James Carey, 71, Influential Journalism Professor

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James Carey, who died Tuesday at 71, was a Columbia journalism professor whose essays bewailed the status of journalism as an academic discipline without a home, and claimed that journalism and democracy were “names for the same thing.”

“Journalism is our public diary, our day book, and as such it forms our collective memory,” Carey wrote in 1998 in the Columbia Journalism Review. In the same essay, written during President Clinton’s affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky, he condemned the press for its “apparent indifference to the erosion of democratic institutions” in the service of sensationalism. “Too much time and space chasing too little information,” Carey wrote of the Clinton scandals.

He liked to say that the press and journalism were completely different things: “To confuse journalism with media or communications is to confuse the fish story with the fish.”

Whether or not Carey’s views were widely influential – in communications studies they were, but in the wider world where every man is his own blogger, less so – he was a beloved figure at Columbia, where he helped create its Ph.D. journalism program.

“As is not universal in the upper-academic realm where Jim dwelt professionally, he loved journalists and believed that universities have something important to teach us,” the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann, wrote Tuesday in an e-mail to faculty.

Carey grew up in Rhode Island in a working-class Irish Catholic family. Confined to home schooling from a young age due to a heart problem by a family that doubted he would survive, he became bookish but puckish, too, and early developed the kind of unconventional attitude responsible for the following confession: “In this, and in no other way, I am like that happy writer of canticles, St. Francis: My only knowledge of virtue comes from a long and intimate acquaintance with vice.”

He was writing about the decline of journalism programs, which he spent most of his career supervising. Carey received a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Illinois in 1963, and immediately became a journalism professor at the Urbana campus. In 1969, he became director of the university’s institute for communications research, and in 1979 was named dean of the College of Communications. He came to Columbia in 1993, and helped to found the journalism school’s doctoral program.

Carey’s lament for journalism training was that journalists – a club he never joined – get no respect from the humanities, where they naturally belong. Hence, journalism programs had thrown in with the more quantitatively oriented press, broadcast, and communications studies programs, where the issue is not the workings of democracy, but the efficacy of information transfer. Carey envisioned something more like John Dewey’s vision of an academy where journalism is a humanistic product of a liberal education.

If he could gently savage the press for failings in the Clinton years, Carey was more brutal in criticizing the New York Times for institutional failings in the Jayson Blair affair. The Times’s investigation of the matter “was less a news story than a trial in which the Times served as investigator, prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, jury, and executioner,” he wrote in the Nation in 2003. “It was a show trial designed to expunge the record and memory of Jayson Blair.”

It was a clear instance of what Carey liked to call the ritual aspect of communication, a story whose importance is less in the actual content than in the fact it exists at all. And yet, Carey realized, this was what journalism does best: helping to bind us together in a community by being the basis of democratic discussion.

He leaves no magnum opus, although he did publish two collections of essays. He never retired, and despite ill health was planning a return to teaching a new syllabus on the history of journalism in the fall.

A long-suffering Cubs fan, his team was failing him again at the end.

James William Carey

Born September 7, 1934, in Providence, R.I.; died May 23 at his home in Wakefield, R.I., of emphysema; survived by his wife, Elizabeth Theresa Gilman, and his children, William, Timothy, Daniel, and Matthew.


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