It was highly interesting to listen to Wolf tell about his last meeting with a group of Christian business people. It really engages one to think. Here is part of what he said among other things:
A journalist, who studied Journalism 20 years ago had argued there that free journalism, talking out your mind, is still possible. 20 years ago, when you had worked as a Journalist, he said, you were given a topic, you did the research and you came up with a story from what you had found out. End of story.
Today, especially in larger newspapers and magazines, a journalist is given a topic, BUT also the very sources he should use, the expected outcome and a frame work of what he should cover and what he shouldn’t. In other words, that’s not freedom any more, but ham-stringed journalism, that serves another purpose than telling the truth.
News is not really news: its what is sold to us under the disguise of news. From 300,000 newsworthy items every day, maybe 3,000 make it to the newswire, and 300 of these items – 1 thousandth of what actually happened – are picked by our local newspaper editors, spiced up with local interest stories, and packaged and sold to us as “newspaper”.
The 90 second sound bites that we see or hear in the news is, of course, not the full story. It is the carefully crafted and massaged message that “journalists” make up to sell us the feeling that we have been informed. Take for example TIME weekly magazine. Their columns and essays are very much bound to never upset the best and biggest customers they have: those who pay the sinfully costly full page ads.The idea is to sell the persons who buy a copy of the magazine for € 4,40 the feeling of being informed, while at the same time protecting the interests of the brands advertising their goods in their pages. Would TIME magazine ever bring out the sad story of the deeply insecure and megalomaniac folks who are addicted to status symbols like ridiculously costly watches? No, because companies advertising such luxury goods would not place any more ads in a paper that debunk their plot: sell grossly over-prized watches to grossly insecure folks who believe the lie that a brand watch adds to their value.
This ties in with a similar phenomenon in our work. When we tell stories in the West about what God is doing in other parts of the world, we usually experience people explode with frustration asking, ‘Why are we not told about this, why do the churches not cover such stories, why do the Christian magazines not publish these things? Why are we informed only with what endorses the Status Quo, or are we intentionally kept in the dark? Why are we not hearing about the millions of Muslims coming to Christ in house churches in Muslim countries, but are forever bombarded with church sponsored “mercy” work, old fashioned evangelism and the ever present social upgrading activities? Is it possible that even the Christian press is not free, but enslaved to those who benefit from the churchy Status Quo, or worse, that the Christian press is also ham-stringed by playing nice to those that place the 4-color ads in their magazines?
Then much of what we have in Christian journalism would not be Christian at all, but a farce, a show that is not run by the desire for truth, but political and economic calculation.
And that would not be good, would it?
