The Daily Signal - Marvin Olasky on How to Reform Journalism

Episode Date: February 11, 2020

Marvin Olasky, editor in chief of World Magazine, and author of the new book, “Reforming Journalism” joins The Daily Signal Podcast today to discuss journalistic independence, what Christian journalism is, and Olasky’s journey out of communism to Christianity.  We also cover these stories: President Donald Trump releases his proposed budget for fiscal year 2021 on Monday that cuts spending by $4.4 trillion and balances the budget in 15 years. The United States Justice Department said on Monday that it is filing charges against four members of the Chinese military for breaking into Equifax, a credit reporting company.  Coronavirus continues to ravage China. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, February 11th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Kate Trinco. Today we'll feature an interview our former colleague, Daniel Davis, did with Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World Magazine, and author of the new book, Reforming Journalism. They talk about independence and journalism, what Christian journalism is, and Olasky's journey out of communism to Christianity. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-fewel star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. President Donald Trump released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2021 on Monday that cuts spending by $4.4 trillion and balances the budget in 15 years. Here's what Russ Vote, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, had to say

about it via CNBC. We are going to robustly fund the military rebuild that was necessary when this president came to office. This will be the fourth year of very high levels of defense spending, $741 billion. In that $741 billion is a 20% increase for nuclear modernization and the important work that's done at the Department of Energy. So look, we prioritize the defenses of this country that President and the Commander-in-Chief believes that is absolutely vital. And at the same time, we believe it's necessary to have restraint on non-defense spending, 5% reduction. 21% reduction for foreign aid. We believe that the era of spending money for a Bob Dylan

statute in Mozambique or a professional cricket league in Afghanistan, those days are over, and we need to get after the waste for our own abuse on our non-defense discretionary. According to Justin Bogie, a senior policy analyst in fiscal affairs at the Heritage Foundation, there is room for improvement in Trump's budget. The president's proposal represents a missed opportunity in other areas. Bogey wrote for the Daily Signal, namely it fails to propose significant reforms to Social Security and health care entitlement programs, the main drivers of spending and debt growth. Attorney General William Barr took a question from a reporter on Monday, inquiring about whether the Justice Department was getting information on Ukraine from the

president's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has reportedly been investigating Burisma and Hunter Biden's role with the company. Here's that exchange between the reporter and Barr via C-SPAN. General Barr. Senator Graham says that Rudy Giuliani will be providing the Department of Information related to Ukraine and the Bidens. What is the process for receiving this information? Who will evaluate it?

And is this something that you feel the need to accuse yourself from? Well, as I've previously said, the DOJ has the obligation to have an open door. to anybody who wishes to provide us information that they think is relevant. But as I did say to Senator Graham, we have to be very careful with respect to any information coming from the Ukraine. There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine. There are a lot of cross currents, and we can't take anything we receive from the Ukraine at face value.

And for that reason, we had established an intake process in the field so that any information coming in about Ukraine could be carefully scrutinized by the department and its intelligence community partners so that we could assess its provenance and its credibility. And that is true for all information that comes to the department relating to the Ukraine, including anything Mr. Giuliani might provide. The United States Justice Department said on Monday that it is filing charges against four members of the Chinese military for breaking into Equifax, a credit reporting company. In 2017, the Chinese military members allegedly stole personal data such as names, birth dates, and social security numbers of about 145 million Americans. Attorney General William Barr called it a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private. private information of the American people. Here's what he had to say Monday during a briefing via ABC News.

I'm here to announce the indictment of Chinese military hackers, specifically for members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, for breaking into the computer systems of the credit reporting agency Equifax, and for stealing the sensitive personal information of nearly half of all American citizens. and also Equifax's hard-earned intellectual property. This was one of the largest data breaches in history. It came to light in the summer of 2017 when Equifax announced the theft. The press release from the Department of Justice said that Equifax hacking is part of a larger pattern.

