I don’t mean that he has a religion. I mean that he is a religion. Leading up to Tom Brokaw’s appearance on the USC campus for the President’s distinguished lecture series, students prepared piously – reading the newspaper more in one week than they had in the past year, looking up youtube videos, and burning Peter Jennings effigies. On a campus that seems to have no clearly defined religion, with Annenberg as our temple, journalism may be the closest thing we’ve got. And of all the talking heads, Brokaw seems to have achieved something just short of saint like status.

I wanted to be a journalist when I was younger. I was fanatical about that and type writers. I imagined that I would tote my typewriter to all the corners of the world and tell the stories of the unreported. In my short life I have managed to amass a large collection of typewriters. Many of which I keep stashed under my bed in nearly identifiable lumpy boxes. I have not been so lucky to collect as many reporting trophies. A part of me probably still wants this, and so I would not turn down an audience with someone who had least been around in journalism at the same time as typewriter technology.

The problem, as with all religions, is that the practice is never quite as fascinating as the theory. Christ dying for your sins is pretty exciting; sitting in church is not. Tom Brokaw’s living room chats on the scary outside world is pretty exciting; sitting and listening to Tom Brokaw recap the news is not. It turns out that old news is just an incomplete and therefore often times inaccurate portrayal of history. It hurts my years of history education to hear the civil rights era summarized so crudely. Instead of recapping the 60s and 70s, he could have provided some personal insight to what he saw and heard. We have all been privy to the recollections of the collective. I saw even the most devout supporters with their heads bent forward rolling into a sleep. Even the Daily Trojan didn’t report on this recap of why Brokaw came to journalism at a lucky and interesting time. It is probably because that reporter too, was asleep. Brokaw said that his most interesting interviews were with the people whose names he couldn’t remember. If they were as interesting and as memorable to his as he wanted us to believe, then perhaps he could have at least remembered one to tell us.

The typewriter was already old technology when I feel in love with it. What is less obvious is that the journalism I feel in love with is also outdated and no longer in use. I worked at my first journalism job this past semester in radio news. Our lives move faster than they ever have and the news moves even faster. We are blessed to have access to so many sources of information. But for this reason, there is very little location reporting. In the four months that I worked for this show we were able to afford the time and money to report on location twice. For the rest of our show, it was far faster and more informational to call someone on the ground. And so when Brokaw said "We need to let these people know that life is not virtual. They need to learn to take their hands off the keyboard, and learn that problems cannot be solved by hitting delete,” I am angry because this not the solution my generation has chosen. In the industry of journalism that Brokaw has helped build, these are the only tools we have left to use.