Abstract
Over the last 20 years, many journalism educators have thought they needed media theory to make their courses sufficiently academic and scholarly. Media theory over this period, however, has been dominated by a number of highly politicized perspectives that have eschewed traditional ideas of academic scholarship. Under the general label of "cultural studies", they have included Althusserian Marxism, structuralist semiotics, poststructuralism and postmodernism. This paper argues that the field of cultural studies is both educationally corrupting and professionally embarrassing for journalism education. In particular it contradicts, by both argument and example, three of the central tenets of journalism: the pursuit of truth and objectivity, the ethical regard for media audiences and the promotion of good writing. The paper also shows that academics within cultural studies are ignorant of many of the basic working practices of contemporary journalism and draw their beliefs about the profession from radical theory rather than empirical investigation.
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