The irony of modern journalism

Modern journalism has become somewhat of a glorious, golden chestnut of irony. Journalism schools around the country, including the top-tier one I will be attending in the fall, stress the ethics and objectivity that should be present in good reporting. And they're absolutely right. As reporters, our job is to report. Pure and simple. Columnist interpret and editorialize, we consume and spit it back out, unharmed and unaffected.

But what I wonder is when this evolution occurred in the journalism world. The very existence of schools of journalism is due to one Joseph Pulitzer, the publishing magnet and number one rival of William Randolph Hearst. Pulitzer originally envisioned a school of journalism at Columbia College in New York, proclaiming in 1902, "My idea is to recognize that journalism is one of the great and intellectual professions; to encourage, elevate and educate in a practical way the present and, still more, future members of that profession." The school turned Pulitzer down flat, only to accept the money, a $2 million sum, in 1912, a condition of Pulitzer's will. How sweet of them (a note should be made: by that point, Missouri had established the first school of journalism in the world in 1908).

What is so interesting about this quote, however, is who it is coming from. Pulitzer, along with Hearst, was a first-class propagandist, a yellow journalist if there ever was one who brilliantly (and sadistically) blew up the truth and bended details to sell papers. Basically, those two were the Rupert Mudochs of their time, and it's no stretch to say that the Spanish American War was a direct product of their sensationalism.


With honest, reliable war time "documents" like this, who could think otherwise?

Yet the Columbia School of Journalism has an elegant statue of Pulitzer at its entrance, and each year, Columbia issues the famed Pulitzer Prizes to the finest examples of modern journalism. Even better, at the college level we compete yearly for the Hearst Journalism Awards Program, a competition that is often labeled the "Pulitzer" of college journalism. So, when did this great development occur?

But it is ironic, isn't it?