We never stop trying to better our reporting.

Byline: Jim Godbold / The Register-Guard

HERE'S SOME EXCITING news: Journalists continue to fare slightly better than lawyers in polls asking the public to rank the "least respected" professions.

This latest survey actually rates our colleagues in the United Kingdom, but it mirrors similar samplings in the Colonies. It was massively unscientific - 12,000 responses on a BBC Radio Web site. Voters were asked to pick their three most and least respected professions out of a list of nearly 100 jobs.

The U.K.'s Bottom 10, beginning with the least-respected-of-all: Minister of Parliament, estate agent, government minister, lawyer, journalist, footballer, advertising executive, car dealer, company director and accountant.

We all should have listened to our mothers and become doctors, which the BBC poll rates as the most respected profession in the U.K., followed in order by nurse, teacher, firefighter, paramedic, army/navy/RAF, scientist, ambulance driver, police officer and care assistant.

Wait, there's more! But to get in the mood for the next installment, let's sing a verse of Don Henley's cynical love song to the news media, "Dirty Laundry":

We can film the innuendo,

We can dance and sing.

When it's said and done,

We haven't told you a thing.

We all know that crap is king,

Give us dirty laundry.

(Chorus)

Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down

Kick 'em when they're up

Kick 'em all around.

Moving right along, we have Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, warning his colleagues in academe, "Reporters are not only not your friends, they are your enemies, for they like nothing better than to catch you up, embarrass you, and make you out to be either a fool or a knave."

Writing in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education, Fish offers a brutal assessment of reporters and a broad indictment of their profession. He is most savage with higher-education reporters.

"Not all reporters come at you with an ideological agenda," Fish said. "In some cases the agenda is more personal. This is certainly true of those higher-education beat reporters who either washed out of graduate school, or got the Ph.D. but never got a job, or got a job but it didn't work out."

Don't touch that dial. Fish is just getting warmed up.

"Typically reporters understand nothing of the tenure and promotion process, but they are certain it is unfair and operates at the expense of students. They understand even less of the budget, but they are certain that money is being squandered or misspent on nonessential frills.

"They have no acquaintance at all with the latest theories in any field, but they know they are faddish and a waste of taxpayers' money. They have no sense at all of what it takes to prepare and teach a course, but they are confident that they could teach at least six in any semester."

And how could these bitter, resentful hacks ever rise above their pettiness in the service of a profession Fish describes this way:

"Of course there are many higher-education reporters who have neither a political ax to grind nor a personal score to settle, but still beat up on you nevertheless. What's their problem? Their problem is the profession they practice, a profession that pays lip service to accuracy and in-depth reporting but more often than not performs ignorance and superficiality."

Where to begin? First, with an acknowledgement that within the arc of all this negativity - from the low regard the public often has for our work to Dean Fish's venomous screed - there is enough truth to make most honest journalists squirm.

Even the finest journalistic institutions in this country occasionally make some of the mistakes Fish cites in his article: bias, superficiality, sensationalism.

But those mistakes occur most often, in my experience, with breaking news stories that must be reported in a terribly tight time frame without the luxury of extensive research prior to publication.

Apart from breaking news, Register-Guard reporters on all beats are doing more background research than ever before writing about complex topics. In fact, it's often hard to decide when to stop doing research and begin writing.

It's not at all uncommon for reporters covering beats such as higher education or health care to interview sources multiple times before writing and to read descriptions of highly technical processes back to the sources for confirmation of accuracy.

Do we still make mistakes? Unfortunately, and we always will. Can we do better? Of course, and we never stop trying to improve.

But despite all the negative surveys and mean-spirited critiques, more often than not we are proud of the work we do, and we take very seriously the important role we play in the communities we serve.

Maybe we just need to have a rock star write us a more positive song.

Jim Godbold is executive editor of The Register-Guard. He can be reached at 338-2413 or by e-mail at [e-mail].