One way to change this perception, some church leaders, social commentators and journalists say, is for mainstream news organizations to employ ”” and keep ”” more evangelicals in their newsrooms.
“Journalism has become more of a white-collar field that draws from elite colleges,” said Terry Mattingly, director of the Washington Journalism Center for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and a religion columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. “While there’s been heavy gender and racial diversity … there’s a lack of cultural diversity in journalism,” including religion.
Take a look at this essay by Orson Scott Card discussing the lack of journalistic integrity: “If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.
You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.”
I learned a few years ago that journalism is one of the few professions that does not even claim to have a code of ethics. Even the two source rule can not be found. The criteria for publishing anything is whether it is news that the paying reader would like to hear.
It won’t do any good. Look at Fox News. They were supposed to bring “fair and balanced” perspectives to the news, and now, after each of the debates, you couldn’t tell the difference between the commentators on CNN, MSNBC (often called MS-DNC) and Fox. They all play the same tune after a time.
By the way, great article by Orson Scott Card! Thanks for posting the link, DJH.
I am so disgusted with the news, and I consider this post politically neutral. Even if you go to [i][b] FOX News [/i][/b] where there isn’t suppose to be liberal bias, [b] libraryjim [/b] aside, you still get headline links like these:
[blockquote]1.6 Million Cribs Recalled After Two Infant Deaths
Afghan Gets 20 Years for Women’s Rights Talk
Former Child Actor Found Guilty in Yacht Killings
FOXBusiness: Kerkorian Sells Part of Stake in Ford
Statewide Lockdown After Phone Found on Death Row
Car Damaged After Chunk of Metal Falls From Sky
Study: Middle-Age Women Driving Up U.S. Suicide Rate
Neglect Charges for Caylee’s Mom Dropped
Astronaut Trial May Include Soiled Diapers as Evidence
Bartender Arrested for Working While Nude
Student Found Shot to Death in High School Bathroom
Four Severed Heads Sent to Police Station
Teen’s Explicit Cell Phone Pic Gets Students Suspended
Man Kills Sister to Cleanse His Family’s Honor
Enraged Girl, 13, Goes on Knife Rampage at Mall
Stunning Photo Shows ‘Abominable Snowman’ Footprints[/blockquote]
How many of these stories are really important? I might as well be standing in the supermarket checkout line.
Maybe the answer is for more evangelicals to go to elite colleges.
I usually watch the BBC World News. While far from being Spin Free, at least they have some substance and talk about subjects in detail.
I grind my teeth when I watch the network evening news from any of the Big Three, or the News channels. If I see one more feel good story about some dog being saved from the interstate traffic or some such thing, I may scream.
Worked freelance on local paper 1945-1947 senior high school and first two years of college. Had hard boiled old editors and most reporters were high school educated. The rules were WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, & WHY and do not inject your opinions for any reason. Opinions were for the editorial page only. Like much in America these days its really gone down hill, I agree with Card, fire them all!
#7: Have you any idea how biased the BBC is? Not for nothing is it popularly known as Pravda – or Al-BBCeera.
This dovetails nicely with Kendall’s contribution and post of the article on attitudes towards Sarah Palin. Evangelical or small-o orthodox Christians are not a monolithic group and some of us resent being treated so by politicians and journalists.
I think the other thread about loss of trust fits this pattern as well. Don’t tell me your opinion or spin, give me the truth, for truely (apologizing for the redundancy), all truth is God’s truth.
Folks, I have to disagree. First of all, a reminder. Larry Summers got fired as President of Harvard because he asked whether certain types of people go into certain types of jobs. Why, he said, were there so few Jewish farmers? Why were Catholics underrepresented in banking? And he wondered whether the smaller number of women in science might not be discrimination but simply because, by and large, science did not appeal to many women. Applied to the above, it seems to me that the kind of people who go into journalism will be those who are more open-minded, tolerant, inquisitive, articulate, somewhat educated in the humanities, and with a concern for justice. Sounds like a recipe for a liberal. The difficulty is that without noticing it, liberals can become as hidebound as any other ideology, and intolerant. You and I know well the contempt, secret or otherwise, that many journalists have for something they call ‘religion’. (An aside: in today’s London Telegraph yet again they confuse evangelism and evangelicalism. Sigh. At least they might try and get their facts straight.) But you know what: I reckon that there is no way round this. Start talking quotas (‘more evangelicals in the newsrooms’) and we are going down the road of dictating the news values. Shudder. I conclude that regarding news media, certain kinds of people gravitate to that kind of thing, and we just have to make sure that we engage in vigorous dialogue with them. Finally: with regard to news values, I suspect that Fox in the list above might at least have it right demotically. It is certainly those kind of stories that sell newspapers.
