Does journalism matter? Not as much as it once did \u2013 if audience numbers or circulation rates are any guide.<\/p>\n
The influence and authority of the nightly network news and the morning metropolitan daily is on the ebb. They like the sea of faith were once, too, at the full, round earth\u2019s shore and lay like the folds of the bright girdle furled. But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world \u2014 sorry, can\u2019t help myself when I get that Arnoldian<\/a> urge.<\/p>\n Perhaps journalism is going the way of poetry? \u00a0In 1992, Dana Gioia, (who would later become the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts), wrote an essay entitled \u201cCan Poetry Matter<\/a>?\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 Unlike fiction\u00ad, poetry no longer mattered, and had become the specialized calling of a small and isolated group, he argued. Five years later, the novelist Jonathan Franzen made the same complaint about fiction, deploring the neglect of novels<\/a> in favor of movies and the web. Journalism \u2014 as practiced by the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post<\/em>, the BBC and the American networks \u2014 suffers from the ills of poetry and fiction \u2014 domination by a priestly caste whose views are formed by a closed world shaped by secularist materialist political-left pieties and an increasingly outmoded publishing platform.<\/p>\n Host Todd Wilkin of the Issues, Etc<\/em>. show of Lutheran Public Radio and I discussed<\/a> these questions on 25 April 2013 in the context of my GetReligion<\/em> articles \u201cGosnell fog <\/a>blankets Britain\u201d and \u201cMaster<\/a> of my domain\u201d. We began the show with an overview of the British press coverage (none to speak of save in the op-ed columns of the Telegraph<\/em> and the Daily Mail<\/em>, which has written more about this story than any non-Philadelphia paper.) I did give Todd an update on the Guardian<\/em>, noting that on 19 April one of its loonier left Comment is Free contributors explained<\/a> to the comrades of Islington:<\/p>\n Now the [Gosnell] trial is underway, and anti-abortion activists are insisting<\/a> there\u2019s been a cover-up by ideologues intent on averting honest discussion about the case in order to suit a cynical political agenda.<\/p>\n They\u2019re right. But the ideologues doing the cover-up are on the \u201cpro-life\u201d side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yes, its those nasty pro-lifers who are responsible for the news blackout. Go figure.<\/p>\n Todd then moved to a discussion of Diane Winston\u2019s Religion Dispatches<\/a><\/em> article \u201cThe Myth of News Media as Secularist Conspiracy\u201d. I observed her arguments were rather thin \u2014 blaming the reader for being stupid is never a convincing argument before we turned to the assertion that this was not a religion story.<\/p>\n The Gosnell story is not a religion story, it\u2019s a crime story. People with religious convictions may read their passions into it, but Gosnell did not seem to be motivated one way or the other by a faith commitment. Yet cultural religionists imply that the absence of religious commitment in the nation\u2019s newsrooms\u2014and consequent acceptance of baby-killing, oops abortion, is among the reasons that the Gosnell story was overlooked.<\/p>\n The notion that the news media is a secularist cabal ignoring stories that challenge its shibboleths is wrongheaded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n No, there has not been some grand conspiracy to spike news stories about Kermit Gosnell. There\u2019s been no need to issue instructions to the troops to toe the line and support abortion no matter the cost to the media\u2019s credibility. But there is quite clearly a secularist cabal that ignores stories or issues that challenge its core beliefs.<\/p>\n Newsrooms are the most intellectually monochrome places in the United States \u2014 and I speak as one who studied at Duke and Yale, experiencing first hand the group think of the modern University. There was no need to form a conspiracy as just about all of the alleged conspirators were of one mind about this issue before the trial began.<\/p>\n While there are some ideologues and hacks amongst the press these days, many seek to be faithful to the truth as they see it and to do their job, to do the good. But what we see time and again in the mainstream media is the press\u2019s failure to understand that it\u2019s pursuit of what it thinks is the good can lead to bad through unintended consequences and unacknowledged motives.\u00a0 The loss of a moral center, of a moral imagination has led the liberal press to become illiberal: single-minded, self-censoring and angry.<\/p>\n The avoidance of coverage of the infanticide, murder and depravity chronicled by testimony presented to the court in the Gosnell case is self-evidently a case of moral and intellectual failure. The press\u2019s avoidance of this major story leads to the question of whether it matters<\/a> any more. And it is hard to say that it does.<\/p>\n In the closing stanza of Dover Beach<\/em>, Matthew Arnold wrote:<\/p>\n Ah, love, let us be true I cannot help but think that if Arnold were writing today, it would be the new church \u2014 the media elites \u2014 who would man his ignorant armies. Listen to the broadcast and tell me what you think.<\/p>\n
\nTo one another! for the world, which seems
\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,
\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,
\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
\nNor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
\nAnd we are here as on a darkling plain
\nSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
\nWhere ignorant armies clash by night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n