“Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy”
By James Fallows
Pantheon Books
296 pp.; $23
“Telling the Truth: How to Revitalize Christian Journalism”
By Marvin Olasky
Crossway
303 pp.; $20, paper
I heard James Fallows talk on National Public Radio, describing the event that put him over the edge. Watching one of the Washington news talk shows, Fallows heard a panel of journalists pronouncing authoritatively and articulately on what President Clinton should do in Bosnia. The trouble was, Fallows knew each of these journalists, and he knew for a fact that none of them had been to Bosnia or covered the story firsthand. They didn’t know what they were talking about. He felt embarrassed, Fallows said, to be part of a profession with such low standards. He decided then and there to write about what has gone wrong with American journalism.
James Fallows ranks among the finest journalists of our time. His specialty has been in-depth illumination of complicated subjects. Seeking to understand the Asian challenge, for example, he was not content to do some interviews and make a three-week Asian trip. He took his family to live in Japan and several other East Asian countries. He has brought a similar care to subjects as arcane as Pentagon weapons procurement. He cannot be dismissed as a ritual complainer. (Complaining about the news seems to be the equivalent of reviling camp food when you are in junior high.)
Not content to describe trends, Fallows names names and cites examples, such as Mike Wallace parachuting in for an instant interview with a subject he does not have the time to understand, or Cokie Roberts refusing to respond to any press inquiries about the amounts she is paid for speaking to special-interest groups. Fallows says that American journalism has gone wrong, so wrong that it undermines our democracy.
He is not charging media bias (he is not denying it, either) but something far deeper. Fallows says journalism has developed habits that undermine its very purpose, which is to equip citizens with the information they need to participate in democracy. Journalists are destroying the house they live in.
Why are voters both passive and angry? Why do they despise politicians and the media? Why do fewer people read the newspaper? Why do so many consider voting a waste of time? Fallows suggests that journalists should read what they write and watch what they produce, and they may begin to understand.
Because of the way journalists report, Fallows says, Americans increasingly perceive political issues as nothing more than arbitrary stances taken by politicians to manipulate voters or special interests (“Clinton Modifies Health Plan to Appease Seniors”). Likewise, people see political campaigns as mere horseraces to handicap (“Fogal Predicts Race Will Narrow”) with nothing at stake except a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” for particular self-serving politicians and their “handlers.” The public believes that politicians care only about their re-election. Why? Largely because that is the only motive ever attributed to them by journalists. Fallows decries “a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems.”
Problems as they appear in the news are rarely solvable; they appear impossibly complex and tragic. News headlines are dominated by scandals and disasters, punctuated by ironic or cynical commentary. The best-known, best-paid journalists are most often seen shouting rudely at each other on talk shows or at the President as he boards a plane. This is what ordinary people learn of political life from the news. Why should they care about it?
Reporters who make it on national TV are the big stars of journalism, Fallows says, and would-be stars emulate them just as they once emulated Woodward and Bernstein. What they emulate is axiomatically bad journalism.
Journalists make it onto TV via the news talk shows, which require that they speak (or more likely, shout) in one-liners about subjects they know little about. Since few have really studied, say, the difficult subject of Medicare reform, they cannot discuss Medicare but only whether Newt Gingrich can convince the public to swallow his Medicare medicine. What does the audience learn from this? Very little about Medicare. They learn that cynical politicians are trying to get advantage over each other by “selling” various approaches to a government program that many elderly people depend on to pay their medical bills. They get insider talk about the tactics being used to push or oppose one approach or another. The audience may or may not turn off the news talk show. (That depends on how entertaining the show is.) They will turn off any hope of understanding what is at stake in Medicare, or finding a politician who truly cares. News talk shows contribute “to a mood of fatalistic disengagement.”
Washington journalists want very badly to get on these talk shows, Fallows claims, partly because of the ego inflation that comes with such exposure, and partly because exposure means name recognition that can be turned into cash on the lecture circuit. Some journalists are selling their souls, he suggests. Many of the rest would like to.
