Our society needs clarity. The News isn’t helping.

Mike Woodruff | Est. 9 minutes

Starting Assumptions

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent
guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power.

Malcom X

_____

This book builds on three assumptions: 1) We are living in an unsettled moment; 2) We need situational clarity; and 3) The news media is failing us.

Assumption 1: This Is an Unsettled Moment

As I write this, the U.S. is involved in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Xi Jinping is making noise about Taiwan, Iran is up to who knows what and the conflicts in Israel keep escalating. Closer to home, we are deeply divided, our government borrows one trillion dollars every 90 days,[i] and we’re racing towards a contentious election.

I could go on, but I don’t need to. You know that higher education has lost its way, depression and loneliness have become epidemics, and that fixing the Middle East may prove easier than getting your family to sit together at Thanksgiving.

None of this means it’s time to channel Chicken Little. If history makes anything clear, it’s that the apocalypse is overprescribed. Besides, by any objective assessment, many things are going well. Life expectancy and literacy rates are up. Infant mortality rates and extreme poverty are down. The water we drink is cleaner, the air we breathe is purer, the cost of energy is lower and our agricultural output is higher than at any point in our lifetime. It’s no longer fair to say we live like the kings and queens of the past because we live much better than they ever did.

However, this is a fragile moment and many of us are feeling overwhelmed. I don’t know about you, but as fascinating as I find nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and bio-medical advances, they leave me feeling unsettled. I understand little of what they’re doing today and less about what they’ll be doing tomorrow. Taken together I’m left feeling that we’re outrunning our technological, emotional and ethical headlights.

And then there is the national divide. No one needs to persuade me that the social fabric of America is whisper thin. The political polarization is palpable. Both sides have a cohort with sharp teeth, strong jaws and unlimited time for contentious conversations.

I could go on, but I don’t have to. You know our infrastructure is decaying, our population is aging, the Russians can shoot down our satellites, and trust in journalism is so low that we no longer trust the reports telling us to not to trust the reports.[1]

There are good reasons for our collective disquiet. Which leads to my second assumption.

Assumption 2: We Need Situational Clarity

To navigate the challenges of the moment, we need a clear, dispassionate overview of what is happening. This is what the news is supposed to give us, but it’s failing.

Battle veterans use the phrase “fog of war” to describe the chaos that hits once bombs start going off. I prefer to avoid war analogies, but it’s foggy out there.

What I want – what our society needs – is not a barrage of disjointed and ever-changing updates, but an infusion of truth, wisdom, hope and humility. By “truth,” I mean an accurate understanding of reality. By “wisdom,” I mean the discipline to act on the truth. By “hope,” I mean the settled conviction that God has things under control. And by “humility,” I mean an awareness that our understanding of things may be wrong.

If you’re a Christ-follower, you know something about the value of truth, wisdom, hope and humility. You also know that although they do not depend on accurate updates from the cable affiliate, bad reporting can upend them.

Which leads to my third assumption.

Assumption 3: Today’s News Is Failing Us

I’m not suggesting that every media outlet is at fault. There are good journalists doing good work, for which we should be grateful.

Nor am I suggesting that our problems are new. Reporters have always missed stories, reported on the wrong stories, or reported on the right stories in the wrong way.[2] 

But I do believe the news is having a particularly bad moment. And I further believe that its missteps are making our fragile moment worse.

Four Examples of the Problem

In Chapter Two I’ll explain how the news media got knocked sideways, but before we go there, I want to be sure you understand the kind of reporting that has me worried.

James Bennet’s Ouster: I was stunned when James Bennet was let go by The New York Times for publishing an editorial by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton shortly after the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.

As you may remember, Floyd died while being arrested by police officer Derek Chauvin, who was later convicted of second degree manslaughter over the event. A video of the incident circulated on social media leading to nation-wide protests. The Times published three editorials. In the first, the paper’s editorial board called for a national response to systemic racism. In the second, they sympathetically discussed defunding the police, and in the third, they published Senator Tom Cotton’s call to use the military to quell the unrest.

Immediately following the publication of Cotton’s piece, the Times’ union demanded that James Bennet be fired. He was the editor held responsible for publishing Cotton’s op-ed, and the union argued that the piece should never have been greenlighted because Cotton’s views made their members feel unsafe. It did not matter to them that Cotton was a U.S. Senator, nor that he was only suggesting that Trump do what George H.W. Bush had done during the LA riots. 

I disagreed with the union’s concerns but acknowledged their right to raise them.

What I was not prepared to accept was their subsequent claim that reporting the news was not the Times’ role in society. The union’s view was that the general public could not be trusted with both sides of an objective argument; therefore, it was the media’s job to tell the public what to believe.

