I’ve long wondered why journalism school deans don’t rise up in outrage over the shoddy journalism that is being practiced today. Now I know why. They like it. In a New York Times op-ed, eight deans of top-line J-schools say they want government standards of news content and less influence by the free market.

[W]e do not believe that the market can be absolutely trusted to provide the local news gathering that the American system needs to function at its best.

In short, they say they, not their readers, know best. The impetus of their op-ed is recently relaxed rules governing broadcast and print outlets owned by the same company in a single market. Their stated concern is that broadcast will cut back on local reporting, but they ignore the thousands of reporting positions that print journalism has killed in the past few years as newspapers have had to cut back due to falling advertising resulting from plummeting circulation.

Steve Boriss tells these illustrious deans what they should be doing:

If these intellectuals want to earn the respect of Americans rather than the contempt they now deserve, they should be manning the barricades to restore our First Amendment rights. This would require phasing out the unnecessary FCC and its insidious regulations, and permanently banning any government regulation of the Internet. A free people deserve nothing less.

After all, as Boriss points out in another post, the definition of news used by the mainstream media is a bit self-serving:

For mainstream journalists, “news” is typically new information, of interest to an audience no smaller than a metro area, that ideally serves a watchdog role re: government and business, is stripped of opinion, and is reported and edited by professional journalists.

But news consumers deem news nowadays as anything new, whether it comes from a mainstream journalist or not:

So, who is more likely to fulfill the “news” needs of a citizen, a blogger or a journalist? Journalists who are unwilling to challenge themselves on this question risk being redefined out of existence.