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Learning - from journalism?

Thursday, August 23, 2007

At first careless glance, August seems ridiculously too late for this. A guide to shopping for schools, aimed at proud parents and ambitious adolescents. But US News and World Report knows this particular commodity market well, and its annual summer publication of "America's Best Colleges" is of course targeting next year's freshmen and families.

 

And this year's guide has provoked even more controversy than before.

There’s no surprise at the top, with Princeton, Yale and Harvard heading the list (Princeton is first). The controversy lies in whether such rankings can ever capture that essentially unquantifiable notion - the educational value that any given seat of learning will offer any given student.

 

Editor Brian Kelly defends his mag’s 25-year old annual league-table as “part of our consumer-journalism franchise” – it also ranks “America’s Best Hospitals” and best graduate schools too.

 

I wonder what noble pillars of the trade like H L Mencken (he of “We must be willing to pay a price for freedom”) or Edward R Murrow (he of “Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information”) would have made of this bread-and-butter, grocery-list subdivision of journalism?

 

I know what one frazzled international correspondent working for US News made of it, back when this “franchise” was first being force-reared, under the slogan "News You Can Use". Mid-East specialist Dennis Mullen used to pound a bar-counter in Beirut, spilling much of his drink over me, and scream above the sound of mortar-fire about his editors: ”How the **** can I send them “News You Can Use” out of this?”

 

Many in the higher education field have developed greater and greater scorn for the Mort Zuckerman-owned news-weekly and its tendentious academic pronouncements. Over 1400 schools are included in its survey, and all the information used comes from the institutions themselves. But now sixty-plus colleges, mostly liberal arts institutions, have jointly condemned the rankings as "misleading" and have decided not to participate with US News in judging each other by reputation.

 

Lloyd Thacker, who’s been an admissions officer for three universities and now runs the campaigning group Education Conservancy which seeks to enlarge the boycott of the magazine, has bluntly dismissed the rankings by saying the process of choosing a college is “different than selecting a car”.

 

 

I’LL GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT’S RIGHTLY DUE. I’ve been taken to task – even smacked, albeit playfully, I believe – for being over-hard on the New York Times. Not for shrinking its size, in paper form, and banishing much material to the web – which happened two weeks ago. But for a journalistic error that happened at the same time, that of missing an important story (vast numbers of unaccounted-for American weaponry lost in Iraq) and later downplaying it.

 

So it’s good to laud the paper for picking up and running seriously with a story that urgently needs close attention - and one that I’ve been highlighting repeatedly over the past couple of years. Under the banner "NEW POWER IN AFRICA", the Times this week gratifyingly ran three front-page dispatches about China’s grab for the African continent’s natural resources, its competitive drive to corner sales markets there, and its growing political influence from Cairo to Cape Town.

 

I have a quibble, though. (Sorry, but I can’t help it – I’m made that way). The writers Howard French (who should know the subject especially well, having been the paper’s correspondent in West Africa and now in China) and Lydia Polgreen, the current West Africa bureau chief, at one point quote as an authoritative pundit in South Africa someone they describe simply as an “entrepreneur and a political analyst”. They quote him saying uncritically: “We are a very important market for China”.

 

This supposedly objective interviewee is one Moeletsi Mbeki, who is indeed on the board of several South African businesses (mainly media companies) and happens currently to chair the South African Institute of International Affairs. But he also happens to be the younger brother of the country’s president, Thabo Mbeki. It seems a bit odd for the reporters not to say so.

 

I’ve known Moeletsi ever since the years of apartheid and oppression. We first met when he was in exile in neighboring Zimbabwe, and his brother was also exiled - in Zambia, heading the public information division of their country’s liberation movement, the African National Congress.

 

It’s fair to say the brothers have not stayed in exact lock-step all their adult lives, though both were committed early to the freedom struggle, as sons of Govan Mbeki, the legendary communist activist and a co-prisoner with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.  Indeed Moeletsi raised havoc three years ago when he was widely quoted (and I mean right across the world) saying that the average African was worse off nowadays than in colonial times. 

 

But on the mater of China, there’s little doubt he takes a similar view as his elder brother – a fan of Beijing’s intervention. Moeletsi wrote an approving account of China’s approach to development (in an old venue of mine, London's New Statesman) and spoke in the same vein at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In French and Polgreen’s article a government official chimes closely with these views of the younger but (at least for the Times) unconnected Mbeki, saying somewhat blithely: “with China we have a relationship as equals”

 

What would we think of an overseas reporting team coming to the US and quoting the opinion of a certain Mr Neil Bush (who is, after all, a businessman of a certain repute, and a frequent speaker in international forums) about the country’s international economic relations, but never mentioning Brother George?

 

 

THE SAFE RETURN OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE ENDEAVOR AND ITS CREW, poignantly including the “teacher astronaut” Barbara Morgan, twenty-one years ago the understudy to Christa McAuliffe who died along with her fellow, more conventional space-travelers in the catastrophic Challenger burn-up, brought out all the experienced astro-broadcasters of Kennedy Space Center and Houston.

 

For my money, prime among them is Pat Duggins - who in everyday times is News Director of WMFE in Orlando but who doubles as National Public Radio’s man-at-the-launch, or at-the-landing, or even (sadly sometimes) at-the-disaster.

 

I admire him not just for his precision and his enthusiasm, along with objectivity about the facts – all necessary qualities for this job – but also for his extraordinary delivery speed.

 

On-air news-reading and live-talking speed is normally about three words per second. I put a stop-watch on Duggins. He often – and amazingly without sacrificing a single syllable of clarity – hits a phenomenal rate of 5.2 words per second.

 

I know it’s not like a breathalyzer reading of below 0.05, but it does suggest Duggins may also have more of what author Tom Wolfe virtually copyrighted as “The Right Stuff” than some astronauts themselves - those who’ve allegedly been showing up for space-launches intoxicated.