Meet the Press
The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili.
This is not a function of journalistic anti-intellectualism, though there‘scertainly enough of that to go around. No, it comes down to a knowledge gap ?- one in which academic media critics are often at a serious disadvantage. I mean tacit knowledge. There are, for example, things one learns from the experience of interviewing people who are clearly lying to you (or otherwise trying to make you a pawn in whatever game they are playing) that cannot be reduced to either formal propositions or methodological rules.–Scott McLemee
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Good point, Mike. The practical and professional needs of a reporter or editor are not the primary criteria by which the education community would evaluate a class in which students are exposed to an analysis of the rhetoric of a CNN story, just as there are students in chemistry classes who won't themselves become chemists, and students in literature classes who won't themselves write novels.
Plenty of news consumers read about sports without playing sports themselves, read about politics without being politicians themselves, etc. I should note, the quotation is taken from an anectode in which McLemee was specifically asked, at a conference full of English professors, how their media analysis techniques affect the way the news is practiced, so I don't want to seem to be dismising McLemee himself as anti-theoretical.
Within the "new media journalism" major, I do notice a bit of tensnion between the students who prefer the practical business of writing, and those who enjoy more of the theory. I think there's plenty of room for both groups, especially since the theoretical students are interested in the practical business of new media production (using code and images, rather than just words).
Perhaps the new media approach just seems more theoretical, since current media theory has more to say about new media than about old media.
This was a sophisticated and interesting article -- it effectively reframes the "theory vs. practice" debate as a "scholarship vs. teaching" debate, by saying that academic media analysis doesn't influence writers and practitioners of the media, but it does influence students as a form of raising media awareness. What's your take on it, down in the trenches? Is tacit knowledge teachable or is it a dodge to claim that the "best" learning is ultimately unknowable? Does McLemee (who I must say I admire), have any "tacit knowledge" about what it means to be a college teacher rather than a writer and pundit?