Bret Stephens

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Podcast: It's just good business? The growing debate about America's news-silo culture

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Podcast: It's just good business? The growing debate about America's news-silo culture

Yes, this is another post about my new essay at the Religion & Liberty journal published by the Acton Institute. The headline: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism.”

Part of me wants to apologize for yet another GetReligion look at this topic. But I’m not going to do that, for at least three reasons.

(1) For me, it’s most important thing I’ve written about journalism since my 1983 essay for The Quill — “The religion beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets,” which helped spark a national debate about religion-news coverage, including a Los Angeles Times series by the late, great media-beat specialist David Shaw.

(2) It demonstrates (think “technology shapes content”) that Internet culture and commerce have either killed the American Model of the Press or are poised to do so. That’s hard for me to say, since I have spent my career defending old-school American journalism from enemies on the right and, now, the illiberal left.

(3) The Acton piece (there’s no way we could have planned this) came out just as several other important articles raised similar issues about journalism’s future and the role of niche/advocacy journalism in splintering American public discourse.

Such as? Click here for a recent GetReligion podcast-post that includes discussion of “Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust,” by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr. Also, see this new Bret Stephens op-ed in the New York Times: “How to Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility.”

As a result, GetReligion readers will not be surprised that this week’s “Crossroads” podcast focused on these themes (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

The key: My essay is not another hot-take on media bias and religion-news coverage.


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What hath Trump wrought? New York Times helps fuel new journalism fires in 2020s

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The New York Times obituary for Seymour Topping, who died Nov. 8 at age 98, accurately summarized the 1969-1986 reign at the newspaper by this No. 2 man with legendary editor A.M. Rosenthal. We're told the team "above all prized high standards of reporting and editing, which demanded fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, political agendas, innuendo and unattributed pejorative quotations."

That was not just a farewell to "Top" but to a fading ideal in American journalism that's steadily supplanted by opinionated and entertaining coverage that wins eyeballs, ears, clicks, digital subscribers -- and profits. Public trust in the news media is eroded to an alarming degree while social media inflame everything, reporters' tweets expose their biases and Donald Trump's attacks accompany media hostility.

This growing trust deficit shapes all aspects of our business, the religion beat included.

A lengthy Times piece Nov. 13 about why 2020 polls were so misleading said Republicans were wary about participating because Trump "frequently told his supporters not to trust the media."

That’s an easy answer. But is suspicion entirely the president's doing? Wholly apart from Trump smears ("the enemy of the American People!"), did mainstream media treatment of the Trump movement, Republicans and political, cultural and religious conservatives sew distrust? What's ahead if Trump succeeds in controlling the GOP and his 73 million voters through 2024?

Vest-pocket history: Starting in 1988 with Rush Limbaugh's outspoken show, conservative talk radio pretty much saved the AM industry. Fox News Channel and MSNBC arrived in 1996, with Fox partially imitating Limbaugh while MSNBC veered ever more leftward, eventually followed by pioneer CNN (founded in 1980). The Times, financially pressed dailies and broadcast networks were tempted toward a more cautious slant.

But with the Trump Era, traditional restraints all but vanished. This advocacy journalism approach — known as “Kellerism,” here at GetReligion — became the norm on coverage of moral and cultural topics in American life.

That brings us to last January's Pew Research Center report "U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided." Media personnel should delve into these data on how 12,043 respondents view 30 varied news outlets.

The Times, so influential among the cultural elite, educators, policy-makers and journalists, exemplifies the concrete news "silos" into which Americans now sequester themselves.


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Weekend think piece: The New York Times offers R.R. Reno's take on America's new cold war

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If you have been paying attention to gossip about the news industry lately, you may have heard that many New York Times readers were not amused when the leaders of the great Gray Lady's editorial pages decided to add another conservative voice to the mix

Ever since the first column by one Bret Stephens -- a piece criticizing how the cultural left pushes climate change (but he does not reject the reality of climate change) -- large numbers of Times nation citizens have been voicing their wrath about this invasion of a beloved safe space, primarily by canceling their subscriptions.

I have not heard of a similar reaction to the recent Times opinion essay by the Catholic scribe R.R. Reno, who is editor of the conservative interfaith journal First Things. The title: "Republicans Are Now the ‘America First’ Party."

Now, let me stress that this Reno think piece does not contain large chunks of theology or commentary about religion. Instead, it's about how one Donald Trump has moved the ground under the feet of Republicans who had, for a long time, assumed that the GOP orthodoxy of Ronald Reagan would last 1,000 years or so.

The central theme: The new GOP enemy is globalism, not big government.

As I read this Reno piece, I kept waiting for religious material, for cultural and moral material, to show up. After all, I read newspapers through the lens of the great historian Martin Marty, as described in an "On Religion" column I wrote a year after 9/11 (at an event that started the dominoes falling that led to the birth of GetReligion). Here is the top of that 2002 column (this is long, but essential):

It is Martin Marty's custom to rise at 4:44 a.m. for coffee and prayer, while awaiting the familiar thump of four newspapers on his porch. ... America's most famous church historian prepared for a lecture in Nebraska by ripping up enough newsprint to bury his table in headlines and copy slashed with a yellow pen.
A former WorldCom CEO kept teaching his Sunday school class. A researcher sought the lost tribe of Israel. Believers clashed in Sudan. Mormon and evangelical statistics were up – again. A Zambian bishop said he got married to shock the Vatican. U.S. bishops kept wrestling with clergy sexual abuse. Pakistani police continued to study the death of journalist Daniel Pearl.
Marty tore out more pages, connecting the dots. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey feared an Anglican schism. Public-school students prayed at flagpoles. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explored the border between church and state. And there were dozens of stories linked to Sept. 11, 2001.


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