The other way onto national TV is by becoming a star for a network. Stars make even larger amounts of money, but not for good reporting. It isn’t profitable for a network to let, say, Judy Woodruff take a month to research a story. Other lower-ranking staff members do the legwork. Woodruff gets flown in for the interview. Since she doesn’t have any in-depth understanding of the story, she can’t add any news value. She can only add the clever, ironic, poised comment–perhaps one that suggests how terribly complex the issue is, or that the politicians have messed up again.
Network TV journalism may seem light years away from the local newspaper, but Fallows thinks that elite national journalists set the trends for everybody else. Fallows favors an alternative approach, developed by the experiment loosely known as “public journalism,” whereby news organizations try to foster understanding and dialogue in their communities. For example, some newspapers have tried to find out what issues their readers consider paramount, and then they cover politicians’ response to these rather than the ersatz controversies (mudslinging, mostly) that are invented by campaign headquarters. Journalism should discard its false pose of objectivity, Fallows says, which translates roughly to “we don’t care.” Rather, journalists should be purposeful in supporting democracy and take care that their work fosters the understanding and civility that democracy requires. “Without purposefulness,” he quotes Buzz Merritt, “toughness is mere self-indulgence.”
If Fallows decries modern journalism as cynical and sensational, Marvin Olasky scorns Christian journalism that is tepid, lukewarm, and “dithering.” For Fallows, journalism is a tool of democracy. Olasky understands it as a weapon of holy war. Although Olasky teaches journalism at a government school, the University of Texas, his interest lies in journalism that instructs in Christian truth–the sort he pursues as the editor of “World,” a Christian newsmagazine. “A solidly Christian news publication should not be balanced,” he writes. Rather, it should “fight a limited war against secular, liberal culture.” Olasky employs such military imagery freely in “Telling the Truth,” a distinctive blend of textbook and manifesto.
Like Fallows, Olasky believes that journalism should be purposeful, not objective in the sense of never taking sides. He wants activist journalists, who write their stories to illustrate truths they are deeply convinced of. Olasky proposes the standard of “biblical objectivity,” which teaches God’s truth by “presentation of the God’s-eye view.” “Biblical objectivity means showing the evil of homosexuality,” he writes; “balancing such stories by giving equal time to gay activists is ungodly journalism.”
The problem with such Old Testament journalism is getting the God’s-eye view right. Olasky seems to suffer no lack of self-confidence on this point. He concedes that nafta was the kind of story for which no biblical understanding is obvious. A journalist must balance views and perspectives (dither?) on some such issues. There do not appear to be many such issues, however. “Biblical objectivity,” he writes in one example, “means supporting the establishment and improvement of Bible-based education, and criticizing government schools.” Really? The Bible tells us to criticize government schools?
A more pernicious problem is that a commitment to teach can be at odds with good reporting. An old, wry line catches this: “I already have the story; I just need some quotes.” Most often when people complain to me about mistreatment by a reporter, they describe someone who did not really listen because he had already made up his mind (though he never said so). This is irritating to the subject, but even more corrosive to the story. If you already know what you will write before you begin, you are not really reporting. You are just ornamenting your view with quotation.
Olasky seems mainly oblivious to this problem, even though he has critiqued it when the reporters’ commitment is pro-abortion. In “The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988,” in a chapter entitled “Ideology Versus Investigation,” he calls most newspapers “pro-abortion lap dogs” and says they avoided “hard investigative digging on abortion.” Olasky quotes from “USA Today” reporter Marlene Perrin, who was set up by Planned Parenthood to do a negative story on pro-life pregnancy counseling centers and admitted she “couldn’t get to the fake clinics, but I talked to clients who had been there. . . . The Planned Parenthood people were very helpful in providing them for me.” That is bad reporting by anyone’s accounting, but precisely such softness has led to modern journalists’ insistence on toughness and objectivity. Good reporting does not require that you give both sides equal credence, but it does require that you get both sides of the story.
In another example, Olasky tells of the “Baltimore Sun’s” story on the anti-abortion film “The Silent Scream,” which quoted filmmaker Bernard Nathanson and then followed his five paragraphs with 32 paragraphs of sharp attack. Would that have been, in Olasky’s mind, fair reporting if the reporter’s sympathies had been anti-abortion? Is bias all right if it is our bias? I know many Christians who resent the anti-Christian bias of the secular press, but what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The issue, I think, is not that the reporter has a point of view. It is that a point of view can steer you toward caricature if you are not careful. The adjectival phrase “tough, but fair” should apply to Christian journalism.
