My understanding of tenure is that it is to protect professors who come to conclusions that may be controversial or offensive to those higher on the totem pole. If you're tenured, you don't have censor your own research out of fear that if you publish controversial findings, you may be fired to keep the story quiet. Likewise, you will not be fired for expressing opinions that anger the administration. Of course tenure isn't given immediately, but professors who meet certain requirements gain a lot of job security.
I don't think journalists can earn tenure. There is no good reason for this, there are as far as I can tell only bad ones: that media is too powerful, and good journalists are undervalued.
The government and the media are too close, advertising is too important to the media, and media corporations are often owned by even bigger corporations. These are just a few of the problems with the news today, and they're made worse by the fact that journalists don't have tenure.
Journalists can be fired for reporting news that is offensive to the public, the government, sponsors, the media corporation itself, and corporations in some way affiliated with the parent corporation. If your newspaper is owned in part by Pfizer, you might think twice about reporting that they may be conducting morally questionable testing of drugs in 3rd world countries. Your editor might tell you not to write a story about conditions deteriorating in Afghanistan because he doesn't want the paper to be seen as anti-american or biased.
We need journalists to sometimes report stories that people don't want reported. We need them to feel free to tell us the truth, no matter who doesn't like it, without fear that they'll lose their jobs. Journalists need tenure.
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
I am not sure what safety tenure will supply to journalists and in all probability stories damaging to publishers will by quashed by editors.
I agree that we now have a big problem that controversial and often truthful journalism is quashed by the corporate and political forces that control the media.
However, tenure is not the answer. It has been a disaster on college campuses. Who has not had a tenured professor that has lost all interest in teaching, and has gotten lazy? That is what tenure does.
Better to boycott the advertisers of journalism that you percieve to be inaccurate or slanted.
I am hoping the internet & blogs solve a lot of this problem. Print media and network news are dying. I do hope a new "honest" class will come soon, opinions that are not so solidly partisan but who report facts and perhaps offer fair musings of the effects of the daily news. In the US I think both parties would have preferred stronger candidates for president lately, but not many will criticize their own. Well, to hell with that, right? What, Bush, Gore, and Kerry were all swell candidates -- if you listen to the yes-men on the respective sides. You can love or hate them, but JFK and Reagan were superior personalities... just "bigger" -- to avoid political wrangling. The recent crop seem to me to be disappointments.
My brother is a 30-year newspaper journalist with a master's degree yet still he makes less than half of my salary as an engineer.
Apparently there are seven journalism graduates every year for each opening. Lots of people take journalism when they can't figure out what to take--it really ruins it for those that passionatly pursue it.
It also leads to zero-job security. No need to give the old-guy a raise when you can hire two new people for his rate. Papers and TV operate on a narrow profit anyway. They're always cutting staff, saying that the technology makes them more efficient.
Tenure is something only government-hacks that can never get fired get.