The recent firestorm over the new part-time teaching job of second lady Karen Pence highlights again the deep unprofessionalism of many in the media who appear not just lacking in, but actually hostile to, traditional faith.
In return, the faithful are getting very, very angry at it.
In case you missed it, Pence has accepted a part-time teaching job at a school that asks its employees to agree with an expression of faith that includes assertion that all nonmarital sex, homosexual or heterosexual, is immoral. Virtually every major media outlet ignored the hetero-ban and labeled the school “anti-gay,” while many journalists took to Twitter to fulminate against Pence and the school.
Judging from my own Twitter feed, which has been inundated with notes of support for Pence and anger at the media, the unfair coverage has struck a deep and raw nerve. As well it should. One fears, however, that the journalists still don’t even begin to understand, or even care about, the legitimate fury growing against them.
There is no problem with journalists deciding they aren’t traditionalist believers themselves, or not believers at all. There is something deeply wrong, however, with them being actively hostile to traditional faith, and even more wrong if they make not a single reasonable effort to understand it. Their attitude is a serious form of bigotry as it makes broad and negative assumptions, without foundation, about entire groups of people.
The media’s antipathy to faith, and its sheer cluelessness about it, is nothing new. Seared into my brain is the subhead of a major news magazine feature story back in about 1993 — alas, before magazine stories were saved on the Internet, so I can’t remember whether it was Time or Newsweek, but it’s still in my files in my attic somewhere — which read as follows: “The surprising unsecularity of the American public.”
I’ve written about this before. The first problem here is the assumption that “secularity” is the norm, so that the awkward, jury-rigged nonword “unsecularity” is used rather than the more obvious, and normal, “faithfulness” or even “religiosity” — although the latter carries a slightly different, perhaps negatively tinged, connotation. Actually, in my handy 1975 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary on my work desk, there’s not even any such word as “secularity” — although “secularism” does make an appearance. Good journalists know this word choice actually is important: When one must twist the language into knots in order to reinvent the very idea of what the norm is, one isn’t doing objective reporting.
It is a truly bizarre idea that in a nation where, at the time, some 90 percent of the citizenry called itself religious, it should be even remotely surprising to any sentient person that the public wasn’t “secular.” The whole premise of the feature story was self-evidently absurd, akin to writing a story about how “surprising” it is that dogs chase cats.
Surveys and anecdotal evidence show that journalists in general, especially in national outlets, are more likely to be atheists, agnostics, or irreligious than the general public. Professional ethics should require, then, that they make extra efforts to understand the other side, since they cover a still-largely-faithful populace.
Misreporting like that involving Pence, in such a light, becomes not just a matter of innocent ignorance, but of willful blindness that amounts to outright bias. The bias is shameful, and the news resulting from it often truly is fake.
