BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  JAN 24

I’ve decided to enroll in the Sanctuarial University of Experiential Learning (SUEL). This SUEL campus is nestled among the Himalayan Mountains in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, just blocks from the Potala Palace, where the Dalai Lama once had his summer home.

Classes are not held on the campus, of course. If they were the learning wouldn’t be experiential now would it?

The actor Sean Penn first introduced me to experiential learning. He is well advanced in the methodology, already a practitioner of what he calls experiential journalism.

I went to Google for my elementary education in experiential learning. I also asked a friend, George Pica, who used to teach journalism. As Billy Crystal might say, it’s a process. Pica just said, “huh?” I now think of it as a circle of enlightenment, a transformation of your experiences into intellectual awakening. Through serious reflection, abstraction, conceptualization, and experimentation, a new body of knowledge is borne, to be passed along to others, best if filtered through experiential journalists like Penn, who have an almost mystic insight into such things.

Learning experientially is not new, of course. Once I asked my grandmother, rest her soul, if she would show me how to sew on a button. “You want me to teach you how to sew on a button? Sew it on yourself. Learn it by doing it,” she demanded.

My interest was piqued by Penn in an interview he did with Charlie Rose on CBS’ 60 Minutes recently. He got the biggest ratings of the show in four years. Wow, I thought. We are getting a first glimpse of a new era in American journalism one needs to be abreast of. Charlie Rose seemed impressed, too. He didn’t doze off once.

Sean was on CBS’ 60 Minutes to promote his latest experiential article in Rolling Stone Magazine, a publication that practices a form of journalism similar to that practiced by Penn. The article detailed Penn’s interview with an apparently misunderstood and unfairly maligned pharmaceutical entrepreneur in Mexico, Mr. Joaquin Guzman Loera, who has built a multi-billion-dollar business, sometimes referred to as a cartel, through a vertically-integrated supply chain ending in a vast marketing and product distribution network in the United States.

Penn told Rose that his adventure began with a Mexican soap opera starlett, Kate del Castillo, who had a somewhat complex financial and amorous online relationship with Mr. Guzman, who thought someone ought to make a movie about him. What resulted was truly experiential for both Penn and del Costillo, now an interpreter as well. There was a secret flight to Mexico, a trip deep into the jungles of the Sierra Madres, and a clandestine meeting in a small mountainous village where Guzman and some business colleagues were in seclusion following their departure from an extended sabbatical as guests of Mexican Federalis.

Can an experiential journalist ask for any better experience? Penn was giving the CBS audience a glimpse into the future of American journalism. I could see a ribbon-cutting at the brand new Penn Experiential Exhibition Hall at the Columbia School of Journalism of the University of Missouri, financed by Mr. Guzman and his associates. The Huffington Post wrote that the Mizzou school was judged the best J-school in the country. So where else?

It’s no wonder Mr. Penn was somewhat breathless and lost for words in his 60 Minutes interview. I was transfixed. I couldn’t help wondering how his hairdresser trimmed his mustache without cutting his lip. I wondered, too, if Madonna was watching. She must be so proud of him.

I imagine that veteran professional journalists in both print and broadcast, are happy to have Penn in their fraternity, a fully committed reporter just like them, fully credentialed, fully immersed in the craft, fully prepared to impart his world view on unwashed and uneducated readers.

He is, indeed, really full of it.

TOP CAMPAIGN DON’TS FOR JOURNALISTS

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin recently posted “six things the media needs to stop doing this election cycle.” A seventh might be to remember that “media” is plural, but we digress.

Rubin’s suggestions are worth repeating. Here they are in my shorthand and commentary.

1. Force candidates who use the nebulous term “Republican establishment” to define it. They can’t. It is meaningless.

2. Quit allowing the indiscriminate use of “amnesty.” No Republican has proposed it.

3. Quit using “conservative” without qualification. If the media are going to sanction the use of a nuanced term such as “democratic socialist” then they should surely at least make distinctions among conservatives, libertarians, and anarchists.

4. Don’t permit criticism of “deal-making” without some distinctions. What critic of “deal-making” has never engaged in it?

5. Challenge politicians who use the term“ the American people believe,” or “the American people want…” How do you know?

6. Challenge those who invoke Ronald Reagan indiscriminately.

Here are several more the media should consider:

7. Restrict the use of anonymous sources, especially those who have an agenda and use anonymity to malign an adversary,

8. Give legitimate candidates more equal coverage and attention. John Kasich has been running strong in New Hampshire for months. He’s been ignored. It leaves the clear impression the media have a partisan agenda and a stake in more colorful and divisive candidates.

9. Quit the marathon he-said, she-said coverage and quit trying to start fights between candidates to produce more provocative headlines.

10. Reduce by about half the amount of personal opinion commentary on broadcasts and in newspapers and confine commentary to one section of the newspaper, certainly not the front page and not pages supposedly devoted to straight news.

11. Prohibit anonymous venom online.

12. Ignore Twitter.

FBI CONSOLIDATING IN MARYLAND. WHAT ABOUT MINNESOTA?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly moving out of its headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington to a new campus in the DC suburb of Prince George’s County, Maryland.

When the General Services Administration began its search for a new FBI headquarters, I wondered why the search was restricted to Maryland and Virginia. Why not Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Minnesota, Idaho, or Oregon?   What is there about Federal law enforcement that it can only be managed from the Washington region?

The same question can be asked of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of the Census or the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Why not move more Federal Government agencies out of Washington and into areas of the country better suited and more compatible with the mission of the agency?

The Department of Agriculture has hundreds of agencies in Washington that could just as easily function in Nebraska or South Dakota where agriculture is the base of the economy and a lifestyle for thousands of people. Labor is less expensive, the schools are often better and taxes are lower. It isn’t crowded. You can get to work on time. There aren’t any protests or street closings and residents know how to get around in snow. More importantly, they know what a chisel plow is and they can tell the difference between a tobacco leaf and a soybean.

The Cabinet secretaries and all of the presidential appointees who work for them can stay in Washington, close to the President and Congress. Fine.

The oversight committees of Congress ought to look into the relocation of the government to the heartland. It’s worth looking into. Seriously. Think about it: The Internal Revenue Service on Guam.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.