Journalism Is Itself a Religion - Page 5

Delegates to the Assembly met in the city of Sarajevo, still recovering from its siege during the Balkan wars. The commitment they voted into being is not a code that would govern an institution. The text is addressed only to individual conscience, and only media people--producers of culture and journalism--are asked to sign. In one portion of the document, the signers speak of their failure to prevent evil. And they attempt to reconcile themselves to that failure:

We look back on a century of brilliance and bloodshed, of amazing technological advance and distressing human misery, of mobility and isolation and of healing and hatred. A century in which two world wars emanated from the so-called advanced and civilized continent of Europe. A century in which we split the atom, but left families, communities and nations divided. A century which ended with some 30 unresolved major conflict situations.

We accept that we in the media, whilst talent and technology enabled us to reach the lives of almost every last person in the world, were not able to create the climate in which problems were solved, conflicting groups and interests reconciled, and peace and justice established.

The media system has closed circle on the earth. It can finally "reach the lives of almost every last person in the world." This not just an earthly power. It is greater, more mystical than that, say the signers of the Sarajevo document (which is still obscure, as universal declarations go.) The public climate is partly our creation, they said. If it turns murderous, we need to admit our part in that. And find some way to redemption:

Now that we confront a new century, many of us, hoping that we interpret the views and feelings of the vast majority of our colleagues, would like to establish a commitment, an undertaking, a pledge, to all those who will live and love and work in these coming hundred years.

The Journalist's Creed from long ago. The Sarajevo Commitment from today. Others may dispute it, but they seem to me spiritual documents.

Three: The Orthodoxy of No Orthodoxy

Ninety percent of the commentary on this subject takes in another kind of question entirely: What results from the "relative godlessness of mainstream journalists?" Or, in a more practical vein: How are editors and reporters striving to improve or beef up their religion coverage?

Here and there in the discussion of religion "in" the news, there arises a trickier matter, which is the religion of the newsroom, and of the priesthood in the press. A particularly telling example began with this passage from a 1999 New York Times Magazine article about anti-abortion extremism: "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," wrote David Samuels.

Article Author: Jay Rosen

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