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In Search of Journalistic Integrity
What are the hottest news topics of the New Year?
I turned to Google News to find out. By adding “2017” in my computer’s search bar, I created my own (small and unscientific) database profiling some of the most reported current events topics.
One might expect – naively, to be sure – that the most pressing issues of the day would populate the brightest constellations of reportage across the firmament of internet news. So let’s take a look at which topics got the most hits:
- Vladimir Putin: 15.6 million
- Terrorism: 24.7 million
- Climate change: 29 million
- Gay: 41.5 million
- Israel: 74.4 million
Now what can we make of all this?
Is there a difference between “opinion” and “bias”?
On Tuesday 3 January — apparently in response to a hail of letters accusing the paper of editorial bias — the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a full-page editorial attempting to justify their approach to opinion pieces. I responded as follows:
Dear Editors,
In last Tuesday’s defense of your paper’s opinion pages, you claim that your reporting is free from editorial influence. Many would dispute this point, but I wish to address a more objectionable assertion in your argument.
You write: “Where you will absolutely find bias is on the opinion pages.” This remark is as astonishing as it is disconcerting.
Bias and opinion are not synonyms. Bias is by definition emotional, often to the point of irrational. Opinion expresses a principled position, ideally based on accurate information and sound reasoning.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed that you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. A responsible news organization, however, is duty bound to make sure that its opinion pieces are fact-based and logically developed. This requires an understanding of both sides of an issue and the commitment to intellectual integrity. Only then is an opinion deserving of publication.
Hail to the new chief
Congratulations to Missouri’s new governor, Eric Greitens.
After serving as a Navy Seal, devoting his career to help returning veterans, and defining himself according to the value of character over ideology, Governor Greitens will enter his new role as public servant with today’s inauguration ceremony.
He offers the kind of hope that we all so desperately look for: modesty, civility, and a commitment to service above political agendas. He faces the challenges of anyone who seeks to confront a culture of entrenched partisanship and cronyism.
King Solomon says that the heart of kings is in the hands of God. May the Almighty guide him and all our leaders to recognize what is right, to retain purity of vision and purpose, and to rally support to lead us on the path of peace and prosperity.
Write your Headline before you Run your Story
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
How often have we heard someone say that? How many times have we said it ourselves? And it almost always comes as a response to the same question:
“What were you thinking?”
Our minds have a funny way of convincing us that our ideas will succeed on strength of creativity, sincerity, ingenuity, and necessity. We might have identified the true source of the problem; we might have formulated a real solution; we might be 100% committed to making things better.
But none of that is enough without two critical components:
Implementation and perception.
When bubbles burst
Raise your glass of champagne to toast the new year. And then, before you take your first sip, ask yourself this question: where do the bubbles come from?
You see them, don’t you – those strings of tiny bubbles rising steadily from the bottom of your fluted goblet? They seem to appear out of nothing and come from nowhere. And yet they keep coming, like refugees from some parallel universe escaping through an inter-dimensional portal, yearning to be free.
The explanation is quite simple. What is more compelling is how the mystery of champagne bubbles can lead us to victory in the modern culture wars.
It can also provide a deeper insight into history’s first culture war, which culminated in the miracle of Chanukah.
TRAPPED IN THE DEPTHS
An average glass of champagne contains about 20 million microscopic bubbles, produced when fermentation under pressure forces carbon gas into wine. The relatively few bubbles that rise to the surface burst and release their CO2. As for the rest, the even distribution of internal pressure across the surface of each bubble keeps the gas trapped within.
Along the interior surface of the glass, however, are tiny imperfections. When bubbles come in contact with any such imperfection, the slightest change in pressure at the point of contact is enough to cause them to burst. Once released, the gas inside streams upward to the surface in a race for freedom.
Now think of champagne as an allegory for life.
A WORLD OF BUBBLE-DWELLERS
Never in history has a society been more comfortable than in this generation. Our homes are climate controlled within a two-degree range. Our cars have automatic entry, heated leather seats, and full entertainment centers. We buy our groceries and holiday gifts with the click of a mouse and wait for them to be delivered by bonded messenger or drone. We text people in the same room and find it too burdensome to open our email.
And what do we have to show for it? We have lost all ability to cope with inconvenience, delay, and change. A website refusing to load, a text not returned in 15 seconds, or our favorite TV show preempted by an amber alert — these are the crises of our times, the insufferable challenges of our era. It’s both laughable and tragic to imagine how we would manage had we to face the hardships of the crossing of the Mayflower, the Great Depression, or the Battle of the Bulge — let alone Auschwitz or the Soviet gulag. The plight of Syrian refugees right now across the sea is too horrific for us to even contemplate.
So we don’t. We’re too comfortable inside our bubbles, insulated from the cold, hard realities that most humans have had to endure through the ages. We hide away from the rest of the word, until something pricks the surface to burst our bubbles — leaving us in pieces and gasping for breath.
But really, we should be grateful for those pinpricks, both great and small. Like the gas that remains trapped beneath the surface, our own potential for greatness remains dormant within us until we are forced to confront the sharp edges of life. Instead of trying to hide from them, we need to prepare ourselves for when they inevitably arrive.