This was the first time I’d heard a full-throated defense of Advocacy Journalism – the theory of reporting that argues that the role of the press is not to report the facts but to push people toward the “correct view.”[3]

One hundred years ago, American newspapers embraced an objective reporting standard, with opinion pieces restricted to the Op/Ed page. Of course, the biases of a journalist leaked out in their reporting, but reporting the facts was their goal. A reporter’s identity consisted of following the truth no matter where it led or who it angered.

Something quite different has been happening lately. Objectivity is under furious debate. The question now pivots around whether journalists should tell the audience, “what is or what ought to be.” Many side with CBS’s Wesley Lowery, who argued that conveying the facts does not lead to “moral clarity.”

I was aware that the biases of Times’ journalists were increasingly seeping into their reporting, but I was unaware that biased reporting was the agenda.

When A.G. Sulzberger – the paper’s publisher – bowed to the union’s demands and accepted Bennet’s resignation, I ended my subscription to the New York Times.[4]

Alex Jones’s Defense: Late in 2022, Alex Jones – the founder of the far-right, anti-government media platform, Infowars – was sued by the parents of the 20 children killed during the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. Jones drew their ire for repeatedly claiming that the massacre was a false flag operation in which some of the parents were paid actors.  

I’d not heard of Jones or Infowars before the suit, but a few minutes online was enough to identify him as a fear-mongering conspiracy theorist. I was not surprised by his efforts to hide behind the First Amendment, nor to cast himself as a victim. What I was not prepared for was his attorney’s claim that Infowars was to real news what the WWE is to wrestling. To his way of thinking, Jones was merely a performance artist that no reasonable person was expected to believe.

I was unsettled to learn there was a genre of news-adjacent entertainment, especially because there are enough people who think WWE is real![5]

NPR’s Response to the Mueller Report: My third example involves NPR’s coverage of the Russia Collusion investigation, especially their actions following the release of the Mueller Report.

As you may remember, in May of 2017, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller to investigate the claim that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians to defeat Hilary Clinton. Members of the Trump team, which had met with Russia officials, denied the charges of collusion and claimed it was the Democrats who were conspiring with the Russians.

Two years of political theater followed, during which “the right” spoke about a bogus Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant and Russian double agents, and “the left” – most notably NPR – claimed that Trump had colluded with the Russians and endlessly cited House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff’s claims that he had seen evidence of just that.

It would take a book to follow the intricacies of what unfolded. For our purposes, two things are important. First, after a two-year investigation, Mueller announced that he had not found sufficient evidence to charge any American for conspiring with Russia. And two, after Muller’s announcement, NPR went radio silent.

I expect news agencies to make mistakes. We all do. But I also expect them to admit when they are wrong, and to be curious enough about how they made the mistake to engage in the appropriate reflection. NPR’s response suggested they were so captured by an illiberal ideology that they were unable to entertain the possibility that they had made a mistake.[6] 

The Fox News Emails: In March of 2023, just before the Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation trial against Fox News was to begin, attorneys for Dominion released internal Fox communications showing that the station’s prominent news personalities did not believe the stolen-election narrative they were advancing on air. The emails also implied that they were promoting those false narratives so their audience wouldn’t flip to other stations.

Knowing that emails can be taken out of context, I looked forward to Fox’s explanation. Unfortunately, it never came. Shortly after the emails were leaked, Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787M to settle the case. They also fired Tucker Carlson.

As I noted earlier, there have been many other moments when my faith in the news media has been shaken:

·      The revelations from the Twitter Files about how certain stories – mostly conservative ones – being suppressed.

·      The Aspen Institute’s call for a Committee on Information Disorder,[7]

·      My discovery that some publications were buying stories in order to bury them;[8]

·      Bari Weiss’s description of the work culture at The New York Times;[9]

·      The Covington Catholic debacle,[10]

·      The CNN chyron announcing “mostly peaceful” in front of a burning city,[11]

·      And both “the left’s” and “the right’s” failure to cover stories that run counter to their preferred narrative.[12]

I could go on, but I don’t need to. You’ve had your own wake-up moments.

I will say more in Chapter Four about the problems that arise, not from news agencies’ failure to objectively report the news, but from the ways consumers make a mess of things. As you will see, we not only have a supply problem. We have a demand one as well.

But for now, let me note that you probably liked two of my examples more than the others – i.e., if you agreed with my frustrations with the New York Times and NPR, you think I am making too much of Infowars and Fox’s missteps.[13] Or vice versa.

Of course, I have only been describing one side of the problem. In addition to the news agencies’ failures to objectively report the news, there are a host of ways news consumers make a mess of things. Supply and demand are linked together.

How did we get here? What is going on? How do we get out of this mess? In the next chapter, I’m going to share the initial reasons the news has stumbled. I’m also going to explain how we’re making a bad situation worse. I suspect you’ll be surprised.