This kind of attack on American industry is of a piece with other Chinese illegal acquisition of sensitive personal data. the DOJ press release says. Four years, we have witnessed China's voricious appetite for the personal data of Americans, including the theft of personnel records from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the intrusion into Marriott Hotels, an Anthem Health Insurance Company, and now the wholesale theft of credit and other information from Equifax. This data has economic value, and these thefts can feed China's development of artificial intelligence tools, as well as the creation of intelligence targeting packages.

Coronavirus continues to ravage China. Right now, there have been 40,000 cases, according to CNN, and the total death toll worldwide is over 900 now, the majority of those deaths in China. Chinese President Xi Jinping visited a hospital Monday, wearing a face mask. This came after weeks of him keeping a low profile. Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar recently tweeted an article

advocating for all Americans to have their college education paid for by the government, just as the military get their education paid for through the GI Bill. Omar, who represents Minnesota, tweeted a portion of the article, published on alternet.org, and authored by a veteran named Will Fisher. Fisher wrote, Imagine what it would do for our country and those who live here if we were to take the ethos behind the original GI Bill and apply it to everybody, canceling all student debt and making public

colleges, universities, and vocational schools tuition-free. Next up, we'll have Daniels interview with Marvin Olasky. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. In the agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research. The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online, as well as media interviews from our experts.

Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. Well, it's no secret that the news isn't what it used to be. The old gatekeepers have lost their tight grip on the media market, making way for new and innovative startups. But the media splintering has come hand-in-hand with another change, a dramatic loss of trust in the media, and a sense that objective reporting has died. My guest today, Marvin Olasky, has a new book out that addresses these issues

called Reforming Journalism. Marvin Olasky is editor-in-chief of World Magazine and Dean of the World Journalism Institute. Marvin, thanks for your time today. Oh, good to be with you. So before we get into the details of your book, you have a fascinating life story that just wanted to touch on first

because I think it really does shed light on your work and your perspectives today. You're a Christian journalist, and you describe yourself as being conservative, but you didn't start out that way. Where did your journey begin? A strange journey began growing up in Judaism and as sad these days, Bar Mitzvah 13, atheists to 14, that's a pretty typical way to go.

So atheism, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, all that type of stuff from the old days in the late 60s, and eventually into the Communist Party. And how long were you in the Communist Party? Oh, a couple of years, long enough to realize through God's grace that it wasn't just stupid, which it was, but also evil. That's remarkable. And then you converted to Christianity, how exactly? Or God converted me.

Yes. I was, I think, a fairly contented communist in late 1973. It was a graduate student at the University of Michigan at that time. And one particular day came to believe that God actually exists. And I won't go through the whole experience because it was, I suppose it sounds a little mystical in some ways. It's never happened to me before and never happened to me again. But for some reason, God and His kindness reached out and touched me and showed me that he exists in some way.

I certainly did not want to believe that. I knew that that was not exactly the way to have a long and happy career in academic life. So I really ran from it, but he kept bringing me back. I had to have a good reading knowledge of a foreign language in order to get a Ph.D. and I've forgotten my childhood Hebrew. I'd forgotten my high school French, which was never very good. Russian was my language at that point. I traveled in the Soviet Union some.

So learning Russian, just trying to read something in Russian one night, I picked up something I'd been given a couple of years before and held on to as a souvenir, a copy of the New Testament in Russian. And just reading that for reading practice, I came to believe this is actually not something just written by man. This is something special. This is from God.

So that type of thing had an influence. me, but I still ran from it. Next, there was an assignment at the University of Michigan to teach a course in early American literature. Early American literature is a lot of puritan sermons. So these dead white males from 300 years ago were preaching to me. And all those types of things eventually added up until after a couple of years I could no longer run from it. And reluctantly, without a whole lot of enthusiasm, but a sense that this was true, I made a profession of faith, was baptized, joined a church. That was in 1976. And I've learned a few things since. then, but it's basically stuck with me what God taught me.

