The complicated path that led to Rational Sheep

A reporter for The Deseret News keep asking questions and, well, here are a few of my answers

The other day, when introducing a post based on material from my Zoom conversation with Jonathan “The Anxious Generation” Haidt, I offered this quip: “Folks who have never worked in journalism would be amazed how many words an articulate expert can say during a 30-minute interview about a complicated subject.”

OK, can you imagine how many words I must have said the other day during a two-hour interview about my career in journalism, my work as a mass-comm professor, the convictions behind Rational Sheep and my “screens culture” experiences as a parent and as a grandparent?

But reporter Jacob Hess of The Deseret News kept asking questions and I kept trying to answer them. A big “thank you” to him for taking the initiative on this.

At times, things did get pretty complex — especially when trying to describe the various angles of my work over the past four decades or more.

For example, consider the years 2005-2015, when I was working inside the D.C. Beltway as director of the Washington Journalism Center program for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. That was my full-time job as a professor, administrator and senior fellow. At the same time, I was writing and editing at the GetReligion website seven days a week, while also writing my weekly nationally syndicated “On Religion” column.

Whenever someone would ask me how I wanted to be identified, I would say: “That’s complicated.” I liked this answer, offered by my son, when he was asked “What does your father do?” during the Baltimore-Washington years. He said, “My dad reads for a living and then he stops and writes.”

At the moment, I am “retired” — which means writing (and doing podcasts) for Rational Sheep, while the “On Religion” column is 36 years old, or thereabouts. The economic realities of the coronavirus pandemic killed my life in the classroom, but we hope that can be resurrected — at least a little bit — with my work as a senior fellow for Saint Constantine College (and the Orthodox Studies Institute) in Houston. I hope to teach my old “Exegete the Culture” seminar once a year.

Is that “retired”? I have to admit that it feels way more relaxed than that blitz of a decade in Washington, D.C.

Anyway, I thought Rational Sheep readers might want to see some excerpts of the edited down Deseret News interview. Yes, running this does feel like self promotion (Did I mention that we urgently need some paid Rational Sheep subscribers?), but here goes:

DN: In that recent essay on journalism, you raised serious questions about whether the “old journalism” ethos “that asked reporters and editors to strive to follow professional standards of accuracy, balance and fairness” is still financially viable in the internet age — even suggesting that a business model relying on this kind of classical journalism “no longer works.” Are you overstating for emphasis?

TM: Maybe I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but not at the structural level. The old model is still thriving in some places. But biased journalism is now good business. I love that clip from Pirates of the Caribbean with, you know, the evil British captain, “I’m sorry, Jack, it’s just good business.” …

The whole purpose of GetReligion was to defend the American model of the press on the religion beat. If you have no financial incentive for accuracy, balance, fairness, or even a respect for people, what happens to American journalism?

DN: In your recent Rational Sheep articles, you suggest that in the same moment people “complain about the state of journalism,” they “keep clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking” on partisan news. What needs to happen to go back to the American style of journalism?

TM: I don’t think it’s possible. “The Free Press” will be an interesting test. Is there a business model to offer anything resembling the American model, even as a separate niche for the 5 to 15% of the American public that might want it?

News is expensive, and commentary is cheap, which is why so many publications now are over half commentary, and you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. I mean, MSNBC has no hard news shows. Fox has one. And yet people say, “Oh, I saw that on the news last night.” And they’re not talking about news. They’re talking about a commentary show that they saw.

Jumping down a bit:

DN: You’ve participated in BYU’s religious freedom conferences over the years. Talk more about the changes in public attitudes you’ve witnessed toward religious freedom in America over your career.

TM: Religious liberty is the old liberalism. The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in the US Senate with only three votes against it, with the Coalition for that bill spanning from the Assemblies of God to the Unitarians. Everybody supported religious liberty.

That’s why you see in my writing this constant reference to old liberalism and old school liberalism, which is a major theme of a new book by The Free Press co-founder Nellie Bowles. In a recent interview, she kept stressing that this is not a battle between left and right. This is a battle between the old left and something else.

And finally, the subject of the day, whether we like it or not:

DN: “Waves of technology are altering young hearts and minds,” you wrote after your recent interview with Jonathan Haidt — a conversation that focused on whether churches and parents will dare to do more about smartphones. Can you say more about why this has become a priority focus for you?

TM: Yes, but first of all: why does it take an atheist social scientist to get us talking about this more than people of faith?

Here’s a sobering thought. Popular culture is way more important in worldview formation than the news in American life. That’s tragic, but that was even true in the 90s. Way more powerful. TikTok matters way more than National Public Radio.

Now you’ve got a form of technology that, if they click one wrong box, networks of people can find them, follow them right to their home and make direct contact with them. To quote the secular Jewish writer Marie Winn’s famous book, “The Plug-In Drug,” we’re allowing our children to be “raised by people that if they showed up at our door we would call 911.”

I think every congregation in America should, once a year, have an entire weekend dedicated to the role of technology in the home, and they should have providers of dumb phones and lite phones come by. Local stores should have a table with all their models and explain how they work and that you’ll still be able to contact your kid in an emergency, but you’re not going to put the internet in the pocket of a young person. …

This is all about parents and grandparents. When I do lectures on this at churches, I encourage them to look at their young children and say, “Our home is not like everyone else’s home.”

If you allow your child to have a television (or other screen) in his or her room, Marie Wynn said, you will get the family life that you deserve.