Christian Media = Lazy
Good morning and welcome to Promise & Peace. I am Thomas Turner, in for Evan Curry.
Recently, a church in Georgia entered made headlines over their decision nine months ago to sell their church building and use the $1 million of equity for ministry and help those who had recently become unemployed. This became news nine months after it happened? Nine months? During this time Christianity Today Liveblog posted on the drop in attendance at the CBA Christian Retail Convention, if Michael Jackson was a Christian or not, and ties between Reader’s Digest and Saddleback’s quarterly Purpose Driven Connection.
The news was first reported by the Atlantic Journal Constitution today. Not by Christianity Today, not by Christian Century, not by any of the Baptist presses. A secular newspaper picked up on the story before any Christian periodical did. Whether you are of the persuasion that Christians should be in the business of culture making or influencing the greater secular culture, you should be a bit muffed that it took nine months for any source to pick up on this story and it wasn’t even a Christian one.
We as Christians cannot complain about the negative criticism of Christianity in the newsmedia if we do not go after the positive stories ourselves. Christian journalism is set up to be purely reactionary: reacting to stories that trickle down from secular newsmedia. This puts Christian journalism in a submissive role, and uses secular culture as a lens of worthiness instead of creating its own lens.
The “biblical lens” is a buzzword of Christian cultural critique. The mantra of a Christian worldview is to engage with art, philosophy, and culture through a “biblical lens,” so that all will be filtered through the Word of God and worldly ideas will be tossed away like chaff.
For Christian media there can be many lenses: the “biblical lens,” the “gospel lens,” the “creational lens,” the “traditional lens.” Instead of discussing the world through any of these lenses, the Christian media continually drops the ball and takes the easy, lazy path of “secular lens.” Using the “secular lens” is a cop out, it’s a way of having others do your work for you and then adding your slant at the end. It’s not true journalism, it’s making every article into an op-ed. It doesn’t deserve our time.
What does deserve our time is the Christian media that pursues stories that are meaningful to their audience at an actional level, stories that matter to a Christian way of living and come forth out of genuine journalistic investigation and not from surfing the top headlines from Reuters and adding some Christian commentary to it.
Maybe some day soon we’ll read stories like the church selling its building from Christian voices and not from a secular newspaper. And maybe a little sooner, too.
I was recently at BlogHer09 in Chicago - a conference for women bloggers across all niches. While MommyBloggers came out in droves, many of us in smaller niches such as politics, the queerosphere, women of color, etc. were definitely in the minority.
One of the keynote discussions that stuck with me the most was about the future of Web 2.0/3.0 - where are we going. One of the panelists announced that we were in the gut of a new cultural turn…the heyday of citizen journalism unlike any other time in history. The reality is that we are becoming our own media. Sure, print media is still alive, but it is definitely in a fight for its life.
Therefore, I must ask, how viral are Christian bloggers? I can name 5 that I read regularly. The others get a mere skim once a week. I haven’t read Christianity Today in…I am not even sure how long. Sure, discourse on kingdom work is compelling, but Christian Media is part of ‘establishment’ media. There is an inherent agenda conflict there.
Sidenote - This weekend, I attended a panel discussion showcasing the work of four international activist bloggers. One of them - Cristina from Bolivia - writes about her indigenous people. They have been written out of Bolivia’s national history - rendered invisible. She said something very powerful and moving (yet obvious and simple)….”If I don’t write about us and tell our stories, then who will. Who will remember us if I don’t tell you who we are.”
If Christian Media isn’t presenting stories on kingdom work then I would stop wishing and praying for them to do so. My suggestion - cut out what is getting in the way of quality content!
I think part of this quandary is that in the advertising based system that structures both traditional and new media is that out-dated thinking is misleading traditional media instead of advertising media. What you imply about new media is that the people are getting what they want. Giving people what they want can make you a whole lot of money. The movie and print media industries are not learning the lessons of the music industry: people will pay good money for what they want (high bitrate mp3s with no DRM). I think that new media is not quite as “new” as they propose…where traditional journalism used “factuality” as a charade to make advertising dollars, so too do bloggers and web based media. As long as you tie “truth”-telling to a capitalist advertising structure journalism, for all of its staunch traditionalism or viral-ness, will be about making money.
Which is not a bad thing, people need to support their families. It’s just that the new is on the cutting edge of content using a very similar economic system to structure itself around.
[...] Hey all, I will be guest posting on evancurry.com this week. My first post over there is Christian Media = Lazy. [...]