The More News You Watch, The Less You Know.

Recently, I learned that I was not accepted to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. I received a thin rejection letter in the mail about a month ago. Last week, I made an appointment with an admissions officer, and I had a pointless meeting about why my application was rejected. The admissions officer read my scores from the admission exam and then gave the admission committee's general opinion of my candidacy. According to her, I was a good candidate for the program with average to below average scores. The committee was also concerned with the duration of experience as an educator. I protested about some of my scores being low, current events in particular, and asked if there was any way of entering the program for this fall. To which she replied, "No."

She then encouraged me to apply for the 2012 year, gave me her business card, and told me that I could audit classes should I still be interested. The biggest problem of my application was the lack of publication - this blog being the sole source. I was not able to see my admission test or the scores.

"Of all the losses time is the most irrecuperable for it can never be redeemed." 

 - Johnathan Rhys Myers as King Henry VIII in Showtime's, The Tudors

Over the past 15 years two curious phenomena have developed symbiotically. The first is the proliferation of misinformation. The second is the death of consensus. The advent of the internet age was heralded as a democratization, to bastardize the term, of information, and indeed the beginning was a wild west shootout between new-old media partnerships, startups, teen-age hackers, and venture capitalists all fueled by Wall Street's funny money. But along the way the gate keepers of information began to lose control. Newspapers, issue magazines, and national televised news broadcasts began to wane in influence as their ad revenue was poached by free listings on Craigslist.org, cable news, and their content was posted on the web at cost to the publishing houses. On the opposite side of the spectrum some of the first successful news aggregators such as The Drudge Report began to exert a political tilt into the direction of the information flow. The Internet allowed anyone, such as myself, to publish whatever they wanted. And they did, and people published blogs about just about anything. As anonymity let loose any base desire or cruelty people like Mike Godwin humorously noted that as an online discussion grows in duration invariably someone will make a comparison equating someone else of being Hitler.

At the same time politics in this country has become more divisive. It has been easier to spread misinformation about just anything. From Birther's questioning President Obama's birth certificate, to the science of climate change, facts have never seemed to be be more insignificant as they are now. In fact they are only as important as they serve the interests of whoever they are subjected to. This death of consensus, playing fast and loose with the facts with no accountability, does not serve the public interest well and is only used in winning policy debates on a national level to whomever can trump the other party's message.

The reason for guilds during the medieval era was to control the labor market, much in the same way lawyers and doctors must pass years of school and rigours tests.  You wouldn't want some quack treating you for some life threatening illness so you shouldn't believe everything you read or more importantly, when it comes to television, you shouldn't believe everything you see.

In the meantime I plan on to keep on writing this blog. When I was told during the meeting how journalism was different that any other type of writing I kind of laughed.