HALIFAX, NS — This week The Mackerel met with Dr. Dwight Herbert, professor at the University of King’s College School of Journalism, for an annual interview about the role of journalism in the world today. The Mackerel has conducted this interview for the past seven years in order to understand the shifting cultural landscape in our rapidly evolving world. In our 2016 interview, in the midst of a worsening war in Syria, the controversial American presidential election, and Brexit, Dr. Herbert proclaimed, “The vocation of journalism is currently essential to the world in a way it has never been before,” echoing a sentiment in much of the news media at the time.
Two years, and two interviews later, Dr. Herbert urged the public to throw their support behind journalists after the brutal 2018 assassination of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “It is absolutely necessary that journalists feel supported, and defended by the public right now, because we need journalism. In all honesty? I would say the job of the journalist is the most important to society, now more than ever,” Herbert explained.
Herbert told The Mackerel in our 2020 interview that “We live in a world in which the President of the United States attacks journalists simply for reporting on a global pandemic. I think we need to realize that in these unprecedented times, there has never been a greater need for journalism. Students of the King’s Journalism School are signing up for a lifetime of some of the most important work in the world — and quite frankly — they are heroes.”
Again in 2021, 2022, and now recently in 2023, Herbert has come forward yet again on behalf of the King’s Journalism School to state that journalism is “crucial, now more than ever”.
Dr. Herbert’s message certainly ought to make the reader think, and maybe even pause to consider what we owe to journalists — particularly in a world where the term ‘unprecedented’ is used with unprecedented frequency.
By Grace Brown