points to the arrogance that lies in ignorance.  The rest of us enable Mr. Smith to claim the doctoral title before his last name because we don't know any better.   We give physicians titled trophies that they do not deserve.  Moreover, the use of vocational titles (including Professor Jackson) risks a vocational reductionism wherein a person is rgarded (and comes to regard himself) as that which he or she does.   Is vocation really so important that it eclipses or overcomes a person's identity? 

 Maybe it is time that we say "enough is enough" on the green glitter and deflate those who have vaunted their own entitlements going along with being a  professional  to a value or level more fitting to what they have earned.   The extent of illusion that a society can create and maintain is astonishing, yet being in the illusion (think here of the Matrix) we do not see it.  It is time to see the green numbers on the wall.  No wonder even the hint of such sight is apt to incur the wrath of the agents who instinctively protect the illusion because they benefit inordinately from it.   It is time, ladies and gentleman, that we wake up, as the sun is already quite high in the sky and there is much to be done.