From Day 1 here at GetReligion, just over 19 years ago, our primary goal has been to defend religion-beat reporting rooted in what has long been called the American Model of the Press.
You know, that’s the old-liberalism brand of journalism built on accuracy, fairness, balance and respect for the views of citizens involved in debates about issues in culture, morality, religion and even politics.
Some people include the word “objectivity” in creeds about this kind of journalism, which tends to fuel philosophical discussions about whether it’s possible for the minds of journalists to remain “blank slates,” or words to that effect. In my teaching days, I attempted to define objectivity in terms of fair-minded professional standards for newsroom work.
This brings me to an essay that I recently wrote for the Religion & Liberty journal published by the Acton Institute. The headline: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism.” I don’t want to cue waves of weeping violins, but writing this piece was painful and involved about a month of involuntary 3 a.m. brainstorms.
The bottom line: I didn’t want to write another essay about media-bias issues, because discussing “bias” implies the existence of shared, common professional standards for journalists. My goal was to describe the emerging digital-marketplace reality — news that preaches to niche choirs makes money. It produces faithful, paying subscribers, which is what matters now that news organizations cannot depend on mass-market advertising.
Are you reading the stunning four-part Columbia Journalism Review series by Jeff Gerth about elite newsrooms and Donald Trump? It’s crucial that “The press versus the president” was published by a journal at the heart of the old-liberal journalism establishment. Here is a crucial passage, right after Trump commits to his “fake news” approach to press relations:
In the days after Trump’s declaration, the Times surveyed its new digital subscribers, millions of whom flocked to the paper during his presidency, to better understand their motivations: the administration’s “vilification of the press,” one subscriber replied, in a typical response, according to “New Digital Subscribers Survey” data provided to me by a Times staffer.
Trump would often call the Times “failing,” including the day after the controversial story about Russia-Trump ties, but in fact the soaring digital-subscriber base throughout his presidency offset the steady fall in revenue from print subscribers and advertising.
What does this have to do with my Acton essay, which focuses on a timeline of events that begins long, long before Orange Man Bad?
There is no way for me to aggregate the contents of my long essay, so I will simple offer the following passage, which is lengthy enough as it is.
Why is biased news the new reality? Basically, because this is what most readers seem to want, whether they want to admit it or not.
The ground under American journalism is moving and that affects all of American life, especially First Amendment issues tied to free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty.
This earthquake is linked to the wave of technological innovations that have forced all kinds of companies, including news organizations, to change their products in an attempt to survive in the digital age. The key is a process familiar to anyone who has surfed the internet. The goal is to convince users to click “like,” “forward,” “tweet,” “post,” or, ultimately, to pay money to receive more content of this kind.
This preaching-to-the-choir business model works with cute kittens and heroic dogs. It works with emotional videos of soldiers returning home and surprising their loved ones, as well as those of rainbow-haired teachers preaching to elementary school students about gender.
This sequence works — on different audiences — with “news” about the verbal and physical stumbles of President Joe Biden or election-denying sermons by former President Trump. It works with reports about environmental apocalypse or the potential for nuclear war in Ukraine. It works when federal agents arrest grandparents protesting at abortion clinics, as well as when there are few, if any, arrests in cases involving activists vandalizing pro-life churches or fire-bombing crisis-pregnancy centers. It works when some churches close, while others stay open, during a global pandemic. It works when some parents choose to take radical actions in response to rapid gender dysphoria symptoms in their children, while others risk clashes with state authorities while opposing treatments of this kind.
These changes provide some of the digital DNA in conflicts that are tearing America apart. Politicians, parents, pastors, and plenty of other people are struggling to understand what is happening in their lives while turning to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Parler, BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Rumble, Telegram, and Truth Social. And there are darker corners of this world, such as 4chan and the “Dark Web.” And never forget this crucial journalism reality: Opinion writing is cheap, while hard-news content is expensive.
There is plenty of money to be made, but one reality looms over those trying to stay in business — researchers believe that two-thirds of ad dollars in the American marketplace head straight to Big Tech powerhouses such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Try operating an ordinary local or national newsroom when competing with that.
Consumers insist they are not happy about the results, but researchers note that they continue to build their own personal information bunkers using niche-news providers.
How does this affect news coverage of religion and other subjects in the public square? Here is other other bite of that section of the essay:
The well-known First Amendment lawyer and evangelical pundit David French described the crisis in his book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. The bottom line: Americans are divided by their choices in news and popular culture, choosing to live in protective silos of digital content. America remains the developing world’s most religious nation, yet its secularized elites occupy one set of zip codes, while most religious believers live in another. These armies share no common standards about “facts,” “accuracy,” or “fairness.”
“It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States cannot be guaranteed,” wrote French. At this moment, “there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart.”
There is so much more that I could say, but I will stop right there — just before the start of the three-act New York Times drama that provides the backbone of the article.
Please read it all and, if you leave comments, please focus on the journalism issues in the piece.
FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration with the podcast “RIP Journalism” at the UNCPHEW.com website.