Indiana University devoted 887 words in a press release to announcing the new strategic partnership between IU athletics and IU's school of journalism.
They're buddies now. Partners, really.
It's creepy in a nonchalant, begging-the-question sort of way. Nowhere in the press release is there any hint about the basic relationship being a conflict of interest.
IU's journalism students might ask their "partner," the head basketball coach, why he recruits so many players who have brushes with the law. At several points in history, IU football and basketball led the league in camouflaged thuggishness.
See the partnership-buddy problem there?
Journalists customarily are trained to expose the smudges on well-crafted drivel. It's useful. They shine the flashlight down dark alleys and make thieves run for cover.
Now the entire point seems to be ignoring conflicts of interest or, better yet, purchasing your own.
You can understand how not everyone is interested in forging a new generation of tough-minded, critical thinkers who might ask difficult questions.
Inside the 887 words of the email-distributed announcement are hypertext Internet links to other stories about IU partnership mania, billionaire Mark Cuban's vision for Indiana journalism students and the technological circus of sports media.
The school once honored World War II's heroic Indiana dogface journalist Ernie Pyle by educating its J-school students in a building bearing his name. That relationship was a point of honor that dignified IU far more than it did Ernie, who did not need stroking to validate his journalism or his heroism. He died near Iwo Jima exhibiting the best of both.
Now 25 percent of IU students don't know who he was, or really care, according to IU's Daily Student.
In keeping with IU's yearning to damn with faint praise, the school did commission a statue of him which, hilariously, misspelled the word "correspondent" on the shoulder of his bronze likeness.
Ernie's values apparently are obsolete. Now Indiana University extols the virtues of Cuban because he exhibited the highest testament to integrity — a $5 million donation.
You can tell how important this is because he wielded a basic tool of sports media power. He bought the naming rights. It's the "Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology" and IU is giggly with happiness.
The goal of transfused 3D computerized technology and fab recording studios is to develop, in his words, "the type of students you want to hire."
That means the type of students Mark Cuban would want to hire.
What would Cuban expect of his proteges and their allegiance to him as a well-heeled customer? "Treat your customers like they own you. Because they do," he has said.
IU is going places with big money and self-promoted big ideas that seem very small next to Pyle. We're all Orwellian partners.
What the new partnership forges is a permanent alliance between two concepts that will be sold as IU's official dogma. Decide for yourself if both ideas give you comfort or heartburn.
First, media education is designed to produce commercially pliable media producers who will make products for their bosses. It's a content world, baby. What does your content say and mean? Is it valuable for the general good? Who cares? Someone will buy it.
Second, media's message is the technology that delivers the media. Humans advance only if they advance the technology. In this trope, the more money and energy — in academia, that's the same commodity — devoted to media technology, the more quality media will be produced.
But nowhere in that linguistic surge was any mention of professional values unconnected to technology or money, which is not a surprising transmutation.
They took Pyle's name down, renamed the department "The Media School: Journalism – Film – Communication" and then moved the department.
But the name on the building is only symbolic. The hardest professional task — the only one for which real training is necessary — is how to ask questions and get answers that reveal truth. Not data. Or facts. But truth.
How do you ask questions when the person being asked might not tell you any truth, besides the faux almost-truth that suits them? What if you're partners?
All the beaming faces and earnest content creators working on their permanent undergraduate student debt in Bloomington have yet to discover that journalism is the quest for facts that someone will lie to protect or hide. Everything else is public relations folderol.
Technology won't find those answers. Only bright lights shined down the alley will. Ernie Pyle knew how to do that. Who will pick up his flashlight now?