AMEN AMEN AMEN.  This has long been a pet peeve of mine about the church’s “caution” in letting their people know where they’re coming from.  I am NOT a believer  in avoiding topics of great import because we want  to “avoid taking sides”,  and so we engage in moral equivalencies,  or avoid it  all together.  The idea that journalists simply PRESENT BOTH SIDES is just not real.  The act of articulating “A SIDE” is as much an exercise of “where we’re coming from” as simply articulating it.  It’s just that we’ve been taught (and therefore are accustomed to doing so)  to take this “presentation of the options—usually 2— as the parameters  for the issue.  This is SO WRONG on SO MANY LEVELS.  We in the church ought to know this better than anyone,  with all the coverage of “Religion in America” and comparing/contrasting Jim Wallis with Ralph Reed,  etc.  (As we saw in the recent PBS “God In America”

Oh, I understand the argument: NPR reporters are supposed to be objective and express no political opinion and do nothing political. I went to J-school, too. And we could argue the point as if in a freshman seminar. I say this is merely a lie of omission, telling reporters to *conceal* their viewpoints and making listeners guess where they’re coming from (the audience knows that can’t be nowhere).

BuzzMachine

For instance,  we no longer are afraid to present the slavery issue as a wrong.  But how about the churches in that day?  What were their  approaches?  I can see pastors expressing how they wanted  to “see  both sides”.  There are many many approaches to “covering an issue or event or news story”  that don’t present such a no-brainer since.  But there are plenty of things left where we must say “this is just  wrong”.  It comes across anyway.  Fox News is such an example of how glaringly obvious this can get without actually saying so.  The presentation of  views they have selected for debunking and shout-down are  ridiculed,  or they use reps of the “opposing view” that  fit ,  for them,  their  stereotype, or offer  them an opening for their inane memes they constantly broadcast. 

I realize I have taken a segway with Jarvis’ argument and identified something in what he has raised here and taken it off the subject of “journalism” and into “preaching” or “being prophetic”…..but there is actually a sense in which the role of journalist and the role of preacher/prophet are similar roles:  the preacher/prophet is expected to interpret what is happening “out there” and “among us” (“us” in this case being the nation,  but calling us to consider who we are as church regarding being citizens of a nation,  and how to discern how we give precedence to our role as church over our role as citizens;  we DO think  this way, right? )