Prodigal Press

Confronting the Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media

Marvin Olasky, Warren Cole Smith

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781596385986
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Intolérance religieuse, persécution et conflits

Despite claiming to be neutral, print and TV journalists increasingly report news from an anti-Christian standpoint. Remarkably, however, leading nineteenth-century newspapers reported news from a Christian perspective. This book reveals how the American news media shifted from a Christian worldview to secular humanism, radically altering what the media covers and how it is reported.

Part 1

Departure

All the devils in hell and tempters on earth could do us no injury if there were no corruption in our own natures.
—Charles Haddon Spurgeon

1

The Decline of
American Journalism

A 1986 study by New York University Professor Paul Vitz found that the vast majority of elementary and high school textbooks go to great lengths to avoid reference to religion. Vitz found American history textbooks defining pilgrims as “people who make long trips” and fundamentalists as rural people who “follow the values or traditions of an earlier period.” One textbook listed three hundred important events in American history, but only three of the three hundred had anything to do with religion. A world history textbook left out any mention of the Protestant Reformation. A literature textbook changed a sentence by Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer from “Thank God” to “Thank goodness.”7

Standard journalism history textbooks provide similar distortions in their accounts of early nineteenth-century newspapers. Two chapters in the most-used textbook, Emery and Emery’s The Press and America, deal with the 1800–1833 era of American journalism without once mentioning the Christian worldview that then characterized many major American newspapers and magazines.8 The textbook does not even mention the New York Christian Advocate, in 1830 the weekly with the largest circulation in the country, or the Boston Recorder, which had the second largest circulation in that city.9

Other textbooks still in use have similar blinders.10 They ignore comments by early nineteenth-century press watchers who noted, “Of all the reading of the people three-fourths is religious . . . of all the issues of the press three-fourths are theological, ethical and devotional.” They do not mention that New York City alone boasted fifty-two magazines and newspapers that called themselves Christian, or that from 1825 to 1845 over one hundred cities and towns had explicitly Christian newspapers.11 The facts, though, are irrefutable, once they are dug up: in the early nineteenth century, American journalism often was Christian journalism.

In those days, many Christian newspapers covered everything from neighborhood disputes to foreign affairs. They did not restrict themselves to church activities. The Boston Recorder, for example, included news of everyday accidents, crimes, and political campaigns. Its circulation success allowed one editor to conclude that the Recorder had gained “the attention of the public” and “stirred up the minds of Christians to duty.”12

Recorder cofounder Nathaniel Willis was an experienced journalist. Born in 1780, he edited the Eastern Argus, a partisan newspaper in Maine, during the early years of the new century. In 1807, though, Willis’s life changed. He went to hear what he thought would be a political speech by a minister, but the minister went back to biblical basics. Willis, in his own words, “was much interested, and became a constant hearer. The Holy Spirit led me to see . . . that the Bible is the Word of God—that Christ is the only Saviour, and that it is by grace we are saved, through faith.”13

The new vision changed Willis’s life. He began to moderate the severity of political advocacy in the Argus, and he excerpted from other papers articles on religious subjects. He wanted to make the Argus an explicitly Christian newspaper, but local politicians who had backed the newspaper were opposed. Willis gave up the Argus and moved to Boston. He opened up a print shop there and investigated the journalistic marketplace.

Some newspapers, Willis found, were largely political and commercial, others largely church public-relations organs specializing in ecclesiastical news. Willis closely analyzed three religious weeklies in particular and would not even count them as newspapers, for “a proper newspaper. . . contains secular news, foreign and domestic, and advertisements.” With coeditor Sidney Morse, Willis then produced the first issue of the Boston Recorder on January 3, 1816. According to the Prospectus published that day, the Recorder was to be a newspaper with “the earliest information of all such events as mankind usually deem important,” rather than a set of abstract sermonettes.14

Willis stuck to his plan, and did not consider it lacking in piety. He knew that news stories could be written in a way showing the consequences of sin and the need for Christ. For example, an article in 1819 headlined “Shocking Homicide” reported that a man had killed his own son after being “for a long time troubled with irreligious fears, and a belief that his sins were too numerous to be pardoned.”15 An 1820 article criticized Admiral Stephen Decatur for fighting a duel for fear of being declared a coward: he forgot “that there is no honor, which is valuable and durable, save that which comes from God.”

For Willis, in his own words, all kinds of stories provided “occasion to record many signal triumphs of divine grace over the obduracy of the human heart, and over the prejudices of the unenlightened mind.” The Recorder, he wrote, was a record of “these quickening influences of the Holy Spirit.”16

Christian-run newspapers in other cities had similar formats and success. The Baltimore Chronicle, in its international coverage, described the troubles of one king: “A bloody cloud now swims before his vision, distilling blood instead of rain; the agitated monarch sees nothing but mangled limbs and bleeding bodies. . . . If Divine Providence had intended to have produced a living instance of the worthlessness of human grandeur, could a more awful example have been afforded?” The Portland Gazette, for its local coverage, described how two persons were killed by lightning within a house, for want of a lightning rod. It then concluded, “By such events, as well as by a multitude of electrical experiments, Providence is teaching us.”17

Christian newspapers through the mid-nineteenth century attempted to provide a biblical worldview on all aspects of life. One Ohio newspaper declared in 1858 that the Christian newspaper should be a provider of not “merely religious intelligence, but a news paper, complete in every department of general news, yet upon a religious, instead of a political or literary basis.” Another, the Northwestern Christian Advocate, proclaimed in 1860, “Let theology, law, medicine, politics, literature, art, science, commerce, trade, architecture, agriculture—in fine, all questions which concern and secure the welfare of a people—be freely discussed and treated, and this, too, for God, for Jesus Christ, and the advancement of the Redeemer’s kingdom among men.”18

Overall, many early Christian journalists showed an awareness of how the Bible uses bad news to show us the wages of sin and to prepare us for understanding the necessity of the Good News. The journalists knew that general statements about man’s corruption were far less gripping than coverage with specific detail of the results of sin and misery.

A Great Christian Newspaper: The New York Times

Harvard, Yale, and other universities founded by Christians now preach an atheistic gospel. A similar story could be told of some of the great newspapers of the land, including the New York Times, established in 1851 by Henry Raymond, a Bible-believing Presbyterian.19 The Times became known for its accurate news coverage and for its exposure in 1871 of both political corruption (the “Tweed Ring”) and abortion practices. Tales of the Times’ political exposes may be found in journalism history textbooks.20 The abortion story is ignored, but it had a far greater long-range impact, one that shows how significant Christian journalism could be.21

Abortion was officially illegal but nevertheless rampant in New York City from the 1840s through the 1860s. Times editorials complained that the “perpetration of infant murder . . . is rank and smells to heaven.”22 But little was done about it until the Times sent one of its reporters, Augustus St. Clair, to carry on an undercover investigation of Manhattan’s abortion businesses. For several weeks St. Clair and “a lady friend” visited the most-advertised abortionists in New York, posing as a couple in need of professional services. The result was an August 23, 1871, story headlined “The Evil of the Age.”

The story began on a solemn note: “Thousands of human beings are murdered before they have seen the light of this world, and thousands upon thousands more adults are irremediably robbed in constitution, health, and happiness.” St. Clair then skillfully contrasted powerlessness and power. He described the back of one abortionist’s office: “Human flesh, supposed to have been the r...