Long ago, when GetReligion was born, another website set out to offer its own view of religion and the news.
From the start, GetReligion wanted to defend the old-school approach to journalism that historians call the American Model of the Press.
The other site — The Revealer — basically approached religion as a great global mystery that journalists feared handling. Since it was all a mystery, it should be covered that way — with a magazine feature approach that offered all kinds of room for analysis, opinion and strange details. It’s kind of an online magazine about religion that you can tell is rooted in college and academic culture.
At the time of that site’s birth, New York University journalist professor Jay Rosen wrote a piece entitled “Journalism Is Itself a Religion.” The epic subtitle said, in part: “The newsroom is a nest of believers if we include believers in journalism itself. There is a religion of the press. There is also a priesthood.”
Rosen described some of the doctrines of this de facto newsroom religion, as he saw it from his desk in New York. I bring this up as a way of introducing a think piece — another Damon Linker essay at The Week about the civil war inside the newsroom at The New York Times: “The woke revolution in American journalism has begun.” This war is, you see, a clash between competing doctrinal approaches to journalism.
But before we go there, let’s go back to a key chunk of the Rosen piece — which focuses one of the key problems that shape the religion of journalism. You will immediately see the link to GetReligion. This is long, but essential:
Ninety percent of the commentary on this subject takes in another kind of question entirely: What results from the “relative godlessness of mainstream journalists?” Or, in a more practical vein: How are editors and reporters striving to improve or beef up their religion coverage?
Here and there in the discussion of religion “in” the news, there arises a trickier matter, which is the religion of the newsroom, and of the priesthood in the press. A particularly telling example began with this passage from a 1999 New York Times Magazine article about anti-abortion extremism: “It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy,” wrote David Samuels.
This struck some people as dogma very close to religious dogma, and they spoke up about it. One was Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist of religion: “This remarkable credo was more than a statement of one journalist’s convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the “world that most of us inhabit” cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages.”
Yet here is the part that intrigued me: “But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward “fundamentalists.” Thus, when listing the “deadly sins” that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world’s most influential newspaper condemns “the sin of religious certainty.”
In other words, it’s against newsroom religion to be an absolutist and in this sense, the Isaiah Berlin sense, the press is a liberal institution put in the uncomfortable position of being “closed” to other traditions and their truth claims — specifically, the orthodox faiths. At least according to Mattingly and his source: “Yet here’s the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths,” said Proctor. Its leaders are “absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right.”
In other words, for many journalists their work is linked to a kind of religion in which the only orthodoxy allowed is the belief that there can be no orthodoxies. There is no absolute truth except the absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. ‘Tis a problem.
So how do enlightened modern scribes do mainstream news coverage about backwards people who believe religion has something to do with history, doctrine and even facts about both?
This brings us to Linker and the current New York Times wars. There is a new doctrine that is clashing with the old religion of objectivity, fairness and balance.
The rebels want to move the lines and impose new standards. Ben Smith's recent and very informative essay in the Times about the revolts erupting in America's newsrooms helps us to understand the character of the proposed changes. The journalists Smith quotes and paraphrases believe that "fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls." That news organizations need to be devoted to "the truth" rather than some spurious ideal of "objectivity." That in all things "moral clarity" is required. And that a journalist determines whether he or she has achieved such righteousness by measuring the volume of applause from likeminded followers on Twitter.
Also, note this:
In place of difficulty, complexity, and complication, today's journalistic revolutionaries crave tidy moral lessons with clear villains and heroes. They champion simplicity, embrace moral uplift, and seek out evildoers to demonize.
That's how it is with crusades, whether theological or moral — they excuse words and deeds that in other contexts would be considered unacceptable.
The key: This new truth cancels out the need to do accurate, fair-minded, balanced coverage of other truths — truth claims that now will be hailed as heresies. Who needs old-school journalism when your journalism religion states that you already possess the only truth?
The old liberalism is dead (see earlier Linker essay: “When journalists stop believing in debate”).
Long live the new — what?
What is this new newsroom religion called, since the old liberalism of the American Model of the Press has been slain?
Read it all. And hang on.
