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Triumph of Reason: The Profession
by Groff Schroeder
| The professions of accounting, medicine, law and pharmacy are potential "money engines" because participants regularly encounter opportunities to reap fantastic gain by violating the trust placed in them. Desperately ill patients will often pay anything, even for unproven treatments. In the absence of accounting oversight, some who handle money find it all too easy to take some home after work. Societal needs for independent regulation of monetary transactions, legal interactions and delivery of powerful medications led to the development of the "profession." |
Professions restrict and regulate participants, providing "morally defensible" services beneficial to society. Professionals complete standard academic curricula, earn college degrees (often graduate degrees), achieve certification or licensing by demonstrating their proficiency in standardized testing, and follow requirements for ethical practice enforced by meaningful penalties. Medical care combined with science (another profession) allowed for the evolution of medical practices that are verifiably safe and effective. The environment of ethics and accountability benefits both practitioners and patients. |
While not all professions self-regulate through testing, certification and licensure, the existence and widespread acceptance of standardized educational curricula can also create a practicing population that delivers the high quality results now associated with professionalism. For example, modern engineering practice all but guarantees the functionality and safety of our infrastructure, buildings, conveyances, communications, etc., even though few engineering positions require formal certification or licensing other than college degrees. |
Despite these successes, other important careers have yet to become professional. |
Access to information and honest government are essential characteristics of free societies, yet polls perennially place journalists and politicians among the least trusted people in America. Journalists and politicians have opportunities for conflicts of interests and opportunities for ill-gotten gain that dwarf those in the accounting, medical and pharmaceutical fields, yet neither occupation allows accountability. Neither journalists nor politicians employ any procedures to demonstrate the validity, efficacy or moral defensibility of their actions. |
Incidents such as politicians paying journalists for favorable coverage, courts allowing news conglomerates to fire journalists who refuse to report falsehoods as news, and the repeal of anti-propaganda laws such as the Fairness Doctrine have created the impression of institutionalized corruption. A very small number of people control the information the People of the United States receive, one of whom (multibillionaire and former federal convict the Rev. Sun Myung Moon) several members of the US Congress recently crowned "The Prince of Peace" in a Senate Office Building. [1] |
What would professional journalism look like? Conscientious Doctors of Journalism would be TV news anchors, newspaper editors and publishers, carefully separating editorial, advertisement, and reporting. Average journalists would understand accuracy, fairness, objectivity and enough statistics to analyze and accurately communicate concepts such as significance and error rates. Skeptical, critically thinking journalists would recognize the difference between coincidence, association and causality, and they would apply thorough, objective analyses to report and elucidate facts, again becoming the watchdog of democracy and the object of civic admiration and trust. |
Professional journalists who achieve accuracy and precision while uncovering and reporting upon blatant institutionalized corruption, ubiquitous malfeasance and continuing destruction of the Constitution and Rule of Law are probably very far in the future. And further away is the day that standardized education, achievement of advanced degrees, testing for licensure, oversight, regulation, and meaningful penalties for ethical violations will provide us with functionally efficacious and morally defensible politicians. |
[1]Gorenfeld, John, "Hail to the Moon King," Salon.com, February 25, 2005, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/21/moon/. |
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