Forgetting What the Media is About

A reader writes about the recent hoohah with the camera whore pastor and his willing accomplices in the media:

Find a rightwing nutjob that is looking for a mouthpiece to spew his idiocy, and then GIVE it to him! Meanwhile, be sure to ignore the fact any damage done or lives lost due to his idiocy are only amplified by the insane amount of coverage given to him, because now you get a chance to write an article like THIS and insinuate that anyone who supports a constitutional right for the individual to bear arms or affirms the sanctity of marriage is a nutjob of the same caliber!

How incredibly helpful! What an in-depth national discussion our media is facilitating!

The function of the media is twofold:

First, sell beer and shampoo. So tales of lurid and weird religion and all forms of religious controversy lead, especially if there is a salacious chance of real bloodshed (coupled with some moralist chin-pulling from the sage and judicious media guy who shows it all in loving detail while saying, “Isn’t that *awful*?” Just as people invariably slow down for car crashes, so they love to watch and read about such things. It’s a sort of group catharsis.

Second, the media, while making money from selling salacious stories they themselves create and facilitate, also live out their own religious doctrines, which include the conviction that all Abrahamic religions are equally bad, especially the Catholic faith. Hence headlines denouncing the “priest” who was to burn the Quran. If you’ve seen on Fundamentalist, you’ve seen ’em all. Fr. George Rutler? Terry Jones? What’s the diff?

So yeah, naturally, every ideological opponent the average MSM journalist has gets lumped in with this yahoo.

What? You thought the function of the media was to enlighten and inform? No, that’s the job of the Catholic intellectual tradition, a project we really need to resume here in the West because without it, it’s slim pickin’s in the mind department as post-modernity takes hold.