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The death watch of journalism | WELT

A few years ago, I was an assistant coach at a predominantly black high school. I loved coaching the offensive line and we had some great success together. One Friday night, we were riding the bus to a game against a white school in the suburbs.

“You know, as soon as we got off the bus, we were already down by two touchdowns,” our head coach told us.

“What do you mean?” I asked naively.

“Because of our appearance,” he said. “We play against the other team And the officials.”

And then we got off the bus, played our game, and everything he said happened. We lost by a touchdown.

This was not unlike ABC News's coverage of the Trump-Harris debate on Tuesday night. Now, no one feels that either candidate is a particularly good speaker or debater. Compared to those two candidates, George W. Bush is basically Brad Pitt in terms of charisma. Watching them was somewhat painful. It was like watching a couple of distant relatives bicker at a family reunion. Tonally, their respective needles were set to “Pique” the entire time, which made it feel like scratching fingernails on a chalkboard.

The coaching point for Vice President Kamala Harris was probably something like, “Speak coherently and show you have some kind of plan,” while for former President Donald Trump it might have been, “Stay calm and act somewhat presidential.” You could argue they both failed. If anything, I was shocked at how bad they both were.

But it became clear pretty early on that Trump was debating both Harris and the two ABC News anchors, who seemed completely at ease checking facts and cheering on the former president while letting Harris get away with it. In every casual group chat I was in, there were people who said they noticed this—you didn't need a PhD in communications to figure it out. In the end, both sides claimed victory, and none of it meant much. Plus, we're all becoming more cynical, which is not a good thing.

It became clear pretty early on that Trump was debating both Harris and the two ABC News moderators, who were completely unbiased in checking the former president's facts and applauding him while letting Harris get away with it.

But what is more significant to me is the role of “journalism” in all of this. It is dear to my heart, of course, because I teach it, but it is also dear to my heart because I have lived and traveled extensively in former Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. And when a country is trying to preserve its freedom, “the media” is almost always a crucial lynchpin. When I arrived in Lithuania in 1998 as a mindless, 21-year-old “missionary” looking for adventure, one of the first things I was shown was the TV tower, where freedom-seeking Lithuanians stood in front of tanks and armed soldiers to demand a free press – not even a full decade before I arrived. They realized that if anything was going to change in their country, it would start with an honest and impartial press, which seems even too optimistic in today's America. We haven't seen impartiality in the mainstream media in a long time.

When it comes time for my students to find jobs, part of the conversation calculus is something like, “You always do what someone says, so you have to be comfortable with the person you're doing it with, given your faith and beliefs.” Early in my career, I freelanced for ESPN, back when the network was in the sports business, not the worldview business. I'm sure the network wouldn't want me now, and to be honest, I probably wouldn't want to work there either. The same could probably be said about some of the Christian publications I used to write for.

Ironically, if a version of journalism (as we thought of it as something “impartial”) is dead, the free market may have killed it. News is just a reflection of our bifurcated culture, where the media tickles its audience based primarily on which side of the political spectrum they are on and what the market will bear. Perhaps today we have, in some ways, the most “honest” version we've ever had – in that if you want “the truth,” you have to avoid pretty much everything the mainstream media has to offer.

But as Christians, we must seek the truth. We must speak it in love. We must resist cynicism and settle for hope. I admit that I found this difficult on Tuesday evening.

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