Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, whose new book is Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism . The book began as a look at what journalism schools need to do to train the new generation of reporters.
Patterson proposes “knowledge-based journalism” as a corrective, believing that unless journalists are more deeply informed about the subjects they cover, they will continue to misinterpret them and to be vulnerable to manipulation by their sources.
In this book, derived from a multi-year initiative of the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, Patterson calls for nothing less than a major overhaul of journalism practice and education.