A Defense of Biblical Objectivity in Journalism
(OPINION) I enjoyed Jenny Taylor’s vigorous prose and even linked to her review of my book Reforming Journalism on my Twitter feed: Since I’ve occasionally linked to positive reviews, I wanted those who follow me to get both sides of the story.
Jenny might have given the impression that I only report one side, and that’s not true. But this part of her review is accurate: anyone “working in a mainstream newsroom with the approach and attitudes advocated in this book would be fired.” Sadly, mainstream journalism (with rare exceptions) is now hostile to mainstream Christians.
That’s why it’s important to create and maintain publications like World, which began in 1986. It’s also important that these publications emphasize street-level reporting that can attract non-Christian readers as well, and minimize suite-level opinionizing.
Reforming Journalism is primarily for bold and courageous journalists willing to be pioneering entrepreneurs, and for those willing to support them. Many journalists, and maybe most of those who will read this article, are prisoners: Either government officials or politically-involved owners and editors determine what they can publish.
So I’ll speak directly to the captives: imagine a situation where you are free. If you were, would you write a neutral story regarding an issue on which the Bible is clear? You’d certainly want to cite accurately dueling positions, but (for example) would you quote equally from anti-adultery and pro-adultery advocates? During the 28 years I’ve edited World we have accurately reported pro-adultery positions but have not treated those as equal to what the Bible plainly states.
Going to the other end of the spectrum: Would you push a particular position regarding an issue on which the Bible is unclear or silent? For example, say there’s a debate about whether to put a 25% tariff on steel imports. Say an organization called “Christian Voice” insists that backing one side or the other is the biblical way to go. Would you advocate one position as “the Christian one” and condemn those on the other side? World would not.
Does that make us inconsistent: sometimes we treat both sides in a debate equally, sometimes we don’t? I don’t think so. We try to practice a journalistic third way: neither conventional objectivity nor existential subjectivity, but biblical objectivity. This is sometimes hard for advocates of those other positions to grasp, so please bear with me as I review some basics.
The first decision journalists make is not how to write about particular issues and questions, but which topics to cover. The world is vast, resources are limited, and we always make choices. Even a local publication has more shoveled onto its plate than it can consume.
An editor who simply says, “We’ll cover the news,” is not being honest with others and perhaps himself as well, for “the news” does not just happen. Agenda-setting is inevitable. Print publications have limited space. The Internet has given journalists greater flexibility than we used to have, but readers still have limited time. A lengthy examination of one issue may mean no time spent on another.
Every editor who assigns a reporter to a story is thereby not assigning the reporter to another. And within a story, reporters make decisions. Stories, unless they are dull reports, typically feature a protagonist who faces an antagonist and tries to fulfill a mission while confronting obstacles—PAMO, for short. Here’s a normal template for a story: The protagonist wants to do X as part of his mission, but Y (the antagonist) and Z (obstacles) are in his way.
I’m simplifying here: The protagonist may be an organization rather than an individual, and the antagonist may be a worldview. But I’m in agreement with Jenny about the importance of story—and most of us learn early on about story-telling through depiction of a protagonist, on a mission, facing an antagonist and obstacles to success.
For example, in the United States children learn about the three little pigs: One who works hard takes the time to build his house out of bricks. The other two choose a faster alternative and build their houses out of straw or sticks. The three pigs are our protagonists. Their mission is building houses. The barrier to success for two of them is laziness— they don’t want to spend the time to build a strong house. They have an antagonist: a big bad wolf who huffs and puffs and blows down the houses made of straw or sticks.
Even the simplest spot news story has a protagonist, mission, antagonist, and barriers. Here’s one: “Firefighters [protagonist] last night battled a blaze [antagonist]. Because of high winds and low water pressure [obstacles], it took two hours to extinguish the flames [mission].” Because only arsonists cheer for the fire, the choice of protagonist—firefighter or fire—is clear.
