The Moral Side of the News
by David Sapp
Like nearly everyone, I am a news consumer. I watch all the major cable news networks. I read several online news sources. I occasionally listen to radio news when I am in the car. I still read newspapers, although less often than I used to. I consume media as a person whose values are shaped by my belief in the goodness and the righteousness of God. This is the only expertise I have with which to write this article.
Nevertheless, here I sit at my laptop, pecking away. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the news media. I appreciate the information they provide and the variety of perspectives they present. Nevertheless, I am sitting here pecking because I am bothered by some things I see happening in today’s media, and I am bothered by the fact that they seem to been more present than ever in this presidential election year. Let me highlight just two of things that bother me.
The news media have become excessively divisive. I find the tone divisive far too often, as well as the choice of which news items get the attention. As for tone, shouting matches too often stand in for helpful debate, and condescension toward and between persons of differing viewpoints is rampant. As for content, there is a strong bent to using those stories involving conflict (the more intense, the better), political horse races, relatively unimportant gaffes by the candidates and polls. Meanwhile, political crises in other countries, international agreements, and important acts of Congress that lack “sizzle” get only secondary coverage. This approach, designed to win the ratings race, has the deadly side effect of deepening the divisions already present in our society, and sometimes creating new ones. Too much attention is given to irresponsible positions. When people advocate ideas that are based on erroneous facts which can endanger our society (climate change is just one example), the media have a responsibility not to give undue and unintended credibility to those ideas.
The news media have an obligation to the serve the common good just like every other institution in our society. Objectivity between reasonable positions is highly desirable, but objectivity between irresponsible voices and sanity is unethical. There must be some responsibility to the common good of our society.
Both of these “bothers-me’s” are, of course, a result of the fact that money now rules the media. The free press is rapidly becoming the free market’s press. According to numerous reports, six companies now own 90% of the media. Ratings drive profits. Profits drive companies. It’s that simple. Everybody knows it. Everybody talks about it. So why isn’t anything being done?
The situation is dangerous. It has driven deep wedges into the heart of our society, and it has fanned fearsome flames of anger and hatred. Combined with the undue power of money in politics, the threat to the
health of our society is overwhelming. The values that gave rise to the First Amendment are being rapidly eroded, and the truth of Christian scripture is being made evident once again: “For the love of money is the root of all evil…” (1 Timothy 6:10).
The current system is entrenched. I have some sympathy for individual media outlets. They have to meet the competition. They have to stay in business. To make meaningful changes would put them at such a competitive disadvantage that they probably could not survive. Meanwhile, although the public wants pizza while needing broccoli, the media will continue to deliver pizza.
Nevertheless, the need for change is urgent. We cannot continue to fan the flames of conflict and division in the service of money. Democracy cannot thrive on a misinformed and morally manipulated public. We cannot overfeed the beast of materialism without starving ourselves. So here I am, writing this article for this one tiny media outlet which by the way does not make a profit because it depends entirely on the generosity of its readers and supporters. I am writing with the hope of sowing a little rebellion in one small field.
Before change can come to giant institutions, it must come to human minds. Ideas come before structures. I have four changes of mind to suggest:
First, we must surrender the notion that the free market is morally self-regulating. This is a badly flawed notion that has ruled much of the media. The idea is that, since the market depends on trust to succeed, it will eliminate untrustworthy behavior on its own.
Reality, however, does not usually work out this way. The market serves only one value: the economic wellbeing of the players. Other values are always subservient to that one even when a media company acts with some degree of altruism.
The situation that results looks like this: John D. Rockefeller squeezes the railroads to get Standard Oil preferential freight rates. With this enormous advantage, he runs his competition out of business, and then goes to church on Sunday morning, feeling that he has acted according to Christian values. Or, an industry engages in informal price-fixing and then defends itself as having done nothing wrong. The primary value of the market has been upheld. The only problem is that ethical decisions do not depend on just one value. They depend on the consideration of multiple values and, most often, on justly weighing the importance of competing values.
Second, we must restore the concept that news is a service a news medium owes to society, not a profit center it owes to itself. This idea never should have been discarded. It was based on the idea that the airwaves belong to the public, and then abandoned because cables do not belong to the public. This is a distinction so fine that it is meaningless. A democracy requires an informed citizenry. In return for being granted enormous influence on that citizenry, the media have a moral obligation to provide factual, responsible, and reasonably unbiased news coverage.
The idea that news divisions must sit on their own financial bottoms alongside entertainment and sports is ludicrous. To operate in this way abridges the freedom of the press, and ultimately the freedom of the society.
Third, the ethical principles that guide the news media must constantly be re-examined. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, said Thomas Jefferson, and it is most especially the price of freedom of press. Time not only passes, it changes realities. When the First Amendment was adopted, guaranteeing that Congress would make no law abridging the freedom of the press, the press was a far different entity than it is today. In fact, the press of that day was largely an uncoordinated group of local papers and magazines which owned themselves and published news and opinion that reached comparatively few people. Today, the whole of media is gargantuan, local news has been dwarfed, and few media outlets “own themselves.” Few are even locally owned.
To produce “fair and balanced news” (as one network puts it) in 2016, demands different considerations than were required in 1787. Being fair and balanced is an admirable goal. But what do these terms mean in the context of our contemporary news situation? Fair to whom? Balanced between what?
For the media, fairness often seems to mean giving equal footing to every position on a given issue.
This is fair only to the advocates of these issues. It is not fair to the public who need adequate information to make judgments about tissues. It is not fair to give equal footing to those who deny science and to environmental scientists. It is not fair to the society to give equal footing to fomenters of ethnic tensions and the advocates of ethnic justice. It is not fair to give equal footing to lunacy and intelligence.
And what is “balanced” news coverage? Is it balanced between the left wing and the right wing? If so, “balanced” is a moving target, for in the last 40 years or so, the center has veered sharply to the right. Is it balanced between time-honored principles and innovation? If so, the public needs help in knowing what America’s “time-honored principles” are and how innovative ideas stand up under historical and ethical scrutiny. Is it balanced between telling the truth and doing no harm? Or, is it simply balanced between the need to tell the truth and the need to attract viewers?
Who makes these judgments and how they are enforced are tough questions. But we are not even addressing them. We are rolling along carelessly with both the media and the government losing more freedom to the marketplace every day. Reflections and discussions of how to end this madness must begin.
CONCLUSION
Of course, these three suggestions—giving up the idea that the free market is morally self-regulating, recapturing the idea that news is a service, and constant re-examination of the principles that guide news reporting and discussion in our time—change only minds, not the reality with which we live.
Still, no reality was ever changed without a change of ideas that came first. Stubborn structures never give way until stubborn minds do. But structural change is urgent, urgent to the integrity and health of our society. The path to attain it is unclear. Perhaps it is enough to pray that this little article might produce a few other reflections and conversations that could contribute to the kind of change that is required.
I would offer one final thought: Neither the media nor its owners can be their own monitors. Some other entity must protect the freedom of the press. The FCC used to play a larger role, but then in 1987 it abandoned its own Fairness Doctrine. Maybe a version of it that fits our day should be adopted. Government control, you scream? Well, like it or not, government is perhaps the key guardian of our freedom in America, and right now it needs guarding. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people is not prohibited from protecting freedom of the press, only from abridging it.
David Sapp is a Christian Ethicist, a member of the board of Christian Ethics Today, and Retired Pastor of Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA.