Olasky is right to criticize the “on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand” style of reporting. If a journalist has no point of view (or thinks he has none, or pretends to have none), then what he produces becomes either false or inhuman. Even reporting a traffic accident requires an implied commitment to the value of human life and property. Many stories would be more interesting and of greater value if the reporter made clear why they matter, and even demonstrated what position is right and what wrong. Olasky hails journalism in earlier American centuries, when newspapers could (and sometimes did) see the news through a strong biblical lens. Many also saw the news through a strong Democratic lens, or a Federalist lens. A city like New York had dozens of newspapers, all vociferously competing to put their spin on the news. (Fairly often they falsified their reports, too.) Newspapers were far from objective then, but no one complained that Americans were disengaged from politics.
Today one newspaper reads like any other. They are (I believe) more factually accurate than in the nineteenth century, yet almost passionless. Television news is similarly monochromatic, its variations lying only in graphics, set, and stars. This does not make for a robust exchange of ideas. (More vivid points of view have become the property of weekly magazines like the “National Review” and “The New Republic,” and of talk radio, which can profitably appeal to small segments of the market.)
Olasky is right, then, that Christians in journalism should vigorously speak the truth that they know. I think he would do well, however, to hear what Fallows says about how journalism can undermine democracy, and consider that a Christian lives in two kingdoms. Journalists are certainly to advance God’s kingdom by proclaiming God’s truth. We are also to treat our neighbors the way we would like to be treated, and to seek the welfare of the city where we live. Having felt the sting of being disinherited by journalists, having witnessed firsthand the blindness of people with such confidence in their position they cannot see another point of view, evangelical Christians of all people ought to eschew arrogance. Arrogance does not produce good journalism, though it may cheer on our own camp.
“People will pay attention to journalism only if they think it tells them something they must know,” Fallows writes, and “Journalism exists to answer questions like, ‘What is really going on?’ and ‘Why is this happening?’ ” Good journalism, therefore, ultimately requires a vigorous Christian point of view, which alone truly identifies what people must know and explains what is really going on.
I can’t agree with Olasky, however, that the problem with Christian journalism is that it is lukewarm. I find the problem to be that Christian journalism (what little exists) is not very insightful. We rarely do the hard work–investigation and thinking–that enables us to advance the reader’s understanding and knowledge. I worry that in his emphasis on vigor and conviction, Olasky barely acknowledges the importance of listening, probing, and sifting through vast areas of uncertainty and ignorance. Granted, it is hard for a crusading journalist to find the patience and care required. But good journalists do.
DIRECTED VERSUS DITHERING
Directed reporting–the combination of a biblical world-view and precise, tough-minded reporting–is atypical within Christian journalism for two reasons. First, it is time-intensive: It is much easier to pontificate about the decline of the Cuban economy than to go to Cuba, interview people there about tight rationing, and report that:
to get even those limited rations, Cubans stand interminably in line. “For four hours I waited for this!” one grandmother fumed to us as she stalked into her home late one afternoon. She raised a small plastic bag which held two tiny rolls and three small bars of soap.
Second, among those able and willing to do a good job from the field, there is sometimes a reluctance to merge opinion and reporting, even though the opinion in directed reporting comes through the selection of specific detail, and it has long been recognized that all reporters inevitably select. Biblical objectivity, however, does not emphasize personal opinion: The goal is perspective that is grounded in a biblical world-view. If there is insufficient biblical rationale for a story theme, out it should go.
A Christian publication, in short, should teach, but it should teach effectively by showing rather than telling. Directed reporting is designed to show readers the salient facts in a Bible-based contextualization, and allow them to agree or disagree with the conclusions reached. It differs from reporting that picks up here a fact, there a fact, because it is directed within a biblical framework; it does not dither. It also differs from theoretical writing that does not have a base in pavement-pounding reporting.
–By Marvin Olasky, from “Telling the Truth”
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 3
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