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9 Soc. F. 370 (1930-1931)
Journalism as Social Science

handle is hein.journals/josf9 and id is 388 raw text is: SOCIAL FORCES JOURNALISM AS SOCIAL SCIENCE CLARENCE E. CASON University of Alabama FFORTS to achieve durable social consequences through the teaching of journalism are in process at a number of American universities.' Present aims go beyond what has been attempted in the past.2 While the usefulness of training newspaper reporters is not to be discounted, it remains true that such work is only one of several functions which press upon the teacher of journalism. Yet, journalism departments in most of the universities heretofore have been so in- tent upon administering the small tech- nical detail of the news room that the really significant scholarship in journalism has been left to the historians, the psy- chologists, and the sociologists.3 The definition of journalism in the colleges has implied a routine technique, and but little more. College instruction in journalism is about twenty-five years old in the United States.4 In France, England, and Ger- many, its development has covered about I For the nucleu of several ideas in this paper, indebtedness is thankfully expressed to Prof. Willard G. Bleyer of the University of Wisconsin, Dean Eric W. Allen of the University of Oregon, and Prof. E. Marion Johnson, formerly of the University of Minnesota. 2 Scholarly impetus in journalism is ably repre- sented by The Journalism Quarterly, which has recently been transformed under the editorship of Prof. Frank Luther Mott of the University of Iowa. 3Perhaps most authoritative and stimulating among American studies in journalism are the com- panion volumes entitled The Newspaper as Authority and The Newspaper and the Historian; New York; 192.3; by Lucy Maynard Salmon, professor of history at Vassar. I General Robert E. Lee, as president of Washing- ton University (now Washington and Lee), is credited with establishing the first courses in journalism in 1869, but the movement was not sysematically de- veloped until many years afterward. the same period. The French and English, while mainly concerned with the training of newspaper workers, have concentrated upon background in the social sciences, rather than upon elementary technical processes. The Germans, characteris- tically, have shown the way in evolving a scientific approach to journalism in the universities. Zeitungswissenschaft has no direct connection with teaching boys and girls to be reporters or press agents. It is newspaper science.5 The curricula of the German departments of journalism, of which there are twelve in the higher in- stitutions, deal profoundly with the peri- odical as a social force. At the Univer- sity of London the student of journalism becomes seeped in the detail and traditions of the English press, and his professional training consists largely of such studies in the social sciences as will fit him to grapple intelligently with the movements and conditions of his day. Because of the peculiarly partisan character of the French newspapers, especially those of Paris, the study of journalism in France involves an even more intricate analysis of political backgrounds and social theory.6 In startling contrast to the view which sees journalism as a ramified phenomenon demanding assiduous scholarship is the attitude which posits the study of journal- ism as a shallow training for mechanical news-gathering and headline-writing. This I The German point of view is admirably portrayed in Karl Bbmer's Bibliographische Handbuch der Zeit- ungswissenschaft. Kritische und Systematische Ein- fiihrung in den Stand der Deutschen Zeitungsforchung; Leipzig, 1929. 0 Distinctive aspects of the French newspapers are briefly set forth in an article called The Daily Press in France by Raphael Levy in The Modern Language Journal, XIII, no. 4. 370

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