Text: Ephesians 4: 11-16
All the news
“All the News that’s fit to print.” That used to stand in the banner of the New York Times with every issue. Which goes to show you, journalism has (or had) a moral compass.
It’s not about newspapers anymore; it’s about “the Media”—a vast array of information sources including diminishing papers, but dominated by cable TV and the internet.
The traditional role of the media can perhaps best be summed up by the BBC, whose working motto is to inform, educate, and entertain.
We can righty question what the balance is between these, and which tend to dominate in our time. Today, unlike any time in our history, news is everywhere, and fake news is the headline of the day.
Newspaper Love
Before I experienced the calling to ministry, I thought I would be a writer. I loved newspapers. I both high school and college I immersed myself in student publications. As a freshman I was a reporter, then the Entertainment Editor, where I amused myself and my friends with extremely snarky music and movie reviews. I wrote a humor column, which was my favorite hobby horse throughout college. As a sophomore, I rose to Managing Editor and was poised to become the Editor in Chief for my junior year, but it was not to be.
Of the 40 students associated with the newspaper, 38 signed a letter to the Publication Board advocating that I become the next Editor in Chief. The Publications Board saw it differently and appointed the two dissenters as the next Editor in Chief and Managing Editor. I was utterly crushed.
Yes, we had made lots of trouble. Yes, we had been threatened by the University with a potential lawsuit. Yes, in protest, we printed an issue with all the ads on the front page. But we also had tripled circulation of the paper extending it into greater Spokane. And yes, I had attended a Trustee dinner where I sat with one of the university’s most generous, multi-millionaire donors and bemoaned the decrepit state of the newspaper’s offices and outdated equipment, and how good it would be to have a dozen IBM Selectric typewriters rather than the WWII surplus tank models handed down for the past several decades. Yeah, that was probably the final straw.
After my defeat, one of the Jesuit teachers spoke some loving truth to me. “Noel, you seem to think there’s a toad under every stone.” “Yeah,” I said, “but I only need one to have a great issue of the paper!” But he was right, I had become filled with scrutiny and suspicion, which tends to fuel much of journalism. Scrutiny and suspicion—point and poke.
I have sentimental thought about my many late nights in the newspaper offices with the old, surplus typewriters. For me, and for the other editors, the paper was everything. It was voice, it was influence, and it was notoriety. I loved the writing, and it became my passion once I realized that there is no such thing as objective journalism.
Nothing Objective
Objective journalism is a myth. It was our motto. Our hero was Hunter S. Thompson, the inventor of so-called Gonzo journalism. Quote:
“So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
It’s true: there’s no such thing really as objective journalism; it’s only relatively objective at best. The moment information of any kind is put into narrative form, the writer—whomever it may be—exercises artistic discrimination over whatever details, words or phrases that will make it into the story.
Truly objective journalism would look like bullet point facts, but even then, someone exercises discrimination over which bullet points make the list, and which are listed above others, and how they are worded, etc.
All journalism is the exercise of personal preferences.
All journalism is political activism.
It’s all fake news.
To train myself to this fact, one of my weekly rituals was to gather a handful of papers every Sunday afternoon into a big stack. I’d have the Star, the National Inquirer, the New York Times, and usually a couple of others. I’d start with the Star and Inquirer so I would be outraged and appalled at the extremity of the spin and sensationalism. That same revulsion—as if I were reading a paper that a dog had confused for a toilet—carried over into whatever “real” newspaper I was reading. What is amazing is how often I had made it into the Times not even realizing it wasn’t still the Inquirer.
With TV journalism, you can experience the same odd feeling by watching Entertainment Tonight and then switching to Fox News or CNN. Inform? Educate? It’s mostly entertainment. Which means so much of what passes for news is merely entertainment.
This brings us to Fake News.
It’s all fake news
The term fake news was coined by a fake news show—the Daily Show on Comedy Central.
In the last election cycle an astonishing percentage of college students, when asked what was their news program of choice, answered the Daily Show.
