The News Is Broken: Christians Know This, But Still Must Read Journalist Chris Stirewalt’s Book

(REVIEW) We are all consumers of news. Many have shunned the news altogether, but if you are reading this website, then you’re probably not one of those people.

Increasingly, Christians are those people shunning the news — especially the mainstream media — because they don’t see in it the values that reflect their lives. If you’re one of those people, then a new book out now helps you understand why.

The book, “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back” (Center Street), by former Fox News Channel political editor Chris Stirewalt is a behind-the-scenes look at the news business, how the craft of journalism is practiced in the 21st century and what “media overconsumption” has done to Americans.

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Stirewalt, a contributing editor at The Dispatch and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, puts forth the thesis that one of America’s biggest problem is anger and anxiety fueled by overconsumption of partisan media. He argues at the very start of the book that “major players in the news business are abusing their privileges and shirking their duties, and we all pay the price.”

What is he specifically referring to? Stirewalt argues that news organizations — major national newspapers, digital news outlets and 24-hour cable TV news — are “moving away from even aspirational fairness and balance and toward shared anger and the powerful emotional connections it can create.”

This is not a religion book, but it does impact the millions and millions of you across the country — many being people of faith — who have to grapple with this new press model.

On the very first page of the book, Stirewalt uses as an example for this trend a Washington Post story on the hospitalization of Cardinal Raymond Burke in August 2021 as a result of contracting COVID-19. The news account ran under the click-bait headline, “A conservative cardinal who criticized the vaccine caught covid. Days later, he was put on a ventilator.”

The headline fueled the partisan bickering that spread across Twitter. Stirewalt argues in the book that the headline and the way the story was spun “was so perfect for left-wing social media that it pushed ahead of gripping stories and images from the Post’s own top-notch journalists on the ground in Afghanistan.”

“If bored, angry people want to go on the internet,” Stirewalt writes, “and post fake Charles Darwin quotes and argle-bargle about religion and science, it doesn’t do the rest of us any harm. Except for this: the argle-bargle is the business model.”

Chris Stirewalt, author of the book “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Drives America and How to Fight Back,” is the former political editor at Fox News. Photo via AEI.

Those in the news business have known this for quite some time, something that was exacerbated by the 2016 election that brought former President Donald Trump to the White House. It should be noted that Stirewalt was canned from Fox News following the 2020 election in which Trump lost to President Joe Biden. The former president, however, continues to argue that he actually won the election.

It was Stirewalt’s call that Biden had won Arizona that Trump was upset with in the days and weeks that followed the election. He writes that Fox News viewers had grown “more accustomed to flattery” compared to 2016.

“Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems,” he added.

There are ways to quantify some of these sentiments. Pew Research Center has looked at the state of the news media from all angles in recent years. In 2021, Pew found that the percentage of Republicans with at least some trust in national news organizations was chopped in half — dropping from 70% in 2016 to 35%. “This decline,” Pew found, “is fueling the continued widening of the partisan gap in trust of the media.”

In July, a survey conducted by the firm McLaughlin & Associates found that 40% of Americans and almost 60% of U.S. evangelicals surveyed don’t trust the mainstream media’s reporting on Israel, suggesting that many are looking for credible news sources about the Middle East.

With objectivity all but gone, what does that mean for news consumers? For Christians? For people of any faith tradition?

I certainly encourage young Christians and people of all faiths to become members of the press should they want to pursue that career path. Mainstream media newsrooms need more diverse voices working in them.

At the same time, Christians should also be consuming news — even outlets we disagree with — to better understand the media and the worldview of others. What all people do need to avoid is news coverage aimed at getting you upset. It’s not always easy to do, but the media ecosystem is a vast one. There is still some very good reporting going on out there.

Stirewalt, who mentions that he grew up in a Christian home, doesn’t address his book to people of faith — the audience for the book includes all news consumers — but he does use religious terms throughout his 247-page book. For example, he argues in Chapter 5 that we are “outsourcing our morality” and that “personality-driven coverage leads to nihilism.”

The book is not all gloom and doom. It does paint a realistic picture, but Stirewalt recommends improving your media habits. As a result, he writes, “it may help you see the world through the eyes of others and give you the gift of greater compassion.”

Clemente Lisi is a senior editor at Religion Unplugged and teaches journalism at The King’s College in New York City. His new book “The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet's Biggest Sporting Event” comes out Oct. 12. Follow him on Twitter @ClementeLisi.