Marvin Olasky's new book 'Reforming Journalism' preaches more than teaches
The cover of Reforming Journalism.
(REVIEW) Marvin Olasky is unique in my nearly 50 years of journalism experience: a proselytizing journalist. His ilk has not been seen since the late nineteenth century. His prejudice against all things British prevents him from ever mentioning the great social reformer and investigative journalist W.T. Stead who with Josephine Butler campaigned successfully against the white slave trade in the 1880s and risked the ire of fashionable pundits like George Bernard Shaw, but Olasky could be his re-incarnation.
And in Reforming Journalism, now at the end of his career, Olasky burns his bridges, assertive about how his own brand of Christian faith can use journalism as its outlet. It is a shocking book for a British journalist raised in a more polite culture to read, but not without considerable merit, if read in secret.
This is part-primer for non-American Christian students of journalism, and also part opportunist rant against fashionable causes. It includes Bible study, personal testimony, practical journalism lessons and the key facts of the Gutenberg/Lutheran revolution and its bloody aftermath particularly in Britain. But it is also a polemic, masquerading as ethics, against abortion and homosexuality. The naked partisanship against leftist attitudes in general and former President Obama in particular confuses the purpose of the book: is this a manual of journalism ethics or sexual ethics?
The book is in three parts: journalistic foundations, practical applications and a necessarily truncated, but nonetheless crucial history of journalism. This last is a rehash of his earlier books, Prodigal Press and Central Ideas in American Journalism. Yet the reworking of his critique of objectivity, and some of the historical material are presented yet again in a style that does not stray far at times from the sermonizing of a reformed pastor. What is new is his overt address to an incipient cadre of Chinese Christian journalists whose travails he sees as mimicking those of the very earliest journalists who faced suppression, imprisonment, torture and sometimes execution as they sought to expose corruption and promote truth.
In view of the Trump/Xi culture war, this is not an untimely effort. It is nonetheless at times unreadable in its overt attempts to form attitudes. Much of it is pure propaganda that no mainstream journalist could countenance. For instance, he writes: “In twentieth-century America, more journalists started to disbelieve in the good news of Christ redeeming us” as if that were a matter of fact and not faith. This kind of faith-based Bible-bashing should be anathema to journalists who want readers to make up their own minds.
A passion for justice and religious literacy in journalism does not need an evangelical label on it.
Olasky is incredibly energetic: the author of more than 20 books, several of them on journalism, and Editor in Chief of WORLD Magazine, he has been allowed over many years to practice what he preaches protected from the ravages of professional contradiction. WORLD was founded in 1986 to replace the Presbyterian Journal and its aim, according to its archives, was to serve "an educational rather than an ecclesiastical task—a vision focused on the importance of a Biblical worldview for all of life.” It is actually a world within a world, which makes its own rules and risks a cultic profile potentially unanswerable to and cut off from the mainstream. Anyone trying to hack it in a mainstream newsroom with the approach and attitudes advocated in this book would be fired. Whatever he says– and he has a lot to say– a passion for justice and religious literacy in journalism does not need an evangelical label on it.
And that is the basic problem of a very problematic book: just who is it for?
As a researcher in the origins of journalism, I am certainly one of its targets. There is much useful material– lifted from previous works– on Reformation history, and the Christianity that overtly motivated and informed much nineteenth-century journalism in America. The incisiveness of his analysis of journalism’s trajectory since it emerged from the swamps of royalist propaganda and persecution in seventeenth-century Europe, is impressive. There are some excellent quotes, mined from hours of intense research for three earlier books that pick out the European Christian roots of journalism from the vast mass of media histories that obscure them. There is also an informative section on the missionary origins of modern Chinese journalism.
I find helpful his analysis of the four phases of journalism’s demise: from Biblical objectivity, to scientific materialism (Marxism), to strategic ritual (which he describes in an earlier book as “disguised subjectivity”) to the “balancing of subjectivities,” where everybody’s view of an action or event is treated as equally valid. He is correct that such “moral neutrality” requires no personal commitment or judgement, and British readers will know that this increasingly worries war reporters like the BBC veteran Martin Bell, who regards it rightly as “the death of news.”
Olasky is right. Objectivity based on a Biblical narrative of creation, fall and redemption should supply the plumb line that helps us gauge not just the worth of a story, but the veracity of our sources, and our choice of facts. Our reason is so fallen that apart from God we can see nothing clearly. But that goes for Christians too. So I prefer to think of religious literacy as a more culturally acceptable and accessible way of supplying all these things. The only criterion for good journalism is the story. Religious literacy simply gets you better stories, and Olasky never says this. You don’t get those stories just by being a certain kind of Christian — otherwise democracy would cease. You get them only by respecting the role of faith in all of human motivation, and it certainly helps to have a crucified mind.
Journalism (as opposed to mere news mongering) emerged in Christendom, and Olasky, a convert from Jewish Marxism is one of the very few to own it. But the story is more nuanced than Olasky wants it to be; the actual motives were always financial and personal and not just scriptural and moral, and the roots are tangled.
It is our job to go on redeeming and releasing the gift of journalism to democracy, but in a spirit of love for our cultures, not condemnation of them, or a desire simply to claim for our trade a halo it never truly had. We must let the wheat grow up with the weeds in humility, grateful for an industry we can and must get along with.
Dr. Jenny Taylor is a journalist, author and part-time Fellow in Media, Communication and Journalism at Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics in Cambridge, U.K. She founded and for twelve years directed the charity, Lapido Media, to improve religious literacy in journalism and world affairs.