One year ago, The Atlantic magazine’s Paul Farhi asked the question, “Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?” No such event seems imminent, but it is undeniable that the legacy media is having a crisis of credibility.
Any sports coach will tell you that the feeder programs are crucial to a team’s success. The media’s feeder programs are the journalism schools, and what they teach matters. Let’s take a look at the leadership of some of the country’s leading journalism schools.
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Charles Whitaker has been the chair of Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism since 2004.
From the school website:
For nine years, Whitaker directed the Academy for Alternative Journalism, a summer fellowship program that trained young writers for work at the member publications of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in an effort to address the field’s lack of diversity. . . .
He also is the author of four statistical analyses of the hiring of women and minorities in the magazine industry and has served as an adviser on diversity issues for the Magazine Publishers of America. He was the co-director of Project Masthead, a program designed to encourage students of color to consider careers in magazines on both the editorial and business side of the industry, and he was one of the co-curators of the Ida B. Wells Award, presented by both Medill and the National Association of Black Journalists to individuals who are working to increase newsroom diversity and improve the coverage of communities of color.
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David Kurpius has been dean of Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri since 2015.
The Columbia Daily Tribune reports:
The journalism school, Kurpius said, needs more diversity. Kurpius said when he was a journalist, he often chose stories about race and that his master’s thesis focused on race and media. During his four years as Louisiana State University’s head of enrollment, the university had four record minority enrollment classes, he said.
Kurpius said diversity is about having people of different races, political viewpoints and religious beliefs represented. The school doesn’t have a bad culture when it comes to diversity, he said, but it could be more welcoming.
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Willow Bay has been dean of Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California since 2017.
Miss Bay spent several years anchoring ABC’s Good Morning America on Sundays. She also anchored two prime-time news programs on CNN NewsStand. She is married to Bob Iger, the ex-chairman and current CEO of Disney.
Mr. Iger told CNBC that “the last thing I want is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars.” He has also stated, “[W]e know our job is not to advance any kind of agenda. So as long as I’m on the job I’m going to continue to be guided by a sense of decency and respect and we will always trust our instincts.”
Those instincts helped him decide not to re-release the 1946 Disney classic film Song of the South on the Disney+ streaming platform. He explained that the movie was “just not appropriate in today’s world.” He also debuted the Disney+ animated kids’ series The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, which has pushed reparations for slavery, claiming in one episode that America was founded on “white supremacy” and “still has not atoned” for its racism.
So much for Miss Bay’s husband. What about her views? In an interview with Forbes in 2022, she said: “Journalism schools today are majority female, producing talented, intellectually rigorous, and ethical young journalists who are well equipped to walk through the doors Barbara Walters helped to open.”
In a USC publication entitled: “Title IX: 50 years of Progress,” Miss Bay states: “We would not have made progress toward equitable outcomes the way we have without Title IX. We would not have the rich college sports programs for men and women the same way we do today, and we would not have the majority of college graduates be female without Title IX. There are so many outcomes that we are experiencing today that have enriched our society in immeasurable ways.”
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Jelani Cobb has been dean of the Henry R. Luce School of Journalism at Columbia University since 2022.
Prior to Columbia, Dr. Cobb was an associate professor of history and director of the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut, where one of his specialties was post-Civil War African American history.
He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress as well as To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. His articles have appeared in Essence, Vibe, The Progressive, and TheRoot.com. He has also contributed to a number of anthologies, including In Defense of Mumia. (Mumia Abu-Jamal was a political activist and journalist who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.)
Just after the 2024 presidential election, Dr. Cobb wrote this for the The New Yorker:
Eight years ago on Election Night, as the returns came in from North Carolina, where I was reporting, I made a panicked phone call to a friend. I told him that I feared the country was sliding into the hands of a demi-fascist, and that it might even be time to start considering an exit plan.
This time, voters in state after state decisively chose Trump, who has become more autocratic and belligerent, building a popular-vote advantage for a man now wholly unfit to hold office. He has grown more maniacal over the years, and now he is a maniac with a mandate.
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Marnel Niles Goins has been dean of the School of Communications at American University since 2024.
She earned a PhD in “small group and organizational communication” from Howard University.
Miss Goins created Fresno State’s African American Edge Initiative, a program designed to increase the retention and graduation rates of black students.
Miss Goins says she enjoys speaking to students, administrators, and other “diverse audiences.” Her keynote presentations include:
- “On Being Black and Angry: Tales of What an Inclusive Community Can Look Like.” Keynote Speaker. Lambda Pi Eta Honors Society. Nebraska Wesleyan University. March 2017
- “A Preview of Success.” Keynote Speaker. Black History Month Opening Day Ceremony. Fresno City College, Fresno, CA. February 2011.
- “Just the Way You Are.” Keynote Speaker. African American Graduation Ceremony. California State University, Fresno, Fresno, CA. May 2010.
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Hub Brown, Dean of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications since 2021.
Prior to coming to UF, he was an associate dean at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
“As associate dean, he managed the college’s incentives to facilitate research and creative activity; aided department chairs, the School’s Diversity Committee, and individual faculty members in promoting diversity in curriculum, faculty hiring and student recruitment. . . .” — School website.
Dean Brown occasionally writes an opinion column for the Florida Alligator, the University’s student newsletter. On February 12, 2024, he published the following, titled “Black history? Our history.”
“It says something about the promise of America that so many of those who are descended from Africa, through generations of slavery, Jim Crow, terrorism and discrimination, still believe in it. It’s a part of the story of this country, one of the many ways we understand what it is to be an American. It is why Black history is American history — it’s part of the context that helps get us to the truth of who we all are now.”
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Nancy Gibbs has been director of the Shorenstein Center and the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School since 2018.
Miss Gibbs is the former editor-in-chief of Time magazine.
While at Time, Prof. Gibbs launched a division which produced a documentary titled, “Transgender In The Military: The Story Behind Their Camouflaged Identity,” sympathetic to the “plight” of transgender people in the armed forces.
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These people lead some of the key institutions that serve as journalism feeder systems in America. Is it any surprise the legacy media have abandoned their role as reporters of fact and as intermediaries between the government and the people? Thankfully, the old guard is being replaced by independent voices, free from the need for elite credentials. As Elon Musk likes to say, “We are the media now.”
This article originally appeared on American Renaissance and is republished by The Noticer with permission.
Header image: Nancy Gibbs (By US Embassy from New Zealand – Nancy Gibbs @ Maidment Theatre, July 30, 2015, Public Domain, Link)
