The journalism death watch

A few years ago, I was an assistant football coach at a predominantly black high school. I loved coaching the offensive line, and we enjoyed some great successes together. One Friday night, we were on our way, by bus, to play a suburban white school.

“You know, as soon as we get off the bus, we’re already down two touchdowns,” our head coach told us.

“What do you mean?” I asked, naively.

“Because of the way we look,” he said. “We’re playing against the other team and the officials.”

And then we got off the bus, played our game, and everything he said came true. We lost by a touchdown.

This was not unlike ABC News’ treatment of the Trump-Harris debate on Tuesday night. Now, no one is under the impression that either candidate is an especially good public speaker or a good debater. George W. Bush is basically Brad Pitt, charisma-wise, compared to these two candidates. Watching them was semi-painful. It was like watching a couple of distant relatives argue at a family reunion. Tonally, their respective needles were both spiked at “pique” the whole time, which made for a fingernails-on-chalkboard experience.

Coming in, the coaching point for Vice President Kamala Harris was probably something like “Speak coherently and indicate that you have some kind of a plan,” whereas for former President Donald Trump it may have been “Keep your cool and act vaguely presidential.” You could make the argument that they both failed. If anything, I was shocked at how bad they both were.

But it became pretty clear pretty early that Trump was debating both Harris and the two ABC News moderators, who seemed completely comfortable fact-checking and clapping back at the former president while giving Harris a pass. Every casual group chat I’m a part of included people indicating that they noticed this—you didn’t need a doctorate in communication studies to figure that out. In the end, both sides claimed victory and none of it meant much. Plus, we will all become more cynical, which isn’t good.

But what’s more meaningful to me is the role of “journalism” in all of this. I obviously care about it because I teach it, but I also care about it because I’ve lived and traveled extensively in formerly Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. And when a country is trying to preserve its freedom, “The Media” is almost always a key pivot point. When I arrived in Lithuania in 1998 as a vapid, 21-year-old “missionary” in search of adventure, one of the first things I was shown was the television tower where freedom-seeking Lithuanians stood in front of tanks and armed soldiers in pursuit of a free press—not even a full decade before I arrived. They realized that if anything was going to change in their country, it started with an honest and impartial media, which in today’s America even seems too Pollyannaish by half. We haven’t seen impartiality in a long time in the mainstream media.

When it’s time for my students to get jobs, part of the conversational calculus is something along the lines of “You’re always doing someone’s bidding, so you have to be comfortable with whomever that is in light of your faith and your convictions.” At the beginning of my career, I freelanced for ESPN back when it was in the sports business and not the worldview business. I’m sure the network wouldn’t want me now, and to be fair, I probably wouldn’t want to work there either. The same could probably be said for a few of the Christian publications I used to write for as well.

Ironically, if one version of journalism (as we thought of it as something “impartial”) is dead, the free market may have killed it. News is just a reflection of our bifurcated culture, where outlets are tickling their audiences’ ears based primarily on what side of the political aisle they occupy and what the market will bear. In a broken way, maybe what we have today is the most “honest” version we’ve ever had—inasmuch as if you want “the truth” you know to steer clear of, well, pretty much all of what the mainstream media has to offer.

But as Christians, we are to seek truth. We are to speak it in love. We are to push back against cynicism and content for hope. I’ll be the first to admit, this was difficult to do on Tuesday night.