Part I: The doctrines that built America's news silos

Why do we live in two different nations when it comes to news? That's a crucial "screens culture" issue

Some people insist that White House races don’t matter until after Labor Day. Maybe so, but at this point the vast majority of voters in our divided States of America are already hunkered down inside their concrete news and entertainment silos and are waiting for the storm to pass. It’s almost time for football!

There is more to this than politics. That’s what makes this subject Rational Sheep material, since what I have to say here concerns the digital DNA of the age in which we live. Please be patient with me. Also, it may help to remember that I have been a frustrated third-party voter for quite some time.

Now, I know that I keep using the following quotation, and I know that some people will roll their eyes at the mere sight of the name “David French.” However, there is a good reason — in terms of “screens culture” — that concerned citizens should heed the opening lines of French’s much-overlooked book, “Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”

Ready? Here we go again:

"It's time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States cannot be guaranteed," wrote French. Right now, "there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart."

Here is my summary of that thesis:

Americans are divided by their choices in news and popular culture. America remains the developing world's most religious nation, yet its increasingly secularized elites occupy one set of zip codes, while most traditional religious believers live in another. In politics, more and more Democrats are Democrats simply because they hate Republicans, and vice versa.

If you want to spot our concrete news silos at this specific moment in time, all you have to do is visit one of your favorite news websites and search for “Tim Walz.”

If you are a red cultural conservative, you will find all kinds of screenshots and archived videos about how the Minnesota governor, and the VP choice of acting president Kamala Harris, has — for years — repeatedly claimed an Army National Guard rank that he didn’t earn, in part because he retired early so that he would not be sent into a war zone with his unit (also allowing him to run for political office).

If you want a sample of that content, all you have to do is go to X and search for “Tim Walz” and then do the scroll of doom thing — CLICK HERE. Welcome to roughly half of America.

However, if you are a blue cultural progressive, you can go to The New York Times and other elite sources and read something like this:

[Tim Walz] is a veteran. Mr. Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard as a teenager and retired 24 years later in 2005. He deployed to Italy from 2003 to 2004 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and received the Army Commendation Medal for meritorious service and two Army Achievement Medals.

That’s that. Nothing to see here. Also, you can click into Times stories like this — “Vance Attacks Walz’s Military Record, Accusing Him of Avoiding a Tour in Iraq” — and read the “Republicans pounce” framing of these issues. A sample:

[J.D.] Vance based his accusations on a Facebook post from 2018, and a paid letter to the editor to The West Central Tribune that same year in which the writers, Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr, both retired command sergeant majors in the Minnesota National Guard, accused Mr. Walz of “conveniently retiring a year before his battalion was deployed to Iraq.”

The criticisms were first leveled by Mr. Behrends and Mr. Herr during Mr. Walz’s first campaign for governor.

But Joseph Eustice, a 32-year veteran of the national guard who led the same battalion as Mr. Walz and served under him, said in an interview … that the governor was a dependable soldier and that the attacks by his fellow comrades were unfounded.

“He was as good a soldier as you’d find, and to have two former sergeant majors say that he wasn’t, it’s just not true,” Mr. Eustice said, adding that he disagreed with Mr. Walz’s politics and most likely would not vote for him in November even though they were friends.

Mr. Eustice recalled that Mr. Walz’s decision to run for Congress came months before the battalion received any official notice of deployment, though he said there had been rumors that it might be deployed.

Is that true? What does “official” mean? In the alternative world of conservative media, there is screenshot evidence (if you are into that kind of thing) that appears to punch holes in that official Harris-Walz campaign logic. You can even read this post (“On the mediocrity and mendacity of Tim Walz”) by a rebellious former New York Times reporter — Alex Berenson, writing at his Unreported Truths feed on Substack.

Meanwhile, Democrats can also read (or watch) all kinds of fictional takes on Vance and his love of couches, including a one-liner from Walz. It’s good, clean, joyful fun, of course. Can conservative comics respond in late-night shows?

Alas, as one politician asked 2,000 years ago: “What is truth?”

Is that a political question, a technology question, a business question or a religion question?

The answer, of course, is: “Yes.”

But let’s pause and meditate on what, in an essay for the Religion & Liberty journal, I called: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism.”

Here is the bottom line in that piece, which I consider one of the most important things I have written in my life. These competing journalism cultures exist, and are dividing America, because it no longer makes economic sense, in our splintered digital age, for journalists to report and produce news that will upset their paying customers. #SIGH. You may need to read that again.

In the South this is called “preaching to the choir.” Sadly, this strategy does work, producing many online clicks and “reposts.” If you want to read more about these niche-news wars, click here for a GetReligion post, and podcast, with lots of links to more information and discussions of that Religion & Liberty piece.

Like I said, the “truth” question today is linked to the fact that many of the most divisive issues in American news are rooted in religious, moral and cultural disputes. For decades, I have written about the many ways that mainstream journalists have struggled to cover news of this kind.

“The Evolving Religion of Journalism” focuses on how The New York Times has served as a powerful rudder that helps steer the mainstream-media ship. The bottom line is that the old journalism “religion” that asked reporters and editors to strive to follow professional standards of accuracy, balance and fairness has died in the Internet age. That business model no longer works.

How did this happen? Here is the opening piece of a three-act Times drama at the heart of my essay. This is long, but essential, and includes a name — Jay Rosen — that we will read more about later this week in Part II of this post.

Act I: “The orthodoxy of no orthodoxies”

In 2004, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen published a provocative PressThink essay under this headline: “Journalism Is Itself a Religion,” with this caption, “A Theological Investigation.” He noted that much of the debate about the ethics and even morality of modern journalism, or even what he called the “priesthood of the press,” revolves around a specific question: “What results from the ‘relative godlessness of mainstream journalists?’” This has led to fierce debates about the quality of religion-news coverage in the press, or the lack of accurate, informed coverage.

All this led Rosen to discuss a famous New York Times Magazine story in 1999 about the religious beliefs of a radical anti-abortion activist. It included these words from reporter David Samuels: “It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy.”

Critics, Rosen noted, thought this declaration that there are no absolute moral truths sounded like “dogma.” It was also clear that “the world that most of us inhabit” consisted of zip codes close to the Times, if not the newsroom itself. To illustrate this, he turned to one of my national “On Religion” columns, in which I interviewed William Proctor — a Harvard Law graduate and the former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Proctor is the author of the 2000 book The Gospel According to the New York Times.

Rosen quoted the following: “Critics are wrong if they claim that The New York Times is a bastion of secularism. … In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward ‘fundamentalists.’ Thus, when listing the ‘deadly sins’ that are opposed by the Times, [Proctor] deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world’s most influential newspaper condemns ‘the sin of religious certainty.’”

This “orthodoxy of forbidding all orthodoxies,” noted Rosen, attacked transcendent truth claims from traditional religious faiths. Here is another bite from my column:

“Yet here’s the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths,” said Proctor. Its leaders are “absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right.”

That was 20 years ago. The “journalism doctrines” have continued to evolve on both the cultural left and right, for reasons that transcend the old realities of “media bias.”

The result is what one pundit has called “Conclusion-First ‘Journalism,’” with news that preaches to two different Americas.

I’ll dig into that pundit’s manifesto in my mid-week post.