How does this work out in more complicated stories? Here’s a paragraph from World’s China coverage (with names omitted): “On July 4 six women arrived at the top prosecutor’s office in Beijing with the names of their detained husbands pasted onto their summer dresses…. The wives came to raise their frustrations that authorities in the neighboring city of Tianjing had barred them from contacting their husbands, whom authorities arrested last year in a nationwide roundup of human rights lawyers and activists.”
In that paragraph, the six women are the protagonists and their mission is to express their frustrations, so as to support their husbands. Their antagonists are government officials, and one of the obstacles is the order than bars wives from contacting their husbands. The story could be written from a different perspective that would have the authorities as protagonists with the mission of preserving law and order, and the wives as antagonists ignorantly or maliciously wasting everyone’s time.
Editors choose which stories to assign, and reporters choose how to structure them. The choice is not clear for many reporters covering abortion. Christian reporters normally see the unborn baby as the protagonist, since the baby’s life is at stake. Those who would kill the baby are antagonists. A pro-abortion reporter normally makes the woman the protagonist, with her mission one of aborting an obstacle, the unborn child she sees as harming her life.
The Bible has a complicated structure, but it is essentially a story of creation, fall and redemption. God’s mission is to rescue His people and save them from sin. Christ is the protagonist. Satan is the antagonist who seems to win in the Garden of Eden, seems to win often throughout the history of Israel, and seems to win on Good Friday—but loses in the end. Satanists make Satan the protagonist who is trying to liberate people from God’s commands.
PAMO analysis is also useful when looking at particular chapters of the Bible. For example, chapter three of Ezekiel portrays watchers on the wall who have a calling like that of journalists. The protagonist is the watchman. The antagonist is a literal enemy bringing a sword to the land—or a metaphorical enemy, sin. The watchman’s goal is to warn the people when a threat appears. Barriers to successful fulfillment of the mission include laziness (the watchman sleeping at his post), blindness (not seeing the threat), cowardice (fear that warning the wicked will bring retribution from them), and wickedness (siding with evil).
After I visited China and saw with my own eyes the burgeoning house church movement, I wrote, “With house churches multiplying in cities and influential executives coming to faith, Christianity is growing so fast in China that Communist officials are having a hard time keeping up.” In that story, Chinese Christians are the protagonists, with a mission of spreading the gospel, and Communist officials are the antagonists. The protagonists face barriers: harassment, sometimes persecution, and their own fears and desires.
I could have written the story very differently—and China’s propagandists now do so. In their stories the Communist Party is the protagonist, ruling wisely with a mission of advancing prosperity and national unity. Christians are trouble-making antagonists. Western reporters who tell their stories are obstacles, so ousting them is proper.
Some journalists say, “I just report the facts,” but it’s important to understand that facts by themselves sit like lumps of coal. Those lumps provide warmth only when placed in a furnace. Facts heat our minds only when placed within stories that normally have protagonists and antagonists.
That involves opinion. Here’s a problem: As theologian John Piper says, “Compared to the wisdom of God, my opinion counts for nothing. So does yours. What we think, out of our own heads, is of little significance.” Piper says, rightly, that we should try to live by what the Bible teaches.
That means we should avoid overusing or underusing the Bible. If we overuse it by asserting that the Bible says certain things that it does not say, we feed our human tendency to make up rules that purportedly will help us save ourselves. Over-assertiveness feeds the legalism that has pushed many Christian students into animosity toward the denominations of their youth.
Underuse is also a problem. When we say the Bible is not clear on a subject when it actually is, that feeds into antinomianism, the belief (particularly familiar today) that we make up our own rules. In the United States, legalistic overuse harms some conservative Christians. Meanwhile, antinomian underuse is rampant among some modern Christians who prefer to say, “I read the Bible and decide what it says to me. No one has the right to tell me I’m wrong, and I don’t have the right to tell someone else—it’s between him and God.”
Overuse and underuse are the Scylla and Charybdis of biblical application. Three millennia ago, Homer wrote about those two mythical sea monsters. Greeks said they were on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina between the island of Sicily and the Italian mainland. Few sailors could survive the passage.