The Daily Show is honest. They are fake news, they claim it. They are sketch comedy. Stephen Colbert and his Colbert Report was a wildly successful parody of FOX news that, while funny, managed to shape and influence a generation of people who had concluded that this was news enough for them.
Hip culture, in targeting conservative values and center/right Fox News, turned fake news into a real influencer.
One result of this has been the wholesale loss of trust in professional journalism. The days of Walter Cronkite and the dream of objective journalism is gone. What used to be the provenance of a handful of papers and 3 or 4 networks is now a vast and fragmented spectrum of networks and news sources, the credibility of each determined by the preferences of the viewer.
To many—perhaps most—fake news is simply all of those sources they don’t want to hear.
Journalism is in crisis. Newspapers are failing left and right.
President Trump exacerbated and highlighted this reality from the earliest Republican Debates. Personally, I was impressed with his perspective, which was spot on. After the debate, when confronted by a CNN correspondent, his comment was, “You guys had a big night.”
What Trump rightly understands is that all journalism is advocacy. CNN, FOX, msnbc, CBS, ABC, NBC—these are just companies—businesses—and Trump, unlike other candidates, only seems to think of these as competition. They’re all just businesses chasing the dollar (same as him). They have shareholders and profit margins to answer to. They are just businesses.
Trump is the first president—surely of many to come—who has not treated the press like high priests, but as competing businesses. His use of Twitter is questionable judgment, to say the least, but the Rubicon has been crossed. It’s now the way things are done. Thumbing his nose at the press corps, Trump has in effect declared, “Who says I need you? I can just go directly to the people myself.” And so he has, and so we are in a new era.
Where did we ever get the idea that our journalists are some kind of dispassionate, high priests of objective truth? They’re not. Unlike judges, doctors, policemen, or even politicians, they take no vows to defend the truth or serve the public honestly. They simply serve the needs and demands of their company businesses.
While in crisis, the media still wield enormous power. Another year of political debates stands ahead of us. Have you ever considered just how powerful the press is shaping who does and does not get into office? In presidential debates, who asks the questions? Who chooses the questions to be asked? To a large degree, the agenda—what criteria people use to choose their candidates and vote—is set by the press!
We have a proud myth in the States about good journalists—the noble warrior of truth who uncovers corruption and speaks the truth to power. Yes, we need those journalists—our country is built upon free speech and our freedom depends upon it—but how today can we return respect and honor to a network of businesses that has no moral center?
I suggest the Society of Professional Journalists finally, and in truth become a profession by having journalists and publishers make a vow of office, just like doctors, lawyers, and judges—something about serving the truth—something to protect every lowly journalist from business interests from above. Yes, there will still be lots of fake news sources out there, but as a nation, we’ll have separated the children from the adults.
As for you and me, I think it wise that we all read widely. Read news you disagree with. See if you find some good reason there, and follow your favorite news sources critically.
our perspective
As to what this all has to do with your and my growing in Christ and making Him known, and would call you to admit and be mindful of several things:
1. The Church must not be represented by any voice other than its own.
2. For Christians, Truth is neither malleable nor personalized.
3. Truth is not in question; it has been revealed decisively and finally.
4. We do not need to be told what to think, how to feel, or what to do.
5. We must practice humility and kindness as to all secondary truths.
6. We all have preferences, but we must refuse to be divided by them.
7. We must test and retest our own feelings and assumptions under God.
Our text makes it clear in verses 14-15:
We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,
Brothers and sisters, we need to be the adults in the room of this nation. We need to stand on, with, and for the revealed Word of God. Our voice has become a small one amidst the clamoring noise of the Information Age. We need to represent the still, small voice of our Lord. We would do well to be like the eye of the Hurricane—calm when all else around is in roiling turmoil.
Our witness demands that we live credibly.
We must seek to become more credible than our critics.
We must become more credible than our critics.
As for the noise around us, just remember:
It’s all fake news. Let none of us forget it! †