Cattle Thievery and the Evening News

There was a job announcement the other day for a writer in the public diplomacy program of a university journalism department, a job that at first glance sounded like something I might be able to do. Since I didn't know exactly what public diplomacy is (a fine-sounding term, but what is it?) and how it relates to journalism, I spent some time reading about the position and trying to get a feel for where they were going with it. In the end, I decided it wasn't for me, for several reasons, the main one being that I'm still not sure what public diplomacy has to do with journalism. Is it the same thing as P.R.?

If I'm not mistaken, public relations is sometimes taught alongside journalism courses in college, which makes sense in a way because both disciplines are a part of the field of communications, even though they have different aims and methods. When I worked for a newspaper, I worked on the business side doing creative and promotional work, which, while a necessary part of the paper's functioning, had nothing to do with news reporting. The newspaper tried to keep the two sides of its business, the advertising/promotion side and the editorial/reporting side, separate, even so far as placing them on opposite sides of the building. I started out at the paper working part-time on the copy desk and writing free-lance pieces, but once I got a job on the business side, I was in very different territory. It was uncommon for someone to go from the business side to the news side, so even though I continued to write features articles for the paper, that was different from being an investigative journalist or a reporter. It would have been hard for a Promotion writer to seem credible as a regular reporter, because the roles are very different.

When I see a concept like public diplomacy being touted as an exciting new field, it reminds me of what I don't like about the media: there's too much of what I would call "soft journalism," too much opinion mixed up with news, and too much of what many people would consider propaganda if they only knew what it was slipped in alongside old-fashioned reporting. It's a regular Mulligan's stew out there in the media world, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I think about this every time I look at or listen to a news piece. I'm guessing there are opportunities in non-profits, businesses, and other organizations for someone to put expertise in public diplomacy to good use; it's the proximity to journalism that seems problematic.

As I understand a reporter's function, it's to tell the who, what, when, where, and why, if I am not being hopelessly romantic in supposing this. There is certainly a place in journalism for editorializing and commentary, but first and foremost, journalists are supposed to tell you what happened. How can democracy function if people don't first know the facts? We do want democracy to function, don't we?

I suspect that some people welcome the blurring of boundaries between reporting and public diplomacy because it allows more opportunities to sway public opinion and influence views, to push out propaganda in a way that looks respectable. It's likely that this has always gone on, and it's probably a mistake to hearken back to a "golden age" of journalism when things were done differently, but nevertheless--reporters are supposed to report, and there just seem to be a lot of ways to get around it these days.

So I looked at the posting, read about the journalism school and the people who worked there, and realized I wouldn't be able to do the job even if I got it. The whole project had a lot of gloss to it, as befits a prestigious organization, and not only am I anti-gloss but I also have a problem with the presentation of public diplomacy as an adjunct of journalism. It seems to me that they ought to be in different departments, that public diplomacy, marketing, and public relations belong in business schools, while journalism is a separate thing entirely. I am often frustrated with the news because even after consulting numerous sources (like our English teachers told us to do) I still have to piece together what's actually happened for myself. By the time you get past the spin, there's sometimes not much else.

The proliferation of news sources via the Internet has been both a blessing and a curse, I think. There are many more sources out there, which potentially means many more independent voices, but it can also create a kind of cacophony in which what's important gets lost in the shuffle. It's like the satellite TV dilemma, the situation in which you click past dozens of channels without finding anything to watch.

I'm all for quantity--having a choice of news sources is good--but here I'm putting in a good word for quality. The fluidity of boundaries between what really should be separate endeavors creates a slipperiness that lets Hermes, who hovers over all forms of communication anyway, flit around all over the place, and as we know, Hermes is a bit of a trickster. He was a cattle thief, after all.