'They think we're all dropouts'

It was 3.54pm on day one before "post-structuralism" echoed through the media studies lecture hall - not a term, it must be admitted, much heard in the Evening Standard's newsroom.

But deep within the University of East London's Beckton campus, journalism tutor Andrew Calcutt was delivering his two-hour lesson on "Under-standing the Culture Industries" - and attention had turned to the feminisation of the media organisation as ideological change inter-acted with structural modification. The "hard newsroom", we learned, was being "feminised" by a popular appetite for lifestyle stories - the fashion and "people" news that was often written by women, who thus gained "an equality of degradation in the post-(Henry)-Fordist workplace".

As a result, a more caring "ethics man" had emerged to replace "the masculinist macho style of Kelvin MacKenzie's management tech-nique" - he, for those too young, was the domineering Sun editor whose reporters would bang their heads against a wall to save Kelvin the trouble.

Kelvin went on to clash with Janet Street-Porter at Live! TV, a relationship we analysed by watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary about their final boardroom struggle. "Watch for the dynamics of power, and work out who's being disempowered at the board meet-ing," Mr Calcutt, a former journal-ist and musician, advised. "The men in the white shirts are being calculating and domineering, and feminisation is unravelling. Put in your minds the dichotomy between rhetoric and reality."

As dichotomies go, there's a pretty huge one between the jargon of media studies theory and the language actually spoken in the modern newsroom. From White City to Canary Wharf, editors tend to sneer at media-studies degrees, famously derided by Chris Woodhead, former chief inspector of schools, as "vacuous" and "quasi-academic". Yet the number of students taking these degrees has doubled since 1995, with 2,660 applying last year for basic media studies and another 1,273 for journalism - catching up fast with the 8,495 choosing English.

So what makes this one of Britain's fastest-growing under-graduate disciplines? To find out, I spent two days at the University of East London, where 400 under-graduates are studying units with titles such as "Sexual Cultures" and "Popular Music: Theory and Practice". A third of the course-work is practical, offering training in production skills and new technologies, but the majority is designed to teach critical thinking. "We're promising a training in deconstruction skills," explains David Butler, the subject co-ordinator. "It's important to under-stand the language of media representation and to learn how to think."

Mr Butler, a former freelance journalist on trade and political titles, has no time for the subject's critics and their "class snobbishness against the former polytechnics". "I'm not particularly interested in talking to elitists," he says, dismissing Chris Woodhead as a "fascist" whom it is "hard to find anyone to defend outside The Daily Telegraph". Media studies degrees are no less vocationally useful than traditional Oxbridge disciplines, he insists. "Apparently doing classics at Oxford is a suitable basis for becoming a civil servant. What's the link? So why is there a view that to work within the media there's a need for particular skills?"

According to Mr Butler - who, with his ponytail, stubble and black leather coat, would not be mistaken for a typical Oxford don - the ability to network is as important in today's job market as knowledge. "The best qualification for getting a job in the media is to be related to someone in the media," he says. "The working-class students here have to work bloody hard to cultivate contacts."

Still, they appear to face better job prospects on graduation than students of more traditional subjects. A national survey recently suggested that 76 per cent of last year's media-studies graduates were working within six months, compared with 56 per cent for English and history. Admittedly, only four per cent of those were working as journalists - compared with 20 per cent in "clerical and secretarial" posts. At East London, last year's graduates are now working at Reuters, at BBC radio, in web design ... and at the local cinema. Current third-year students hope to run a music magazine, produce for television and local radio, and work in music PR, with the Mirror's 3am Girls the most popular role models in print.

The theory aspect, by students' general consensus, will be of limited value in the real world. They are realistic that "you won't get into TV because of a university project", and are quite focused on the value of contacts made through work experience. Sophie Price worries that the bad name of media studies might actually disadvantage us they ll think we re dropouts . Khadijah Moncrieffe recalls that when she was 16, on a work-experience place-ment at the BBC, the producers were laughing when applicants CVs listed media courses . Khadijah knows what counts more than the degree: It s who you know. Evelyn Ojo agrees: Nepotism, that s the game in media. Being good isn t always enough.

Back in the "Writing, Knowledge, Power" class, lecturer Marianne Wells emphasises that news stories and TV documentaries, like history, are always told from a particular standpoint, and that "representation is never neutral". "Think about absence and inclusion," Ms Wells says as she plays a Discovery Civilisation Channel video about the Wright Brothers' first flight. "Think about what kinds of power relationships are influencing interpretation."

Such an emphasis on critical thinking would be commended at the traditional universities. But media studies at a former poly faces an extra battle to gain credibility among the very media it seeks to understand. For all the department's excellent production-training facilities, course-study units entitled "Lesbian and Gay Cultures" and "Film and Feminism" risk playing to the media's own prejudices. And the jargon - essay questions on whether "the dual labour market is reproduced in the world of digital media production" - does not help bridge the gap between academia and workplace.

Andrew Calcutt, whose books include a cultural critique of Britain, insists that the subject is relevant to the world of work. "It's key," he says. "Not because its a precise training for the job, but because students are trained in critical but disciplined thinking. Employers want critical thinking."

As for Kelvin MacKenzie, currently preoccupied with the Wireless Group's troubled share price, he was uncharacteristically "unwilling to comment" yesterday about his starring role in media education. Perhaps the newsroom really has been feminised.