At World, we’ve tried to navigate during the past two decades with the help of another watery metaphor, one based on whitewater rafting. Going down rocky streams in a rubber raft is a popular American activity, and experts talk of six classes of rapids where the water runs swiftly, from class one (easy enough for a novice) to class six (death with a roar).
A class one rapids issue is one on which the Bible is explicit: we oppose murder, adultery, theft, and other sins clearly and specifically identified as such in the Bible. In reporting such issues, World reporters do not make a proponent of such sins our protagonist. We quote him or her accurately but we do not write a story from that perspective.
For example, the mainstream press frequently makes same-sex couples their protagonists, with praise for their mission of adopting a child and criticism of anyone getting in the way. World would make a child the protagonist and point out the importance of having a father and a mother.
A class two issue is one where the Bible is implicit—for example, not committing suicide. While mainstream reporters choose as protagonists individuals who choose euthanasia, World would have protagonists who fight on.
Class three stories are those in which partisans on both sides can quote Bible verses, but careful study results in definite conclusions. For example, a biblical understanding of helping the poor means an emphasis on generosity, but not the kind that just makes the giver feel good. I’ve written several books showing why we should offer challenging, personal, and spiritual help to widows, orphans, aliens, prisoners and others among the unemployed, uneducated, or unwanted. You can find online our “Effective Compassion” podcast series that profiles numerous protagonists overcoming antagonists and obstacles. But we also tell the truth about programs that don’t work: Our reporting has credibility only if we are willing to tell the truth even when it hurts. We try to offer salt, not sugar.
On class four issues, we try to tell stories based in the Bible’s perspective on human nature. For example, biblical objectivity on international issues emphasizes striving for peace without appeasing aggressors. We throw tough questions at interviewees: What if war is the natural habit of sinful man? What if some leaders see war as a useful way to gain more power, believing they can achieve victory without overwhelming losses?
The Bible is mostly silent on class five issues, but historical study gives hints as to what works and what doesn’t. Although the Bible does not say explicitly that one kind of anti-addiction program will work and another won’t, programs that leave out the spiritual have rarely had success, so in telling stories we ask questions about religious challenge as well as material help.
Class six issues are those in which there is no clear biblical position nor other clear indications, so people equally well-versed in the Bible will often take diametrically opposed positions. Technical economic issues—whether to raise or lower interest rates, for example—are often of this nature, as are complex questions of international diplomacy. Biblical understandings will often help analysts sort out the relevant questions, but Christians should be careful not to state that there is one biblical position on these subjects to which all should ascribe, or else.
Overall, the rapids metaphor suggests a framework for biblical objectivity that allows us to push hard, but avoid twisting Scripture. When we take a strong biblical stand on a class one issue, we are objective: Since God created the world and sustains it, His opinion is true objectivity. When we take a balanced position on a class six issue by citing the views and approaches of a variety of informed sources, we are also biblically objective, because we cannot be sure about an issue when the Bible is not clear. On those issues, and there are lots of them, World’s coverage might not be different from 20th century objectivity, before leading newspapers became “woke.”
Christian journalists should faithfully reflect God’s teaching, as best we can discern it and as best we are able, given the media organizations that employ us. Biblically objective reporters are still fallen sinners: I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of journalistic humility, based on the recognition that we see through a glass darkly, so I won’t repeat that here. Sometimes we all err by playing it safe and being silent when the Bible is clear, or by claiming biblical warrant for positions that are matters of opinion rather than biblical truth. A rapids analysis can help all of us come closer to biblical objectivity.
I thank Jenny for saying Reforming Journalism is “not without considerable merit, if read in secret,” and I appreciate her very public efforts to improve religious literacy. It’s becoming increasingly dangerous in many countries to read Christian works, even in secret, so I hope we’ll all pray for God’s mercy.
Dr. Marvin Olasky is the editor-in-chief of WORLD Magazine, dean of the World Journalism Institute, and the author of dozens of books. His latest book is Reforming Journalism. Follow him on Twitter @MarvinOlasky.