Media Bias?
You hear a lot about alleged anti-Catholic media bias. Often you hear it talked about as some sort of conspiracy. The main stream media (MSM) is personified as some sort of evil scheming entity. The trouble is there is nobody out there scheming. The evidence is clear that the media is formed from many independent organizations. Sure some of them are big but none of them are controlling the flow of information. Yet they all seem to make the same sorts of choices. These are choices that seem irrational and biased to us. Where do they come from?
The first point to understand the media is that they will tend towards feelers rather than thinkers. Emotions are a lot easier to reach. Show somebody in pain or somebody being victimized. People respond to that. Make a complex argument and people change the channel. So there is a natural tendency to put out raw emotional images and to keep the analysis of these events very short and sweet. This is not a conspiracy on the part of the media but a demand on the part of the public. They want to hear about Paris Hilton and they don’t want to hear about Mideast peace plans. This isn’t everyone but mass media responds to the masses. They go where the ratings are.
The second point to understand is that they try and stay away from religion. People disagree about faith and so the media treads lightly. This is not their idea but just the fact that if you offend some small religious group they are likely to make a lot of noise. What is more their protest is likely to have a lot of sympathy. Remember emotional images of victimized groups are powerful. So they are careful when talking about matters of faith. Much of this is the fault of Christians who can’t seem to agree on anything. It is the majority faith but often they look more like many small religions. Many churches don’t have a single leader that can clarify issues quickly so even getting the official Southern Baptist position before your deadline can be hard.
You put these two things together and what do you get when it comes to moral questions? What happens is a very under-developed morality comes forward. Think of morality before the 10 Commandments. People knew things like adultery, murder, lying, and stealing were wrong. That is clear from our innate feelings of fairness and not wanting to hurt other people. So what did the law bring? It brought an authority outside ourselves. We tend to have much stronger feelings that something is wrong when somebody else does something than when we do it. Especially when we are the victim we can be very sure something is wrong. When we do the same thing we have many excuses. An external law changes that. The same law must apply to everyone.
So who writes the law? Well if we write it we end up with a ton of exceptions. We go by our feelings and feelings don’t follow consistent principles. We know we want consistent principles so we make them complicated. GK Chesterton said if you throw out the big laws you don’t get anarchy but you get many small laws. This is why God’s gift of the law was so important. God gives us 10 commandments so we don’t have to make 10,000 commandments.
When you look at the medias and see how they focus on the emotional then you can see how the innate sense of fairness and not wanting to hurt people is very strong. That is a good thing but it is quite primitive. What takes us to the next step morally is absolute moral principles that come from God. They resonate with our moral feeling most of the time but not all the time. Still we need to understand that the commandments are more important than our feelings. You can see why the medias has trouble with this. First of all, it involves an abstract analysis of feelings and the notion that rational principles should sometimes trump emotional reactions. That violates principle one that the medias avoids deep thinking. Worse yet the analysis must involve the supernatural. We are talking about principles that every human is subject to and unable to change. How do you get there unless you have God as the source of these principles?
So when you deal with an issue like euthanasia. On CBC the other day we saw a report on a Canadian woman who had gone to Switzerland to take her life. It is legal there. Her husband was a retired Anglican priest who made an emotional appeal to change the law so others like her could end their suffering at home. That side of the argument the MSM knows how to represent. How do you represent the other side? Well you need to start from the idea that strong emotions don’t allow us to discard moral principles. People are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. So can we just discard what the creator has given? You see how it gets very abstract and very religious. They can give a bishop a 20 second sound-byte but that won’t do it. They need to give him 20 minutes to even begin to make the argument. It is not going to happen on a 3 minute story that is mostly to cover the facts of what happened.
So the media get blamed a lot but they are just responding to market forces. We need to look deeper into society than that. One place we need to look is at the lack of Christian unity. Jesus said we would have to be united to be a credible force in society. Our disunity has been causing our influence to diminish over time. Unity is one of those moral absolutes that we have made many exceptions to for emotional reasons. We like our pet traditions and our private interpretations. We like them so much that God’s word can no longer be heard through the noise.