That's really remarkable. So when you began your career as a journalist, did you immediately begin to bring your theological commitments into the picture, or when did you realize that they were relevant? Well, I began my career as a journalist first in college, writing columns in the Yale Daily News, and then working on the Boston Globe. And when I was working in the Boston Globe, the second time, there were a couple of different experiences there. I was a member of the Communist Party and I wanted to bring my communism to the story. So assigned to write a feature article on, say, agriculture in Western Massachusetts,

it was the small farmers versus the big corporate entities messing with them or writing a series of stories about Portuguese immigrants in New Bedford and other towns in Massachusetts. Again, it was the exploitation of these people by the big capital. So everything went through a certain communist spectrum. And the Globe editors were fine with that because they weren't communists. Some of them weren't Marxist, but they basically thought the same way. So that was my introduction to what at that time was called objective journalism. But I really learned there that all journalism is directed by a worldview of some kind.

The idea of objectivity is fairly naive. It's like saying, well, you have a camera and so whatever you photograph is the objective truth. well, it depends on where you point the camera, what kind of film you use, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that helped me to see the difficulty of what was claimed to be objectivity. It really wasn't.

Then the question becomes, what do you do with that? If there is no conventional objectivity because it depends so much on the worldview of the writer, does that mean all we have is existential subjectivity and each person has got into himself?

And that's where I started learning as I became a Christian thinking through what, difference the Bible actually makes in reporting and how trying to have a biblical view should really transform everything you do in reporting. It's directed by a particular worldview, but we are also, as Christians, certainly told to be honest, to report even things we don't agree with and to treat people fairly as made in God's image, even if they disagree with us. So that led to this book, really, well, led to my work at World for the past 27 years editing it, and then this

book is really the result of what we've road tested over the year. So it's not just a theoretical thing. It actually works in practice. Well, today, a lot of people will look to the media and say that it's obviously biased and will point back 50, 60 years ago to the good old days and say that that media structure where we had Walter Cronkite giving us the straight story, that was objective. Would you shy away from that language or how would you characterize the old media establishment when it came to objectivity? Well, I grew up in Boston, and basically you had a choice as far as networks. You had three networks.

They were all pretty much the same with kind of a moderate liberalism, but very definitely a worldview in the articles. There was the Boston Globe. There was the Boston Herald. It was small competition to it, but essentially the globe ruled the print media in Boston. So, yeah, it wasn't objectivity in the stuff. sense of either a faithful view, an accurate view of what was going on. And it wasn't even objectivity in the sense of a balancing of subjectivities. You quote from person A, you quote from

person B. It was a mild liberalism that wasn't as bad as the radical liberalism that's common today. But it also did not give much of an opportunity and sometimes no opportunity all for alternative viewpoints. So it was a bad situation for conservatives at that time. Now we have what we wished for or prayed for. We have a great deal of diversity. It's a much better opportunity for Christians. It's a much better opportunity for conservatives. The problem is there's very little check on fake news, which often comes from the left, but sometimes comes from the right as well. So that's a big problem today. There are no gatekeepers. And I am very glad that we don't have the liberal monopoly on gatekeepers as we did a generation of two ago.

But at the same time, we do have a problem with the credibility of journalists when so many journalists are not actually going out and reporting at street level. We're just looking at things from sweet level, basically. We're just sucking our thumb, sitting in our air-conditioned offices, and pretending to actually show what's going on. But often we're just relaying what someone else's reported. And perhaps we're not even relaying what someone else's reported. It may be like the old game of post office, five or six steps removed from reality. So you've brought an approach to your organization, World Magazine, that you call biblical objectivity. Describe how that works in the context of a newsroom.

Well, two things. The basic view of within biblical objectivity is that in the same way that my house in Austin, I learn about by looking at the blueprints, the fellow who built it, lived next door for a while. and so when I was wondering whether it would fall down in a strong wind, I could ask him and he could show me how it was anchored in place. That was very useful being able to ask the builder. This world is our home. It's our house. We live here.

