Closing arguments

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: a closing argument.

I’m going to link an extraordinarily long piece in The Economist … 17-thousand words … written by James Bennet, the former editorial page editor of The New York Times. It’ll take you about an hour to read if you’re not distracted.

It’s about the crisis of confidence in the news media. You probably wouldn’t agree with every word in the piece. I didn’t, either.

But it’s an unblinking look at the culture change that happened at The New York Times … that I look at as a microcosm of the state of the American mainstream news media, the crisis of confidence. Americans have almost no confidence in the news media, and the news media have returned the favor, lacking confidence in the public that it supposedly serves.

I say that simply to note that I think WORLD is uniquely positioned for this moment.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Nick, I see that. I think we’ve built a structure here and a core team that’s ready to take off and fly. I know people are weary of the bias of the mainstream media. I know I am. I come from the mainstream media.

But I’m noticing that things have gotten worse as the media have doubled down on the bias.

There’s an obvious anti-life bias, whether that’s at the beginning of life or at the end.

An anti-Creation bias, where we find not journalism but propaganda to prop up the assault on the very meaning of male and female.

And an anti-human bias, where individuals are not judged on merit but divided by membership in an ethnic group. That’s all over the media today.

EICHER: It is both impossible and unwise to summarize 17-thousand words into just a few, so what follows here is not an attempt at summary … it’s just an observation that rings so true to me from Bennet’s piece in The Economist. He laments that the ideology of The New York Times newsroom springs from the root idea that—and I’m quoting here—

“… there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.”

In other words, just a power game.

Well, we don’t see it that way. We know there is objective truth and our job is to tell it. WORLD’s No. 1 core value is this, the words of our founder Joel Belz: Every day, earn their trust.

That’s our closing argument for the December Giving Drive. If we’ve not earned your trust, we don’t deserve your support. If we have, please make your gift today and help us take advantage of this pivotal moment for the American news media, a strategic moment.

BROWN: Your support can absolutely make a difference … so please make that difference today or before the last grain of sand makes it through the hourglass that is 2023. wng.org/donate. That’s wng.org/donate.

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