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Chapter 7: DISCERNING PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM: REPORTERS ADOPT FUNDAMENTALIST DISCOURSE
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7 Discerning Professional Journalism: Reporters Adopt Fundamentalist Discourse P P P In 1996 Today show host Bryant Gumble interviewed former U.S. president Jimmy Carter about his new autobiography. Gumble asked Carter the following question: “You write that you prayed more during your four years in office than basically at any time in your life, and yet I think it’s fair to say, and I hope this doesn’t sound too harsh . . . you are consistently reviewed as one of the more ineffective Presidents of modern times. What do you think, if anything, that says about the power of prayer?”1 Gumble’s leading question implicitly addresses the heart of this chapter. Should religious faith, whether personal or collective, be addressed in public discourse? From the early years of the Republic, religion has been one of the largely private passions that influence many Americans’ public actions . Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, “The spirit of the journalist in America is to attach coarsely, without preparation and without art, the passions of those whom it addresses, to set aside principles in order to grab men; to follow them into their private lives, and to lay bare their weaknesses and their vices.” Nevertheless, adds Tocqueville, “Americans so completely confuse Christianity and freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to have them conceive of the one without the other.” He 263 observed that in the United States religion is not “confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people.”2 If Tocqueville’s observations about America still hold today, maybe journalists and other chroniclers are obligated as public fiduciaries to illuminate the significance of religion in contemporary society. Perhaps religious ideas and customs are not only the province of religious institutions but also a subject for the news media. Gumble’s question to Carter seems to assume that if the president’s religion is valid his prayers should have made him a more effective or even successful president. Gumble implicitly sees religious faith as a kind of instrumental technology whose value depends on its practical power to achieve particular human desires. If prayers do not “work,” he implies, why believe in God? Does Gumble’s view of prayer represent the agnosticism of the public, the skepticism of journalists, or merely his personal penchant? In addition, did Gumble have an obligation to admit to his viewers any of his own disdain for Carter or for prayer? Inside the journalistic profession, writes Allan R. Andrews, “[w]hen our critical words are turned against ourselves, we tend to speak with a forked tongue. . . . We are told, for example, that objectivity and fairness demands (sic) that reporters who cover religion should take care not to express personal religious views. I’ve read articles in professional journals debating, ‘Can religion reporters be religious?’”3 This chapter argues that professional journalism has contributed to the privatization and secularization of religion in the United States. This development has worked to the advantage of professional journalists, who increasingly have taken over some of the social functions and cultural authority formerly held by religious institutions. Like religion, modern news is an epistemology, a way of knowing about the world, and a means of locating ourselves in that world. As Robert E. Park writes, news “performs somewhat the same functions for the public that perception does for the individual man . . . it does not so much inform as orient the public. . . . It does this without any effort of the reporter to interpret the events he reports , except in so far as to make them comprehensible and interesting.”4 News substitutes in America partly for custom and tradition, including religious tradition. Louis Wirth says that such mass communication is a paradox because in “order to communicate with one another we must have common knowledge, but in a mass society it is through communication that we must obtain this common body of knowledge.”5 Either tradition, public opinion, the news, or some other form of cultural transmission must 264 Quentin J. Schultze [44.200.191.146] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:08 GMT) provide the common knowledge that Americans need to participate in a democratic society. News is increasingly the way Americans orient themselves to their shared life as a nation. The first section of this chapter argues that in early colonies news was largely the province of religious leaders who delivered it to their communities of faith. In Christian churches the Good News contextualized the “common occurrences...