And happily we can ask the builder. The builder has given us the Bible. The builder has given us within the Bible lots of understanding of both human psychology and the way history works. and he's actually given us some pretty outright commands. So at World, we have a shorthand based on whitewater rafting, which is pretty good about 40, 50 miles west of Asheville. Good white water rafters know that there are six classes of whitewater rapids. It goes from class one, which is really easy.

I can do it gently down the stream to class three, which is a little more dangerous. There's some whitewater. Maybe I can do that to class six, which is really hazardous. You're going over a water field unless you're good. you're probably going to die. Six classes of Rapids. We use that as our shorthand in deciding, and in discussing what the Bible teaches. Class one is the stuff that's an outright clear command. You shall not commit adultery. We, in reporting stories, we try very hard to quote everyone accurately, to represent faithfully what people believe, but we don't believe in quoting equally the pro-adultery

the anti-adultery position. See, all stories, whether there are even small news stories or feature stories, have a protagonist and antagonist mission obstacles. So we tend to find a protagonist who is a person who, let's say, is having a faithful marriage. And the antagonist might be those individuals who don't believe in that at all for a whole lot of reasons. The protagonist has a mission to try to succeed in maintaining marriage, developing a family,

having children. There are all kinds of obstacles in the way. psychological ones, economic ones, et cetera. So we're going to tell the story, basically from the viewpoint of the person who is trying to build a successful marriage. Other publications might do very differently. They might say, well, marriage is just a ball and chain. We need free love and so forth. So when we talk about a Class 1 rapid, it's something we're going to be very clear on because the Bible is very clear.

Class 2, the Bible is more implicit than explicit. We're still going to have a position, but we're going to be a little more tentative. in it. Class three, it just goes all the way down to class six, which is, let's say, an international trade agreement, the Bible is not going to give us specifics on that. And anyone who says the Bible does is really overusing the Bible and thus really cheapening it. So with this rapid strategy, with this metaphor, we try not to either underuse the Bible by saying everything is up for grabs or to overuse it by saying that God is telling us clearly what to do, and in fact, he isn't. And different stories, we,

are we look upon as having different classes of rapids, and we try to go from there to neither overuse or underuse the Bible. You know, it's so interesting how transparent you are about the biblical and theological bases for those decisions, because I can imagine a lot of folks, maybe secular or liberal, hearing that and thinking, wow, that is inappropriate. That's the last thing you should bring to the newsroom. And yet I would think, I mean, I'm speaking as a Christian too, that they have their own Bible and their own sources of truth that they're implicitly bringing as well.

Yeah, so I think when you talk with secular journalists off the record or just talking, and again, I enjoy a lot of secular journalists, they'll be very honest about this. They'll say, sure, we all know this. We know that all reporting is directed reporting. But then officially, in a lot of publications, there's still the representation that you are either, number one, objectively showing reality without any kind of bias setting in, or number two, you are being objective by balancing subjectivities. That still tends to be the official view of lots of newspapers, but it's very obvious reading the New York Times or the Washington Post today. There's certainly very different bias in one direction. It's certainly obvious watching Fox News. There's a bias in a different direction.

Let's just admit it and say, yes, reporting is directed reporting. put up with it. That's the way it is. You've also spoken about the need for media outlets to stay independent and avoid entangling alliances. What does that look like for a magazine like yours? Oh, for a magazine like ours, it means we tend to get people mad. Probably every Christian conservative leader has been irritated with us at some point because we don't just go by the talking points. and we draw a very firm line between journalism and public relations. We try to avoid entangling alliances.

So we do not consider ourselves really part of the conservative movement. We tend to be conservative in most of the policies that we support and describe, but we're not part of the movement. We're also not part of the evangelical movement. We are free to criticize. we're free to, as best we can, humbly before God, and recognizing that we make mistakes, we try to tell the truth. Another big point of critique for media outlets is their funding sources, whether it's ad-driven or being funded by powerful donors. There's this perception and reality that money can corrupt the newsroom.

