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A Good Report
Les Sillars on Journalism as an Exercise of the Moral Imagination
The newsroom where I got my start in the 1990s, at a conservative newsweekly called The Alberta Report, loved to skewer the pretensions of establishment media. Establishment journalists saw themselves as professionals graciously bestowing their wisdom upon the unwashed masses; we saw journalism as a trade. "It's kind of like plumbing," our publisher, Link Byfield, would chuckle, "only less complicated."
That's plausible. The reporter's job is to get accurate information from A to B with no leakage. You talk to somebody, you write down what he says, and you put it in your news story. How hard can it be, really?
Journalists themselves, being humble creatures (cough), concede that the moderately gifted can work in the field. "That awful power, the public opinion of a nation," wrote occasional journalist Mark Twain, "is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse."
But perhaps we're oversimplifying the inherently interpretive process by which people, information, and events become "news." Maybe journalism is something more than a profession. Perhaps journalism is, in a Burkean sense, an exercise of the moral imagination.
Well, talk about pretentious. To mention journalism in the same breath as the liberal arts, to suggest that news stories cranked out on deadline should and do address morality, faith, human dignity—indeed, the essence of what it means to be human—who do I think I'm kidding?
Then again, how's that "professional" approach to journalism working these days? Conservatives and Christians have long complained about the news media's failure to meet supposed professional standards. Lately the major media have doubled down on their liberal bias, putting out sloppy, clueless, and at times deranged coverage of religious liberty, gender issues, and President Trump. Their professional orientation, which is focused on credentials and legitimacy, encourages groupthink and arrogance. All this has left the public with the same regard for reporters as it has for lawyers and roadkill.
As for conservative and Christian news media, they mostly just reframe, analyze, or add a few details to the stories dug up by a relatively small group of national outlets. Few have the resources or the will to do much original reporting, and audiences don't see why it matters.
It does matter. The professional approach introduced useful concepts, but journalism is more than standards and practices. It requires the talents of a storyteller, a historian, a philosopher, and a theologian; it requires a love of language and a commitment to truth; it is, in short, an exercise of the moral imagination.
Professionalization & Pushback
The professionalization of the industry began in the early 1900s, partly in reaction to the sensational yellow journalism of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. At the time, law, medicine, and other fields were forming their own associations and training schools, and journalists longed to attain the same kind of respectability.
Les Sillars teaches journalism at Patrick Henry College and is on staff at WORLD magazine; his first book, Intended for Evil: A Survivor's Story of Love, Faith, and Courage in the Cambodian Killing Fields, was released by Baker in 2016.
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