Critical Thinking 101

Sharri Markson may have done us all a favour with her undercover exposé of course content at two of Sydney’s big media and communications degree courses. Journalism is important. We need to ensure that our future journalists have the best preparation possible. Ms Markson's piece has kickstarted a conversation we need to have.

Twenty-four hours ago, before social media was consumed by Tony Abbott's threat to 'shirtfront' one of the handful of men on the planet with access to a large pile of nukes, social media, and a few mainstream media outlets were consumed by the always newsworthy Ms Markson and her scant few weeks’ part time experience as a journalism student.

In fairness, Ms Markson started her career as a sixteen year old copy girl at the Murdoch-owned Sunday Telegraph, and has not had the benefit of a university education. She may have been unfamiliar with the openly challenging style and subtle expectation of some lecturers.

Lack of undergraduate experience notwithstanding, her undercover forays into UTS and the University of Sydney’s first year journalism classes armed The Australian with enough ammunition to accuse these respected institutions of brainwashing their students. Specifically, she accused senior lecturers of teaching students that News Corp - the very organisation that pays for Ms Markson’s Jimmy Choos – is dangerously biased in ways that are so obvious and effective as to damage the democratic process. 

After being shown a transcript of the lecture on News Corp, the company’s group editorial director Campbell Reid accused the University of Sydney of indoctrinating students, not educating them.

“Obviously I can’t comment on the full breadth of the content of these courses but on the basis of what has been relayed here I have to wonder if we are dealing with indoctrination rather than education,’’ he said.

Journalists, students, ex-students and commentators leapt to their chosen side of the political spectrum and displayed their colours. Lefties puffed out their chests and demanded that media lecturers be allowed to teach their students about the reality of the news media environment in Australia. The lefty reality is obviously that News Corp is as biased as buggery.

Conservatives punched back with claims of academic elitism in a news media dominated by government-bashing lefties, and counter-claims of opposite bias from almost everyone who isn’t a Murdoch employee. Commentators chimed in with warnings about biting the hand that feeds so many in the industry.

Questions, some rhetorical, volleyed back and forth: Are lecturers really teaching *that*? Is it just one or two lecturers, or are whole universities infested with the anti-News Corp bug? What impact is all this Murdoch-bashing having on the poor, impressionable students, most still in their teens? How did Ms Markson, thirty-something and worldly-wise, pass herself off as a first-year innocent?

Actually, that's an important question. Sharri Markson is a scarlet gladioli sticking up in the middle of a bowling green. Deliberately, she stands out: a former print and television reporter, ex Cleo editor, now Media Editor at the Australian and commentator-for-hire on shows ranging from Q&A to The Bolt Report. She's a Walkley Award winner, and part of Sydney's social set with a perfectly coiffed public profile. How is it possible that a group of media students, as well as their lecturers, failed to recognise that the Media Editor of The Australian had infiltrated their alleged lefty groupthink lessons? Who else would they fail to recognise?

Some students, past and present, have responded to the accusations of anti-News Corp indoctrination, insisting that they are quite able to apply critical analysis to the information presented, and sift the valid from the invalid. In Honi Soit, the student paper at the University of Sydney, media student Lane Sainty defends her institution, while former Honi Soit editor Max Chalmers defends the students in Crikey:

Notably absent in Markson’s writing was any word from actual students. Most insultingly, she seems to think we can’t tell when a lecturer is a bit of a lefty or a Tory. That’s the reason that just about every media student in Sydney is laughing at Markson this morning.

At least Ms Sainty had the grace to admit that if one of the Murdoch papers was to offer her a job, she would take it without hesitation. Of course she would! Jobs in journalism are disappearing and newly graduated beggars can’t be choosers.

Vertigo, the student paper at UTS, chose to respond with satire, portraying itself as a hotbed of communism: 

The revelations follow reports on UTS left-wing bias from The Australian. Working undercover, Media Editor Sharri Markson braved the brutalist battlegrounds of the city campus with a Macbook as camouflage and The Truth as ammunition.

Rumours suggest that Markson is in fact working undercover under the guise of a “journalist”. The reports have not been confirmed.

Ouch.

Ms Markson’s expose has ignited a critical conversation about how our future journalists are being educated. The issue should not be about lecturers teaching their students that a specific media organisation as biased or unethical or corrupt. Our journalism students shouldn’t be learning what to think; they should be learning how to think critically, how to analyse, how to tell a story...and by all accounts – including Ms Markson’s own – this is exactly what’s happening at USyd and UTS.

Ms Markson seems to have missed that point.