What is the best most effective revenue model for media outlets that want to produce fair and quality reporting? Well, increasingly publications and media outlets either by necessity or desire are going to a nonprofit model. That, I think, is the way to go. But it has to be done without reliance on some big sugar daddy because there you have the same problem. You know, Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post, perhaps, and others. The goal, I think, should be to have a diversified group of fairly small donors. And the small donors have to be large enough to be. able to help us actually get salaries and eat dinner, which we like to do. But you don't want to have to rely on advertisers because advertisers then will not be particularly happy if you criticize

them in any way or undercut their product. The subscription model is getting much harder, given the great diversity media, which is a good thing in lots of ways, but not a good thing if journalists want to get paid. So I think the nonprofit model, which is increasingly being used is the way to go. But that means you have to produce stuff that people are willing to contribute to. And the temptation there is just to build entangling alliances and just be a spokesman for one particular position

and not being willing to criticize your own people if you have to. And that's a problem in journalism. So I really like the funding model with people wanting to donate. Listener support. We have a daily podcast called The World and Everything in it, and it's listener-supported radio, listener-supported podcasting. And that's the way our magazine and our website tends to be also. We also have a World Journalism Minister to who we train,

both college students and mid-career people, and how to be reporters. And that also depends highly on funding. So far it's working. We hope it'll continue to be so, but we are reliant on individual sense that this is a godly way. to use their money. It's up to them. You know, it's hard to keep up with all the technological changes today, and it's certainly affecting journalism. You know, you've got CNN and other outlets that are making it possible

now for individuals who don't have journalism training to do journalism in a sense and to publish stories online. Do you see that as a threat to the integrity of journalism? Well, it's a threat if people do it without any training whatsoever and try to pretend that the propaganda they particularly want is true. What we do at World, we have a two-week course at the end of May, which lots of college students go to, and so we train them, and from them, we select interns, and some of them go on to work at secular publications, but others come to work at World. So that's our training mechanism, and they really have some very intensive training, and then we have internships, and there's more training that goes on there. And so by the time

they're ready to be reporters, we can be pretty confident. They know the basic ethics, not just how to avoid grammar spelling and punctuation mistakes, but how to avoid the deeper mistakes of pretending that your own view is coming from God, which it may be if you're at a class one or two rapids and you've actually started the Bible, but if you pretend otherwise, it's really a disgrace. So you need that type of training, and we do that with our World Journalism Institute for college students. And also some people on their 20s, and then we do it with our mid-career course. We're very intensive training. I'll tell you, it's my favorite type of teaching. I taught at the University of Texas for 25 years, but you know,

you teach people for 15 weeks, three hours a week. You see them in the classroom. That's it. Much better is to have an intensive course for a week. We do it from 8.30 in the morning until 10 o'clock at night. The people are living with us. They're studying in our living room. They're going out on learning reporting. And when we're done with that week, then, you know, the ones who are good, can go out and report other stories, and we keep track of them, we keep teaching. But you don't have to be a rocket scientist. You don't have to get a medical degree and go through that, but you need some basic training. And when people go and do it without any basic training at all, they tend to run into big mistakes.

And in some ways, lead people to think that reporting is a very untrustworthy agenda. It's a great occupation. It is so much fun to have a front row seat at the circus. It's too bad that journalists are now right down there with not only, not just use car salesmen, but use tire salesmen. Not there's anything wrong with that, but the reputation is not good. It's really too bad. I think we could improve the reputation with some basic training

and then letting people go out and report what they've seen, not just sitting in the suites, but actually going on on the streets. That's what's really crucial, reporting, not just pontificating. Well, the book is called Reforming Journalism. Marvin Olasky's editor-in-chief of World Magazine. Thank you so much for your time today. Good to be with you again. Thanks. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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