Looking out from Terra Nullius: Journalism, modernity and the 'vacant lot'

Keith Windschuttle's recent defence of journalism education (1998a: 41)brought a storm of protest from cultural and media studies theorists (The Australian, 25 March 1998). It is with faint damnation that I find myself praising Windschuttle. While I acknowledge that some media theory is good for journalism students, I question the usefulness and validity of much that the postmodernists believe in. I criticise cultural studies as an attempt to colonise the "terra nullius" of journalism theory (Hartley 1996: 39) and would argue strongly that journalism education should be taken seriously in universities as a legitimate cross-disciplinary field of study (Guerke & Hirst 1996, Hirst 1998).