Journalism Education In Nepal

Nepalese journalists have a major responsibility - working on democracy’s free press to inform citizens and officials about local, national and world events as well as providing a measure of public accountability for all institutions and their members. Globalisation imposes on journalists the increasing burden of making sense of interlocking or interdependent histories, economies, laws, cultures and conflicts in a "news cycle" now spinning at Internet speed.
The Information Revolution - with journalists at the front and centre of this revolution - makes it enormously easier for journalists to obtain information, but not correspondingly easier for them to separate the chaff from the wheat, subjectivity from objectivity, opinion from fact, private interests from public interests, manipulation from influence and corruption from "spin."
The Information Revolution, globalisation and media industry trends - including corporate consolidations, ever-present commercialism and "infotainment" - make it more and more difficult for journalists to cover the news and provide sophisticated analysis, synthesis and context. Even leaving aside the corporate issues, it is clear that the complexities of modern society, global development and the Information Revolution place unprecedented demands on the profession of journalism. But it is not so clear whether our graduate and undergraduate programmes in journalism provide adequate intellectual and technical preparation to meet these challenges.
Nepalese journalism practice should now turn to understanding what a good journalist does. The old paradigm was that any good reporter can do a good job of covering any subject, regardless of how complicated it was. The new paradigm says: ‘Wouldn’t it be good if people really knew what they were writing about?’"
Journalism, after all, has to help us cope with the info-glut. The total amount of collected information is said to double every two or three years, and yet we are told that we’re unable to use 90 to 95 per cent of the information on hand.
The importance of ensuring journalism’s success in meeting today’s challenges - finding knowledge in information - cannot be overstated, for failure leaves our democracy open to massive manipulation, distortion and denial of citizens’ ability to make real choices as autonomous beings.
As a close society, however, general Nepalese people do not put a lot of trust in journalism, ranking journalists just below the "rich people" and just above "government officials". Indeed our ambivalence about journalists is comparable to our ambivalence about teachers and librarians. While many people pay lip service to the need for a free press, public education and libraries - saying they are essential sources of information and knowledge and, thus, essential to the security and health of our democracy - most journalists in Nepal rarely pay any attention to the needs of these idealised professions.
Nearly four out of five journalists say they are not well prepared to cover the most important issues facing the country. One in five journalists are dissatisfied with professional development opportunities at work, and this complaint is more common than ones about pay, benefits, promotion or even job security. Most journalists say they need training in work skills, content areas and ethics, values and legal issues, but few news staffers say they receive training in these areas. Four out of six news executives agree about the desirability of better training, but they say financial and time constraints severely limit training opportunities.
Most Nepalese media industries spend one per cent or less of their news budget on training and 10 per cent of the media houses spend nothing on training. Three in five editors responsible for international news say their newspaper’s coverage is fair or poor and say television networks’ foreign coverage was worse. These editors also said their own news organisations do a fair or poor job of satisfying readers’ interest in international news.
Of particular interest to the current debate is whether our journalism education programmes are preparing "reporters" who are skilled in gathering and packaging information, or "journalists" who have additional abilities for investigation, analysis, synthesis, perspective and narration. Because of the journalists’ importance to our society, media educators should believe that the level of their education, the level of their sophistication and the level of their knowledge about the issues that they report on must be high in order to prevent them from being marginalised, sidelined or manipulated.
We need, as much as possible, unshakable, untouchable independence and integrity from journalists because, as a society, we are dependent on them not only for information but for the context about the information they bring us and for expanding how we think about and analyse the life of our nation, our relationships with our allies and enemies, and events taking place in the most far-flung corners of the world.
The value of a good liberal arts education, moreover, is its ability to enhance a journalist’s powers of rational analysis, intellectual precision, independent judgment and mental adaptability - a characteristic sorely needed, especially now in an era of rapid change. A liberal education also will help journalism students to become familiar with the best our culture has taught, said and done. It may help young journalists to know and understand the sweep of our culture, the complex nature of our society, the achievements, the problems, the solutions and the failures that mark our history.