Journalists, Prophets and Preachers... Failure, Absence and Being Tuned Out

Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed.

Everything else is public relations.

-George Orwell

The press gets a lot of flack these days.  I think they deserve some criticism, but not the kind of criticism they generally receive.  With a very few exceptions, the press has become a mouthpiece for extremists.  You have Fox News on one end of the spectrum claiming to be fair and balanced, which unless they're being deliberately ironic is just a patent lie, if they are being ironic, it's hilarious, except for the fact that the American public is the butt of the joke.  On the other hand you have the "liberal" media, which is, to be fair a monstrosity in it's own right.  The "enlightened" and educated folks who are largely the foil for Fox's brand of conservativism, have been around for a long time, and they have held the reigns of our cultural context, and they have led us onto the brink of a precipice.

I suspect that the failure of liberalism as our dominant cultural metaphor is entirely responsible for the rise of the sort of bombastic fear mongering that one finds on Fox.  Most of the rhetoric that one is bathed in over the whole 24 hour news cycle is textbook reactionary material: we need to fear the outsiders and the agents of change, because they're a threat to our way of life.

In almost any period of human history this is a good formula for popular success: make people aware that the world is out get them, because in some cases it is, thus there is significant evidence to support your claims.  People naturally fear change and outsiders because we do not like to lose what we have.  Reactionary talk  first convinces people that they are in the category of people who belong, who have carved out their niche in the world, who have worked for what they have and then it subtly (or not so subtly) works to convince them that someone is trying to take it away from them, tapping in to our basic fear of loss, which is rooted in our anxiety over our own mortality.

Liberalism failed when it became the status quo, when the politics that brought us labor unions and the New Deal, became the way things were and they began to suffer the same lesions and infections that corrupted our democratic republic in the gilded age.  We discovered that no one is immune to the corrupting nature of power and wealth.

Journalists, and preachers alike started to neglect their prophetic duty: the call to speak a word of challenge to the powers of the age.  Perhaps it's because money has always been able to purchase influence, but I think it goes deeper than that, into the depth of human nature.  We always want to keep what we have.  A young journalist might have the verve to dig up the truth behind and underneath all the mess, but they do not yet have the trust of the public.  Once one becomes a trusted source (think Tom Brokaw, or Walter Cronkite), one must become more circumspect about one's words, and the question is no longer: "is it true?"  The question starts to be laden with other considerations.

Jesus said, "whoever seeks to save his life will lose it." (Mt. 16: 25)  Which is a rather challenging idea, which has broad implications, far beyond the obvious implications concerning martyrdom.  It means that when you hold on to what you have, you lose something very important.  I would claim that journalists and preachers alike have neglected their prophetic purpose in favor of career stability.  Prophets are not popular characters for the most part, if you want to be beloved, you probably shouldn't make too much of habit of telling people what they don't want to hear.

If you're popular, you're probably not a prophet.  There are a lot of pretenders out there; a lot of people who imitate the stern, sometimes bombastic style of prophetic speech, but they're really just telling people things that reinforce what they already believed.  There is no challenge, no gauntlet thrown down, no call to repent.  False prophets have no trouble accumulating a following, there are people out there who will flock to their teaching.  Genuine prophets usually find themselves alone under the broom tree, with the powers of the world seeking their life.

I have been thinking about a quote I saw on the interweb last week, but cannot re-trace: "Preach like you're trying to get fired."  And no, I don't think that means deliberately trying to offend people and being obnoxious, I do think it means exercising the prophetic role of the office.  I think it means presenting the challenge that Jesus makes to the way things are and always have been.  I think it might make some people angry, but if it doesn't, isn't it all just public relations?