Footnotes:

[1] Polls now rank the ethics and honesty of journalists quite low. (Jeffrey McCall, “Journalism profession has ‘lost its way,’” The Hill, Jan. 1, 2024). A Mar. 24, 2024 Rasmussen poll, notes that 60 percent of likely U.S. voters view the media as “the enemy of the people.” In Uri Berliner’s exposé, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust” (The Free Press, Mar. 9, 2024), he noted NPR celebrating being viewed as more trustworthy than CNN or The New York Times, even though only 3 in 10 viewed NPR as being trustworthy.”

[2] In her book, True or False: A CIA Analysts Guide to Spotting Fake News, Cindy Ottis lists many examples of bad reports. Some happen because reporters were lied to. (See the report in Matthew 28 in which the priests pay people to lie about what happened to Christ’s body.) And some have happened because the reporter was at fault in some way. In my work on this book, I heard from more than a few who longed for a return to the era of Walter Cronkite. Alas, the news was not perfect then, either.

[3] During most of the 20th century, reporters were committed to the objective reporting of facts. At some point, the goal became fairness. After the election of Donald Trump, some argued that objective reporting – also sometimes referred to as “both-sidesism” – was no longer possible (e.g., in an Aug. 7, 2016 piece – “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism.” – Times media critic Jim Rutenberg argued that objectivity was no longer responsible.

[4] Sulzberger initially stood behind Bennet and later wrote a lengthy Columbia Journalism Review article articulating his commitment to objective reporting. But after three days of union pressure, he demanded Bennet’s resignation. Bennet later took Sulzburger to task in “When the New York Times Lost Its Way,” a lengthy Dec. 2023 piece in The Economist. In it he argued that the Times no longer pursued the news “without fear or favor” because it has become a progressive monoculture. It’s worth noting that advocacy journalism is not new. In the early 1900s, newspapers (e.g., The Arkansas Democrat and Springfield’s The Republican) acted as house organs for political parties. But no one reading them expected them to be objective.

[5] The book of Proverbs singles out three types of people: the fools, the wise and the evil. The difference between the first and the third is not just that there are lots of the first and relatively few of the third, it’s that the first make bad decisions without understanding what they are doing. I’d place Jones in the third camp. All that to say, I would feel one way about Jones if I thought he believed what he was saying. I feel little more than contempt for people who knowingly mislead others in a bald play for money.

[6] In, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” Free Press, April 10, 2024, Uri Berliner’s description of the culture at NPR suggests that it was more reflexively illiberal and partisan than I suspected. In “Here’s Why Uri Berliner Couldn’t Stay at NPR,” Washington Post, Apr. 18, 2024, Erik Wemple defended NPR’s response. I found Berliner’s account believable and Wemple guilty of the same bias as NPR.  

[7] In a move ripped from the pages of 1984 and Soviet era censorship, the Biden Administration briefly endorsed The Aspen Institute’s advocacy of a Committee on Information Disorder.

[8] I’m referring to David Pecker’s April 2024 admission that The National Enquirer engaged in catch and kill – i.e., buying stories to keep them out of the news. Sara Dorn, “Who Is David Pecker?” Forbes, Apr. 25, 2024.

[9] One month after Bennet was forced out, Bari Weiss’s resignation letter – in which she claimed that the Times was an ideological, anti-free speech, and at times anti-Semitic institution – went viral.

[10] The Covington Catholic video is not just an example of reporters allowing their bias to mislead them, but also an example of good journalists admitting when they were wrong (e.g., Colin J. Mason, “I was Wrong About the CovSchool Boy Story, And You Probably Are Too;” https://medium.com/@colinjmason/i-was-wrong-about-the-covington-catholic-school-boy-story-and-you-probably-are-too-32673e76c534.)

[11] Following a June 8, 2024 rescue of four Israeli hostages in Gaza – during which over 250 Palestinians were killed – the CNN chyron read that Hamas had released four hostages.

[12] The publisher of Dinesh D'Souza's film, 2000 Mules, which argues that the 2020 election was stolen, recently pulled the film and refused to defend it. After scanning the story on CNN, I turned to see what Fox said, but it was not there. Similarly, CNN, has done little to note that the scientific community now considers the Wuhan Lab origin for Covid to be plausible if not probable.

[13] Those who read early drafts of this book did not like my examples. Conservatives feel that my examples of sites on the left were legacy sites while those on the right were mostly fringe players – i.e. “the wackos on the right are in their basement, the wackos on the left are in Congress.” Those on the left either thought the sins on the right were far worse, or that Donald Trump forced their hand. I should also note that many on the right were unaware of the conservative media’s screw-ups, while those on the left were unaware of the errors from the progressive media. 

Mike Woodruff is the lead pastor at Christ Church, a multi-site ministry with campuses in the northern suburbs of Chicago. In addition to chairing the boards of Renew Communities and Lakelight Institute, Mike is the past President of ScholarLeaders International, a visiting scholar with the Murdock Charitable Trust and the author of over 200 articles and eight books. You can sign up for The Friday Update, his free weekly reflection on life, culture and faith, at thefridayupdate.org.