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Doug Underwood, an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington, is the author of When MBAs Rule the Newsroom: How the Marketers and Managers Are Reshaping Today's Media.

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From Yahweh to Yahoo!

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Preface.................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Journalism Facing Faith...................................................................................................................11. Prophetic Journalism: Moral Outrage and the News.....................................................................................................192. The Profits of Reform: Printers, Capitalists, and the Priesthood of Believers........................................................................333. Skeptics of Faith or Faith in Skepticism? Enlightening the Journalistic Mind.........................................................................474. Mystics, Idealists, and Utopians: Journalism and the Romantic Tradition..............................................................................615. Muckraking the Nation's Conscience: Journalists and the Social Gospel................................................................................766. Mencken, Monkeys, and Modernity: A New Metaphysic for the Newsroom...................................................................................887. Pragmatism and the "Facts" of Religious Experience: The Model for a Synthesis........................................................................1028. Trusting Their Guts: The Moral Compass of a Doubters' Profession.....................................................................................1179. "I Will Show You My Faith by What I Do": A Survey of the Religious Beliefs of Journalists and Journalists' Faith Put into Action.....................13010. Religion, Morality, and Professional Values: A Study of the Ethical Sources of Today's Journalists..................................................14811. The Cult of Science and the Scientifically Challenged Press.........................................................................................16512. The Mind of the Inquiring Reporter: Psychology and the Science of the Soul..........................................................................13. The Press, Politics, and Religion in the Public Square14. Foundations of Sand: Technology Worship and the Internet............................................................................................20615. The Gospel of Public Journalism: The Newsroom Communitarians and the Search for Civic Virtue........................................................21616. Jesus without Journalists: Miracles and Mysteries, Minus Media Reports..............................................................................23317. Visions of Mary and the Less Than Visionary Press: Religious Apparitions in the Framing of the Modern Media.........................................24918. Proselytizing and Profits: The Growth of Televangelism and the Collaboration of the Mainstream Press................................................25319. Pluralism and the Press's Blind Spots: The Coverage of Religious Diversity at Home and Abroad.......................................................264Afterword...............................................................................................................................................271Notes...................................................................................................................................................281Selected Bibliography...................................................................................................................................319Index...................................................................................................................................................331

Chapter One

When the Protestant-dominated Long Parliament in England faced an upsurge in polemical religious literature in 1643, it did the accustomed thing: it passed an ordinance that attempted to control the content of printed material through licensing and censorship laws. At the time, a young man was wandering the English countryside, preparing for a ministry that would challenge religious and governmental authority, thereby playing an important role in ending censorship of the press in England and laying the foundations for today's press freedoms.

George Fox is best remembered as the founder of the Quaker movement, but the spirit embodied in his radical campaign cannot be separated from the communications mission that we now identify with modern journalism. In his biblically based, prophetic writing and speaking, Fox called for political reform, defended the sanctity of individual conscience, and advocated freedom of expression—all precursors to the vital principles that make up today's journalistic credo. While Fox is not as widely recognized as a pioneer in carving out new press freedoms as, say, John Milton is, Fox's motivation for demanding the right to express his conscience without restriction draws on religion as its source as much as did the Puritan poet-scholar Milton. Although modern media historians tend to see Milton's classical defense of press freedoms in largely secular terms, the religious partisans of the seventeenth century would not have missed the religious overtones in Milton's message.

It is almost forgotten in our more secular times that many of the early advocates of freedom of the press were preachers and proselytizers whose religious zeal—and the writings that poured forth from their pens—placed them solidly in the tradition of the world's first "journalists." While the values of free expression put forth by these religious reformers have been transformed into secular principles that we now identify as constitutional (as in the protections of free speech and press freedom in the U.S. Constitution) or professional in nature (as in journalists' defense of the "public's right to know"), the origins of these bedrock principles of a free press can be found in the passionate religious disputes of a time when religion was interwoven with virtually all controversies of public life. Few journalists would recognize that when Milton talked about truth in his famous maxim—if truth and falsehood are pitted in an equal contest, truth is sure to prevail—he capitalized Truth, meaning that he was confident that God's truth would be revealed to people who were receptive to it. Journalists today seldom recognize that the prophetic impulse to protest injustice and to root out corruption—which Fox found spelled out in key passages of the Bible—still rests, admittedly in diluted and secularized form, in the modern journalistic commitment to social justice and reform.

Back in the 1600s, in the period of the English civil war, most of what embroiled England had to do with religion, and that counted for the news, too. The religious cauldron that was England at that time—where Protestants took full power of the English government in 1649, beheaded the Catholic-sympathizing Charles I, and established a theocratic government that unsuccessfully tried to unite a nation teeming with dissident religious groups—was also the breeding ground of the modern newspaper. The first printed newssheets hawked by booksellers and circulated in the marketplaces contained a form of journalism we would recognize today—news of murders, speeches, military victories, executions. But these "newsbooks," as they have come to be called, were also packed with thundering theological broadsides and partisan religious attacks that reflected the passions of the English Reformation.

