OPINION: Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, fostering a culture of liberalism

As my time at Medill comes to end, I am reminded of an article that I read last year, just weeks before I moved to Chicago and took the plunge into graduate school. Michael Lewis, then a senior editor at The New Republic, wrote an editorial in 1993 titled, “J-school Confidential,” taking the position that journalism schools refused to call a spade a spade.

Instead of accepting journalism for what it is (observe, question, report), Lewis deemed journalism school a “pretentious science [designed to] distract from the journalist’s task” and dubbed Columbia University’s graduate program nothing more than a “trade” school.

Just days away from surviving J-school, I can’t help but wonder if Lewis was onto something.

For Medill’s one-year grad program, it costs approximately $44,000 in tuition. Add living expenses and students are looking at about $60,000. All that money for what is billed as the best journalism school in the country. But the question Lewis posed, and the question I am left pondering is: Was it worth it?

A former undergrad professor of mine recently told me, the reason he attended graduate journalism school was not to learn a “trade,” as Lewis put it, but to “learn how best to learn.” Looking back, I would like to think that is exactly what I did. Through Medill, I was afforded the opportunity to spend a good portion of the summer covering Capitol Hill and going places and meeting people that I otherwise wouldn’t have.

But as my summer in D.C. progressed, I realized certain discrepancies that not only plague the media as a whole, but Medill too.

People often complain about media bias. They say media outlets only cater to the right or the left; that there is no media objectivity anymore. Perhaps, they are right. After spending some time on the Hill, it seems like the media and Congress reflect each other. There is no middle ground.

For the record, I fall on the political right.

At Medill, professors hammer into our heads that there is no room for bias in our reporting. However, it seems to me that what is preached by Medill isn’t followed by some of those very preachers.

I am reminded of an e-mail sent out to the fall first quarter graduate Medill student body and professors this past November with a video link to a Daily Show segment in which host Jon Stewart caught Sean Hannity using footage from a rally sponsored by Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project to make a November anti-health care bill rally look bigger than what is really was. The e-mail read: “Have you all seen this?” While I didn’t cry foul on the initial e-mail, what shocked me were the immediate responses. One Medill professor responded, this “is just one reason why [The Daily Show] is considered in some circles to be more credible than so-called ‘real’ news organizations.” This professor was, of course, referring to Fox News. Another responded, “A fine journalist like Sean Hannity? Perhaps Michelle Bachman simply has the power to turn leaves green.” I responded to the e-mail chain with the video of Hannity’s apology and said it would be nice if other media entities also apologized when errors were made.