So...is Bill O'Reilly a Journalist?
How about Oprah or Jon Stewart?

As the program planning process for the 2006 AEJMC Convention in San Francisco proceeds, panels examining hurricane disaster coverage will likely be a top consideration. The media coverage and the government's response to Hurricane Katrina have sparked a national debate that carried over onto the RTVJ listserv.

The disaster also provided a great opportunity in the classroom for me to ask my television news students to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the coverage. During one of these discussions, I asked the students to name their favorite television journalist and to identify the reasons behind their choice. The first student to answer named Bill O'Reilly from the Fox News Channel because he gets to the "heart" of issues. As I quickly processed her answer in my head, I said, "Okay, but is Bill O'Reilly a journalist?" She didn't have an answer, so I asked the rest of the class that question.

This launched a lively discussion about the difference between talk show hosts who conduct interviews and often give opinions (like O'Reilly) and journalists who are supposed to gather and report factual information based on observation, documentation, and interviews. As the discussion moved on, one student wanted to argue that Oprah was a journalist because she traveled to the Gulf Coast after the hurricane. And, yet another student wanted to know if I thought Jon Stewart from Comedy Central's "Daily Show" was a journalist. I said, no, he's still a comedian, even if he uses current events and political topics in his jokes.

It was at this point that I realized these junior-level undergrad students and I needed to try to reach a common understanding about what journalism is and what it means to be a broadcast journalist. My next step was to ask them to compare and contrast journalism and propaganda, which they couldn't do. So I asked each of them to bring a definition of propaganda for our next class session. This proved to be a terrific exercise because it highlighted the overt, one-sided, intentionally biased nature of propaganda and they were able to see why good journalism should be different.

I also shared one of my favorite quotes with them:

"Some view the difference between the talk shows and traditional journalism in political terms, as a simple quarrel between left and right, between liberal and conservative. Those differences exist, but they’re not of great consequence. What we’re seeing is a difference between journalism and pseudo-journalism, between journalism and propaganda. The former seeks earnestly to serve the public. The latter seeks to manipulate it." --John Carroll, editor, Los Angeles Times, 2004

At the end of the day, the students and I had a better understanding of what journalism should be so we could more effectively evaluate the hurricane coverage. We'll have to tackle the blurred line between news and entertainment in another session.