A powerful element in Fox's crusade was the tract, or the pamphlet—printed on the newly invented printing presses (many of them mobile, so that they could be moved quickly to avoid discovery by the authorities). Fox and his followers' determined use of the printing press has led one of his biographers to speculate that Fox may have come across the 1644 tract Areopagitica, written by Milton, during Fox's first visit to London that same year. Even if Fox did not see the essay by Milton—whose ringing defense of free expression and unlicensed printing is viewed as the foundational statement of modern press liberty—it likely would have appealed to him. After all, wrote Cecil Sharman, "as events turned out, for forty years it was Fox, his fellow Quaker writers, and their printers, who most persistently defied all censorship."

The Quaker movement provides an important illustration of the way that what today we would call press freedoms were intertwined historically with religious dissent. Quakers were both the recipients and the producers of the bombast and the vitriol characterizing much of the printed material that circulated throughout England in the 1600s. Many Quaker pamphlets were printed to rebut the claims made in the newsbooks of the time (some produced by rival clerics who detested the Quaker cause), and Fox complained of being the victim of "newsmongers." Quakers were accused of regularly spewing forth blasphemies and heresies, spurning marriage, believing in free love, and being papists in disguise. Fox himself was said to wear ribbons to attract and seduce women. Fox—and the other defenders of Quakerism—answered in kind. The later image of Quakers as a humble, soft-spoken people was hardly reflected in such bitter denunciations as the 1659 pamphlet in which Fox defended Quakerism against "the great mystery of the great whore unfolded: and antichrists kingdom revealed unto destruction."

To understand fully the elements making up modern journalism, it is important to realize that Fox—despite a life devoted exclusively to religious matters—stands squarely in a tradition of writing that reaches back to the Hebrew prophets of the Bible and forward to today's most outspoken columnists, investigative reporters, and editorial champions of social causes. Although now almost fully secular in outlook, journalistic advocates are heirs to the reform spirit that inspired Fox to resist paying tithes to support the state church, to plead the cause of the poor and the persecuted, and to rail against what he saw as the hypocrisy and incompetence of the Anglican clergy. Fox clearly saw his life modeled on the Hebrew prophets, who were outraged at the religious corruption of their own time and called for a revitalized Judaism. Fox also followed in the footsteps of early Christian prophetic figures, such as the apostle Paul, whose revelatory experience of the indwelling Christ and whose belief that he was taught the truth of scripture directly from God deeply influenced Fox's own theology. As it was for Paul and the Hebrew prophets, whose written texts were used to help maintain Jewish and early Christian community solidarity in times of exile and political oppression, writing was a central element of Fox's missionary activity and his efforts to bolster Quaker resistance to persecution. Fox produced more than five thousand letters and circulated more than two hundred published pamphlets; it takes an eight-volume publication to encompass his writings.

To call Fox's writing journalism may seem a stretch for the modern imagination, but in the most basic sense it represents an important strain in journalism during its formative period. Fox's writings are representative of a raw and inspired expression that I call "prophetic journalism"—a journalism of passion, polemic, and moral opinion that has come to exist alongside the modern ethic of objectivity and the commercial elements of profit making that dictate so much of what journalism constitutes today. To be sure, the impulse that drove Fox is now found largely on the editorial page, in opinion publications, or (in its most direct form) in religious broadcasting and pamphlets handed out on the street corner by religious groups. However, in Fox's day, the idea of truth as something to be discovered by testable, observable experimentation and the subjectivist notion of the importance of each individual's perception of the truth as he or she sees it were just developing. In one respect, Fox was influenced by these emerging forces of modern science and individualism, and he put a high premium on the individual's personal experience of God and religious truth—what he calls knowing something "experimentally"—in discerning the validity of spiritual experience. But Fox also was still medieval in outlook, and he, like most of his contemporaries, tended to treat fact, just as it had been done since ancient times, as something inseparable from what we would call opinion and to use bombast and polemic as a method to assert the truth.