This looks like a good argument for requiring our kids to learn foreign languages. The more languages you can read, the more news sources you can get; and the more sources you have, the greater the likelihood of being able to see around regional and parochial biases.
Terry Tee – I think you might have had the right idea for a journalism major in the 50s or 60s. Then people went into reporting to report the news. But in the 70s – particularly after Watergate – many people went into Journalism to make the world better – to help solve problems and issues. This shift in focus brought us the media we have today. They are not reporting the news, they are crusading for a cause.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Hopper [#13]: Evangelicals have a much stronger presence in academia now than in the days when they avoided elite colleges.
“This shift in focus brought us the media we have today”
The shift in focus is related to much broader trends, such as the shift from modernism (i.e., scientific materialism) to postmodernism (subjectivist).
That is a great article by Card. But who is it directed to? And who is reading it?
drjoan, it’s in an LDS (Mormon) publication.
I don’t support employment quotas of any kind. Newsrooms of major papers and broadcast outlets these days are filled with people who generally agree with each other. Their failure to spot bias and to investigate other ideas is probably not some grand conspiracy but a simple failure of vision. Other opinions and contrary ideas don’t occur to them. Journalism schools today are the same. We can easily find horror stories of what happens to students in any of the humanities who express conservative or religious sentiments. People who come to the news organizations through journalism schools don’t reflect views other than the prevailing “progressive” orthodoxy.
We don’t want, on the other hand, to get to the point where the progressives are shut out. If a news bureau had people with a variety of opinions checking each other it would be far more likely to be accurate and inclusive.
Actually, I looked up the original article. The LDS publication reprinted it from there.
The original article is found [url=http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/Articles-i-2008-10-09-185828.112113_Would_the_Last_Honest_Reporter_Please_Turn_On_the_Lights.html]here[/url], the Greensboro (NC) Rhino Times of October 9.
In His Peace
Jim Elliott <><
The Rhinoceros Times, right over there in Greensboro! Who knew?
In #11 Terry Tee notes the historical pattern that journalists are typically educated in the humanities. This tends to create a real problem of lack of technical competence in many specific areas, such as religion, science, law, and anything mathematical.
For example, in the current housing crisis, housing prices are a major interest. People want to know whether the value of their homes is going up or down. Yet most reports in all the media simply refer to the median price “moving” up or down. The problem is that the median price only shows where the middle of the market is at any particular time. The median home this year is different than the median home last year, sometimes by a large amount. Thus using the median to show price movement over time is meaningless; it is comparing apples to oranges.
So why would reporters continue to report such misleading stories? Several factors. First, looking back to education, most reporters really don’t understand the subject. Two, the median info is available in less than 60 seconds with a call to the reporter’s favorite agent, whereas analyzing actual price movement would require much more analysis with appraisers and/or agents. Three, the median often shows a much greater move, making for more spectacular headlines, even if they are not true.
Another example from a few years ago. Headline: “Salaries Slide X%”. But the article’s actual data said that the rate of salary INCREASES was lower than the prior period. So even the article proved the headline false.
Of course on this blog we have seen a myriad of reporting showing that reporters do not understand either the institutional or theological religious issues.
Small wonder the mainstream media is fragmenting and often failing.
#21, A few months ago in the Washington Post, a reporter was writing about the use of food banks in the affluent DC suburbs. She reported the high median income and then with dramatic flair wrote, “But 50% of the county residents make less than this level.” My middle school student read the article and laughed. That is the definition of the median!
Bill Matz #21: You gave a few examples of journalistic naivety above. Also in the technological sciences, solutions to energy and environmental problems are dealt with by many reporters as if it has become a religious quest. I work in a university engineering school. Much of our current research is focused on these problems. When reporters think that they have a simplified solution, they are just substituting one undesirable outcome for another. New technology will help with some of these problems, and it is in almost everyone’s interest that they be developed and employed quickly. Scarcity through supply and demand will also both aggravate and solve many of these challenges. I watched part of a PBS program last night on energy and felt that the facts were manipulated around the preconceived solutions. Which is more important: bio-fuels vs bio-diversity and bio-nutrition, hydroelectricity vs hydro-irrigation, or nuclear waste vs atmospheric carbon waste? Journalism school does not train their students technologically on these problems.
[i] I watched part of a PBS program last night on energy and felt that the facts were manipulated around the preconceived solutions.[/i]
Cole, I have the same conviction whenever I watch a news report or read a newspaper article on ‘Global Warming’ (aka ‘Climate Change’). If it doesn’t fit their preconceived pet theory, they ignore it or attempt to discredit the “other side’s” experts.
Objective Journalism? A thing of the past.