academics living in cloud cuckoo land
| by Pearl Thevanayagam
(May31, 2012, London Sri Lanka Guardian) By the time readers go through the likes of Michael Roberts, Dayan Jayetillaka and other long-winded social and political scientists' essays (what science has got to do with social studies remains a mystery) in the newspapers and websites the world would have moved on faster than a scud missile. Yet, these writers insist the readers should take their seminal works very seriously indeed. Quite literally they are inept at comprehending that the shelf-life of a newspaper is less than 24 hours and those of websites few hours if not minutes. Newspapers are now a luxury to the average person and they had better have their money's worth and news which are easily digestible rather than reaching for Roget's Thesaurus.
Now physical scientists are an entirely different breed altogether and their painstaking and laborious research does benefit mankind be it in medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics, astronomy, biology and a host of other useful disciplines.
Roberts opined in a local website - popular for publishing lengthy discourses on any given topic and generally restricted to the owner and editor of the website, their near and dear academic colleagues and essentially those from the late Dr Neelan Thiruchelvam's Hoover Institute and CIA funded ICES (International Center For Ethnic Studies) yet calling itself citizen journalism - that journalists are incapable of writing at length giving the readers reasoning and rationale for their stories.
Don't get me wrong. There are world renowned academics like Noam Chomsky and you will not get any hi-faluting Latin and quoting ancient Greek philosophers, Gramsci or Sophocles from him nor for that matter does Prof. G.L. Peiris wear his many law degrees or his Oxbridge tenure and Rhodes Fellowship on his sleeve. Although the latter has fallen by the wayside when he entered politics and has to play down his intelligence on par with the average politician's who has the brain of a single cell organism. They are effective reader-friendly academics and they certainly do not need props since they can stand on their own and their words are their own.
Little does Roberts realise that journalists go through reams of academic drivel to bring out the substance in summary so that they give the news and not theses. Leading editors in Sri Lanka have years of experience in reporting on a multitude of topics, professional training locally and abroad and are also qualified lawyers, economists, scientists and accountants. Experienced journalists can spot a charlatan miles away and they are also very astute at getting to the bottom of the truth. They also consume Hansard three times a day, five times a week not to mention scores of books to give good or bad reviews.
The proof readers (now extinct) and sub-editors have far more knowledge of how the readers want their money's worth than these so called academics in ivory towers. I will bet my bottom dollar that Roberts has never set foot in the North and East but he soldiers on writing about the ethnic conflict just because he can and there are websites who are gullible enough to buy his convoluted and empty rhetoric.
So, what is going to be the future for honest journalism? A PhD in social or political 'science' who cannot complete a sentence under fifty words laced with paradigm and polity or a bona fide journalist who would make that extra effort to get to the bottom of a story.
The writer is Asia Pacific Journalism Fellow at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, California and a print journalist for 22 years. She can be reached at pearltheva@hotmail.com)
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