To understand Fox—as well as the spiritual impetus behind the tradition of prophetic journalism—it is valuable to see the way the prophets of the Bible loom behind the writing that today we would call advocacy or adversarial journalism. In his written broadsides, as well as the way he led his life, Fox gained much spiritual inspiration from the prophets, particularly Jeremiah, who spoke of God's making a "new covenant" with people by touching "their hearts." In the Hebrew prophetic tradition, the prophets tell the Israelites the hard truths about the condition of their society and warn of the consequences if they do not follow the ways of God. Hebrew prophecy falls into two broad categories. When the Israelites are oppressed or in captivity, the prophets speak a message of hope and promise a restoration of their independence as a sign that God has not forgotten them: "When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none ... I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them" (Isaiah 41:17–18). But when the Israelites are a successful nation, the prophets hold them accountable to standards of equality, justice, and compassion for the weak and downtrodden and excoriate in fearless ways those who fall short of God's demands: "Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow" (Isaiah 1:16–17). Although the religious overtones may not always be evident in today's journalism, one can recognize the prophecy of hope in the journalistic tradition. "It is a great thing to be truly a Reformer, even one misinterpreted and scorned through life," said the nineteenth-century editor Horace Greeley, adding, "To speak firmly the word destined ultimately to heal Man's deadliest maladies ... this is a heroism whereof no other forlorn hope than that of Humanity is capable." The prophecy of moral indignation rings loudly in the modern press champions of reform, too. "Every government is run by liars," declared I. F. Stone, one of the preeminent Washington, D.C., investigative reporter from the 1950s to the early 1970s. "That is a prima facie assumption until proven wrong."

The elements of Jewish prophetic expression are most clearly evident in the "journalism of outrage," as modern investigative journalism has been described. Lincoln Steffens acknowledged as much in his Autobiography when he placed "muckraking" investigative reporters in the direct lineage of the Hebrew prophets. One only has to look at an adage of that period—the journalist Finley Peter Dunne's celebrated phrase that the proper role of journalists is to "comfort the afflicted" and to "afflict the comfortable"—to see the biblical parallels between the muckraking movement and the progressive political period of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth that muckraking so influenced. Compare Dunne's comment with, for example, Ezekiel 34:16: "The Lord said: `I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy; I will feed them with justice.'"

Many elements of the prophetic tradition—the spirit of righteousness, the indignant moralism, the effort to maintain purity of values, the call for spiritual and ethical renewal, the fierce sense of corruption abounding everywhere—are as typically found in today's best investigative reporters or crusading editors as they were in the prophetic voices who tried to keep alive Jewish faith and morality during the Israelite empire and the Jewish exile in Babylon. The image of the investigative reporter as the heir of the prophetic tradition is exemplified by I. F. Stone, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who spent almost twenty years mining federal government documents for examples of waste and duplicity that he published in his widely circulated newsletter. Described as a "cheerfully angry man," Stone impressed people with his "permanent sense of outrage," as the Washington Post reporter Peter Osnos put it. "He sees black and whites where others are willing to see gray. A scandal or an injustice is not to be excused. Compromise when it is a sell-out is not to be excused."

The prophetic message was incorporated into the news formulas from the earliest days of the large commercial newspapers in the United States. James Gordon Bennett—one of the first and most powerful voices in the establishment of the nineteenth-century "penny press"—used religious language, closely covered developments in the religious community, and recognized the appeal of calls for reform as part of the free-wheeling formula he developed in the 1830s that set the tone for the modern-day, big-city, commercial newspaper. Trained to be a priest and intimately familiar with scripture, Bennett regularly displayed the unabashedly righteous tone of biblical prophecy, such as he did when he jabbed in ironic ways at his fellow editors who helped launch the famous "Moral War" against the sensationalistic tactics of Bennett's newspaper. "They can only find room for the lies and slander of politicians—but not for the truths and facts of religion and morals," Bennett editorialized. "The immoral, indecent, irreligious, obscene Morning Herald, however, finds time and room to report all these valuable doings." Bennett, never known for his lack of hubris, lambasted the religious establishment for its hypocrisy and its phony moralizing, and he even went so far as to proclaim journalism to be the higher religious calling when he declared that "the temple of religion has had its day" and that now the newspaper must take the lead in reforming society.

Bennett's form of acerbic, no-holds-barred commentary has largely disappeared from the discourse of today's more restrained mainstream, commercial press. But, even without Bennett's self-promoting, self-congratulatory tone, the thrust of much modern-day journalism—ranging from editorial calls for civic reform to investigative reporting of fraud and corruption—is in the tradition of the prophetic call for righteousness and renewal. The media sociologist Herbert Gans, in pointing to the reform-oriented values of modern journalists, maintained this is no coincidence. The late-nineteenth-century Progressive movement came into being at just about the time the mass market magazine and large circulation newspapers, where such muckrakers as Steffens did their work, had become the dominant form of media in the United States. Many of the beliefs that Gans identified as part of the "enduring" values of journalists—they are against waste and environmental degradation, violations of legal and political rights, and bigness and monopoly in business and government and are in favor of democratic ideals, individual freedom, grass-roots citizen activity, and the maintenance of a just social order—can be seen, in much modernized ways, as parallels to the social protests launched by the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures. As the historian Richard Hofstadter put it in describing journalism's contribution to the investigative and reform mood of the time, "The fundamental critical achievement of American Progressivism was the business of exposure, and journalism was the chief occupational source of its creative writers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind, and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer."

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Excerpted from From Yahweh to Yahoo!by DOUG UNDERWOOD Copyright © 2002 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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