Earlier this week, the Independent (UK) ran a column by Tim Luckhurst, a professor of journalism at the University of Kent: Demise of news barons is just a Marxist fantasy. (Read it, please…)  I called attention to the column on my Twitter feed. “UK friends! Museum-quality curmudgeon specimen has been unearthed on your shores. I hope you have the preservation skills.”  The other day I heard from the professor via email. He accused me of framing him as anti-technology and challenged me to a debate in England, New York or online. I am posting here my reply to him.

Dear Professor Luckhurst:  I didn’t say you were anti-technology. That is your fantasy. In fact, you made it up. I said you were a curmudgeon.

A curmudgeon thinks the proper response to the changes swamping professional journalism is to project his resentments at people he sees as representing—or championing—those changes.  That is what you did in your column for the Independent.

But you didn’t have the balls to identify any of those people by name, did you? You couldn’t find the courage to quote even one of them. Not a single sentence! Though your column appeared online, you lacked the decency to link to any of their texts, so that readers could compare what you said about them and what they said for themselves.  (I hope your students take a look and see if I am telling the truth about that.)

“They wonder who will have the honour of sacking the last newspaper journalist,” you write. Who does?  Who is “they” and what did they say?

“New media prophets pore over the evidence, and find it thrillingly compelling,” you write.  Which ones?  This one?  He’s often cited. The same man worries hard about the  future of accountability journalism. “The possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously,” he has said.

“To people who forecast a glorious future without professional reporting this was an example of new-media democracy in action,” you write.  Who are these forecasters? I wrote in defense of Mayhill Fowler, whom you spat upon, but I make no such forecast. Rather:  “I think the hybrid forms will be the strongest—openness with some controls, amateurs with some pros—but that means we have to figure out how these hybrid forms work.”

You see, people with real views have complicated assessments of what is being lost and what is being gained. But that is too messy for you.  You are like most curmudgeons. You feel entitled to an intellectual pass because you are defending a glorious past. Arguing with real people is just too damn hard.

So you argued with a fiction, an imaginary adversary, a crypto-Marxist, post-mod new media prophet and “futurologist” about whom anything can be said, because sayer and inventor are the same person. You traded the honor of polemics for the ease of puppetry. This is very sad.

Look around you. You are employed at a university. Academics don’t get to make up the authors they are arguing with, as you did. How you conned the Independent into publishing your piece might qualify you for something, but it is not the profession of scholarship.  You need to run and find out what a footnote is, and why we have them. You need to return to journalism school and re-learn why we tell students to get quotes from reliable sources.

Verification, sir.  Journalism is the art of verification. You made that impossible for your readers. There’s a word for what you did. The word is cheating.

I used to write often about the curmudgeons in journalism. I write much less now.  For they are fading.  Their stylized resentment is irrelevant to the problems facing real journalists and concerned teachers. Their newspaper revanchism is deeply unattractive to smart newspaper people, as your column was deeply embarrassing.

By all means, you may publish this at www.centreforjournalism.co.uk. I plan to publish it at one of my own sites. Now good luck and good day to you.

Notes

Professor Luckhurst sent me this reply:

Dear Professor Rosen,

What a peculiar response. Everything I write for online publication contains links, as you’ll be able to confirm from one of many contributions to the Guardian’s website. The Independent asked me for an opinionated comment piece for its printed edition.

No names, no quotes, no actual ideas from real people and no links, Professor Luckhurst. That is what I pointed out. The fact that you often use links when writing for The Guardian is… oh, never mind!