ONE OF quality journalism's mysteries -- the purpose of courses run by the likes hoax-abetter Margaret Simons, for instance -- has been solved. As (former) readers of The Age will be aware, reporters who boast more degrees than a thermometer offer no guarantees of fairness, accuracy or intelligence. Indeed, such qualifications strongly suggest the opposite.
So, if universities aren't there for the purpose of training journalists, what is their real purpose?
To keep editors who have ruined their newspapers off the streets, evidently.
"More degrees than a thermometer".
ReplyDeleteAnd you know where they stick them.
Sheltered workshops, Prof, sheltered workshops. Places where those unaccountably declared 'intellectually enabled' go to live out their lives in a satisfactorily remote and unworldly therapeutic community engaging in the treatment mode called Groupthink. The only harm they do is to pass on their incapacities to the young and vulnerable. Who could argue with that?
ReplyDeleteProf. There's a sense in all this inwhich we gleefully boo and hiss at all those Muriel's wedding "bad" Fairfax Green Left conga dancers.
ReplyDeleteBut Prof, those running the asylum policy, green fantasm, self flagellation lesson's shouldn't be merely laughed at.
The three plus years to not do anything about a Craig Thomson and the fifteen plus years to bury a Bruce Wilson affair has a much more serious and dark side to it.
Confidence in institutions. A Federal Reserve Bank can try to move heaven and earth to protect the integrity of its currency but when people seriously doubt the integrity of their more ubiquitous institutions the match is all but over.
Rome fell internally. The only thing that gave any sense of recovery was Christianity. It shall be the same again. If the revival doesn't start now its over.
Darwinism has been the world's single greatest intellectual fraud. If you want to promote rationalism start there. Integrity has a coal face and people with blackened shitty sweaty faces working it. All the nutters your keen eye dissects were born of a school of thought that is only just a bit longer than a single generation old.
Churchill thought that Western scientific integrity would hold it together. Climategate buried this sentiment ever that much deeper.
written, spoken and authorized by flesh and blood, living breathing, bleeding, bruised, sweats, farts and scratches, humanity
I have asked Adam Morton what his credentials are. A curious journalist might like to find this out. He claims to have an honours degree in science. He has not said which branch of science and which university.
ReplyDeleteCan anyone find out? Does anyone know?
Anon.,
ReplyDeleteRe Morton's credentials. The Melbourne University website refers to his studying and working in psychology at La Trobe and Tasmania.
Does that mean Morton lied about his science credentials?
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