What Happened to the News?

This article might seem to be about a trivial matter, but I believe it taps into something that runs very deep. 

I like to scan news sites every day.  I guess it’s kind of a hobby.  I’m interested in our world and what goes on in it, especially in the political or social areas. 

The theologian Karl Barth once famously said that ministers should “preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”  He meant that we should preach the Bible’s timeless truths to the modern culture, and to know the culture we must be aware of the news.  I agree.  Christians should be informed about what’s going on in the world. 

I also think it’s good to be aware of ideas you disagree with; to know how the other half lives.  I’m conservative but try to know how liberals/progressives think.  It’s a way to hone my edge by sharpening it with iron, rather than just affirming ideas I already agree with.

For years I used to subscribe to Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times.  They were mostly liberal, but had their occasional good articles, and I enjoyed honing my own views against their opinion pages.  In the same way, I would look up lefty news sites on my computer, perhaps even more than conservative ones.  Again, to keep my edge.

Some sites that always so extremely liberal that I knew it was better to just skip them, like MSNBC, Slate and Salon. 

But in recent years I’ve noticed that even the sites that were occasionally reasonable seem to have abandoned all journalistic sanity.  For some reason they went from center-left to jumping off the liberal cliff without a parachute!   I put CNN, NPR, Time Magazine, Politico, and USA Today into this category. 

What happened?  It didn’t used to be this bad.  Now, almost all the mainstream media seems to be little more than non-stop left-wing editorial. 

Some examples:

• Every negative weather event will be attributed to climate change (and our failure to spend trillions to fix it)
• Trump is bad
• Every conservative politician is bad
• Every problem should be solved by more (massive) government spending
• We should ‘trust the science’ (esp. in the days of Covid)
• Those who oppose abortion are not against killing but against ‘reproductive health care’

Another example, one that particularly exposes the mainstream media’s extremism and hypocrisy: their failure to oppose the threat to women’s sports by the transgender movement.  Though liberals profess to care much about justice and fairness, they say nothing about the injustice of men ‘identifying’ as women and then competing against and defeating women in sports.  Where is the outcry?  They are so far gone they cannot even oppose this blatant evil.   

What has bewitched them to abandon journalism in favor of hard-left bias? 

There used to be a saying, “Don’t believe everything you read.”  I think we are way beyond that now. 

Such moral insanity doesn’t come from nowhere.  It is not caused by merely human opinion.  It is too extreme for that.  The media has been swayed by an outside force. 

The answer lies in the spiritual realm.  The Bible clearly tells us that there are unseen forces at work, ultimately rooted in either in God’s or the devil.  As it says in Ephesians 6:12, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”  We are also told that the devil “masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).

I believe that the mainstream media has been bewitched by evil forces. 

However, there seems to be some recent hopeful signs that maybe the worst is over.  Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, prohibited the famously liberal paper from making a presidential endorsement in the last election (everyone knows they would have been all-in for Harris).  There were shrieks of protest, resignations and cancelations of subscriptions as a result.  A good start.

More recently, the CEO of National Public Radio testified before Congress that her organization made a mistake in under reporting the Hunter Biden laptop story.  This kind of admission almost never happens.  Maybe it marks the beginnings of a return to sanity. 

Maybe the media abandons its extreme liberal bias and returns to real journalism.  But we won’t hold our breath.  Besides, as Christians, our hope is not built on wicked institutions become less wicked (though we hope they do).  Our hope is in God. 

So, whether the media corrects itself or not, we need to practice discernment in everything.  When something is reported, or an opinion is expressed, we should sift it and measure it against what we know to be true.  Let us not fall for ‘the cult of the expert’–believing someone just because the person speaking has a degree or title.  They might even have won a Nobel Prize or Pulitzer Prize.  Those things don’t make any difference; people with titles and prizes can be just as wrong as anyone. 

Let us have a Christian mind formed in us and let us not be persuaded by what we hear, however authoritative it sounds, if it goes against God.