Damon Linker
On Wednesday, when The New York Times published an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas in favor of using the military to "restore order" in the face of widespread urban rioting, the reaction of many journalists, including journalists working at the Times itself, was not to take issue with the argument. It was instead to take aim at the Times for publishing it.
This happens quite regularly now, usually in response to columns penned by the paper's stable of conservative and centrist columnists. But the reaction to Cotton has been especially severe because of the astonishing events of the past week, with protests taking place in well over a hundred cities and towns, riots breaking out in numerous places, and the president taking precipitous actions in response to disorder in the nation's capital. Given this context, many apparently believe that Cotton's law-and-order column needs to be classified as dangerous — something pushing an idea beyond the pale that the Times should never have disseminated to the world — even though he clearly advocated the use of force only against rioters and looters and not against those engaging in peaceful protest.
This reaction tells us a lot — about how journalists view the Times and other mainstream media outlets, about how these journalists see their own role in the culture, and most of all, about how they think about ideas and their relation to politics.
It is now quite common among journalists to think of opinions not as arguments to be advanced, engaged with, and potentially refuted, but as a kind of viral propaganda with the power to convert readers to new holistic outlooks, much like the spread of a religious fervor during a revival.
We see this most vividly in the periodic groundswells of outrage directed at both news and op-ed pages of the paper for publishing stories and columns that give voice to people and ideas deemed unacceptable. Sometimes the response includes substantive criticism of the views themselves, but more often it is directed at the paper's editors for running them at all. This assumes a vision of journalism in which the role of media outlets — whether print or digital — is to put forth a set of officially approved views and to silence (or refuse to give voice to) those who dissent from these views.
This journalistic outlook is rooted in some partial truths. Newspapers, magazines, and websites aren't neutral billboards (like social media) where everyone gets a chance to post their opinions unfiltered, with only the most minimum of oversight. Editors exercise judgment all the time about what gets published and what doesn't, what receives the legitimation of having been vetted and accepted for publication under the outlet's prestigious brand. There are gatekeepers, and getting past them is hard. Those who would have denied publication to Cotton's op-ed are saying that these standards should have been much stricter in this and similar cases involving incendiary opinions.
But why?
Because these critics presume that this power to disseminate and bestow legitimation upon opinions is enormous, amounting to far more than merely declaring the opinion worth taking seriously. They go much further to presume that publishing the opinion, releasing it into the world with the media outlet's imprimatur attached, contributes decisively to its acceptance and affirmation by the nation's citizenry. On this view, published ideas are a kind of ideological contagion. If the ideas are good, they can serve as a kind of vaccination against evil. But if they are bad, they function as an intellectual and moral pathogen that are better off being eradicated.
This view of the press and the public is very different than the classically liberal notion of an active citizenry engaging productively with competing ideas in the public square, weighing evidence, and judging opinions responsibly and critically for themselves. Instead of this marketplace of ideas, we have a vision of public life marked by uniformity or only very narrowly divided over a set of pragmatic solutions to universally agreed upon problems. It's a vision of public life in which, ideally, just about everyone agrees — and those who dare to dissent from this journalistically enforced consensus are treated as anathema.
But of course this is also a vision of public life without politics — which can be defined in part as the effort of a community divided by differing visions of the public good to find common ground through compromise and accommodation. Cotton and his critics disagree very strenuously about what the public good amounts to and what achieving it requires. Yet Cotton and those who agree with him are our fellow citizens. Denying their views a voice, ruling them out of bounds, doesn't actually succeed in making them disappear — just as publishing them doesn't imply they are correct. It implies only that they are worthy of discussion, debate, and, quite possibly, strenuous refutation.
But endorsing this classically liberal process of political disputation in public requires that one holds certain liberal convictions — in the capacity of reason to determine right from wrong and of one's own side to prevail through the give and take of argument. It also requires a certain degree of modesty about the likelihood of any comprehensive moral and political view triumphing so decisively that competing views vanish or shrink to the furthest margins of a free society.
What we increasingly see among journalists today is the collapse of these core liberal convictions. The consequences for our civic life are not likely to be salutary.