HIGHS AND LOWS
This was the state of affairs in Judea under the rule of the Seleucid Empire 2180 years ago. The prevailing culture of Greek philosophy worshipped aesthetic idealism. Graceful lines, elegant syllogisms, and harmonic symmetry represented the highest expression of human civilization.
But it also represented the lowest. Where the ancient Greeks revered physical and intellectual beauty, they abandoned children with physical deformities or mental impairments and left them to die. They valued the philosophic sophistication of their greatest thinkers less for its content and more for the polished sophistry of its expression. They ruthlessly stamped out all dissonance – as they did by sentencing Socrates, the greatest among them, to death for the crime of exposing the logical contradictions of their philosophy.
Enamored with the cultural idealism of Greece, Jewish Hellenists believed they could blend their practice of Judaism with the prettified ways of their masters. But Jewish philosophy demands that we challenge the external status quo, that we push our personal boundaries outward even as we strive to refine our commitment to the traditions on which our nation is founded. It is a prickly discipline, one in which bubbles cannot long survive.
And so the culture of Greece tried to swallow the soul of Judaism. But in the end, the weak rose up against the strong and the few prevailed over the many. Instead of capitulating to the apparent inevitability of their defeat, the Jews fought for their physical and spiritual lives. By doing so, they broke through the boundaries of what anyone imagined possible, and they set free the potential that would have remained forever hidden if the Greeks had not tried to crush it into non-existence.
And when the hidden spark of determination inside them caught fire, it light up the darkness of exile, just like the tiny container of oil that burned miraculously for eight days – a sign of divine favor because they refused to exchange spiritual identity for the comfort of cultural superficiality.
When we reject comfortable confinement and fight our way out of the bubbles we live in, there is no limit to the miracles we can expect to see in our daily lives.
Lighting our way to the Palace of the King
There is a story of a prince, a true prodigal son, whose antics and excesses taxed his father’s patience until the king, with no other recourse, sent his son penniless into exile to learn responsibility and humility.
The prince wandered from place to place, half-starving, unqualified for any craft or labor, until he finally found work as a shepherd in a distant land. The job of shepherding was not overly difficult, but the sun burned the prince’s back by day, the wind froze him at night, and the rain soaked through his clothes in winter.
Other shepherds built little huts to protect them from the elements, but whenever the poor prince tried to build himself a hut it toppled over in the first strong breeze.
Years went by, until at last the prince heard that the king was coming to the province where he lived. There was a custom in the kingdom that people would write their wishes upon scraps of paper and throw them at the king’s carriage. Any requests that the king picked up a read would be granted immediately. So the prince positioned himself along the parade route and, as the king’s carriage passed, he took careful aim and tossed his note.
The paper fell at the king’s feet. He unrolled it and, recognizing his son’s handwriting, he began to weep. For the note asked if the king would give the prince a little hut to protect him from the sun and the wind and the rain.
“My son could have asked to return to the palace,” cried the king, “but he no longer knows he is a prince.”
So it was in the days of the Maccabees, when the Jewish people were so steeped in the physical aestheticism and indulgences of Greek culture that many of them forgot that they were in exile, forgot that they were inheritors of a priceless spiritual legacy, forgot that they were children of the King.
But a few didn’t forget. A few risked their lives to honor the Sabbath, to circumcise their sons, to study the Torah of their fathers and grandfathers, to preserve the divine spark that had guided their ancestors for a thousand years. And, when their moment came, those few took up arms against their oppressors and fought for the privilege of living as Jews. They recaptured the Holy Temple and, as they rekindled the menorah, divine light flooded the streets and courtyards of Jerusalem, pushing off the darkness of exile, waking the people from cultural forgetfulness, inspiring a generation to remember its ancient roots cast its aspirations once more toward the heavens.
Today, 2,180 years later, we too live in an age of spiritual darkness, when the loudest and most persistent voices in our surrounding culture cry out to expunge every mention of the divine, to condemn every moral judgment, to sanctify every perversion in the name of “tolerance.” We live in an era of unprecedented material comfort and convenience, tranquilizing our bodies and our minds so that we can easily stifle the yearning of our souls.
But when the days are shortest and the nights are coldest, just then can a little light shine forth and dispel much darkness. Like a lighthouse guiding a ship home, the lights of the Chanukah menorah can draw us back from the abyss of spiritual oblivion. And as we add candle upon candle and light upon light, the growing radiance of the menorah reminds us of the divine flame that has guided us through the darkness of exile and saved us from the darkness of assimilation for generation after generation.
If we, like the Hellenist Jews, allow the material values of contemporary culture to shape our thinking and guide our actions, then we have truly forgotten who we are. Like the prince whose soul longed for nothing but a little hut to protect him from the sun and the rain, we will be destined to live out our days in futility.
But if we cling to all that which is noble within us, if the values of our tradition drive us to perform acts of kindness and charity, to devote a few moments each day to heartfelt and meditative prayer, to treat neighbors and strangers alike with respect, to set an example of morality and character for our children — then we will have rekindled the spark of divinity inside us, and we will have earned the privilege to have our Father, the King, bring us home.
Originally published in 2003 by Jewish World Review
Yonason Goldson 