A license to dance

Sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.

The First Amendment makes a lovely invitation to the journalism ball.

Ask any dancer in the professional news business.
Trouble is, that same person can be a positive busybody about anyone else’s call to be a self-styled journalist.
I’m a constitutional purist about free expression, declared retired Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie last week. He said government shouldn’t license journalists.
But it was no more than a few minutes later in his speech at the Nieman Foundation for Journalists at Harvard. Downie said Lou Dobbs shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast his CNN news program because of his notorious stand against immigration.
Time and again prominent news executives do this two-step. No one can tell them how to behave journalistically. But they would deny symbolic licenses to other practitioners.
Hypocrisy trips merrily at a faster pace in the current splintering of the information industry. Print, cable, online and broadcast standards dance to different sheet music in which a main step is finger pointing at the professional practices of other dancers on the floor.
The boogie beat of citizen journalism especially drives the foxtrot crowd of mainstream media into digital harrumph.
Look, it’s like this: Journalism is either free of interference or it isn’t.
I prefer free.
If you enforce standards of practice for the street dancers, you have to do the same in the ornate ballrooms of news too.
It happens that quite a few amateurs trip themselves up in their own private Roselands. That stumblebum effect is supposed to lower the public’s opinion of all journalists. Such bad ethics shouldn’t be allowed, sniff the slow-dancers.
Yes, well, their disdain takes for granted public opinion of journalism could get much lower.
It’s just as likely the public will award the trophy to seasoned, sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.
The marketplace of public opinion is licenser enough.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter. Not when you play the constitutional music of the law of the land.
You’ve got to open the floor to the trip-foot amateur and the rowdy intruder if they want to go dancing with the stars.

The view of freedom from where it wasn't

Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Ex-patriot journalists can get very patriotic. They can see no reason to hide it for someone else's imagined allegiance to objectivity over allegiance to country. Try teaching the tenets of western journalism to students from throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, their countries still thawing out from the Cold War and the frigid embrace of Stalinism. Look at the faces of Kosovo refugees, of Albanians worried about home and family, of ethnic minorities in a time of ethnic cleansing.The American University in Bulgaria held classes in an old communist headquarters. The idea was to spread free thinking where none had been allowed. Yet the region was not very much advanced from the time of the gulag. Bulgaria had still locked political rebels away in secret places even after Russia had stopped. American journalists-turned-teachers built a distressing reputation for themselves when first allowed into Eastern European classrooms. Students had them pegged as preachers of do-as-we-do, who would go back home after giving no real, pragmatic advice for coping with governments that had no sense of our First Amendment. There can be no American-style press without basic press freedom. So it's useless to tell new journalists to copy us. That reality travelled with me to American University as a Fulbright professor in the secondary city of Blagoevgrad, named for the founder of the Bulgarian communist movement. I looked out on my multi-ethnic, multi-national class in a setting that made 1958 look modern. And I said to the students' relief, "All right, let's figure out how you can do the best journalism you can without getting killed. Even if you merely get thrown into jail, you're still not going to be able to publish the closest approximation to truth all journalists seek." The students loved my American practicality. And I had a renewed appreciation for the press freedom they lacked and we take for granted in the United States. The final exam consisted of 9/11, which occurred during my Bulgarian semester, 2001. Weeping Muslim and Christian and the pro-American and the nominally anti-American students and people embraced my family and me. My students in particular felt an evil blow fell on a people who understood freedom better than any. An ex-pat looking homeward at a time of tragedy from a vantage of the freedom-deprived can see patriotism quite clearly. It's a foolish journalist who pretends not to be affected by feelings for country, whose Constitution makes our profession possible.

What to do when the headhunter calls

Some big jobs are open in journalism. More will come. Revolving doors churn faster with the industry in economic upheaval.
A city editor once advised me I was “on the up escalator, because management had its eye on me.”
My wife and I got a big laugh out of that. Still do.
Ambition is normal, however. No one should apologize for wanting to be considered.
The turmoil in management is so rampant and widespread across media platforms, the next call a news executive gets may be from a search firm.
Leonard Downie, Jr. is retiring from The Washington Post after a fabled run as executive editor. He’s making way so a new publisher can have her own person to meld print and online coverage.
Everyone in and out of media has a favorite candidate to succeed the late Tim Russert as NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief and moderator of Meet the Press. Actually, that could take two appointments.
How wise of the network to ask Tom Brokaw, its dean of broadcasters, to preside on the Sunday morning show in the interim.
It’s tough to take a saint’s place on a permanent basis. And Russert certainly received media canonization so rapidly, the Vatican must wonder if it could speed its own process for beatification.
Note to the halo hungry: Try to follow a sinner or at least allow some time to lapse before your own succession to magnificence. And more advice...

• Make sure you have something to add to the civic conversation.
• Journalists are content providers, so don't go too techno crazy.
• It’s a cliché to want to make a difference; choose that attitude anyway.
• Forget about the kingdom and the power and the glory; just do the news.
• Keep family uppermost as Tim Russert did; we have enough misplaced priorities.
• Don't get snowed by the perks and the bucks.

Journalism is a public service and a Constitutional privilege with responsibility attached to protect The People with information.
If that job description doesn’t fit the offer, thank the headhunter for the call and go back to work.