The Options Option--May/June 2000

September/October 2000 | Contents

DEVILISH NEWS

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: HOW THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL NEWS ORGANIZATION SHAPES YOUR MIND AND VALUES THROUGH 'CULTURE CREEP'
By William Procter

BY MARK I. PINSKY

The sixteen-million member Southern Baptist Convention has been at war with modern American culture for the past four years. In 1996, the nation's largest Protestant denomination launched an economic boycott of the Walt Disney Company, charging the entertainment giant with abandoning its family-values legacy in movies, books, and television programs, and attacking it for offering health benefits to partners of gay employees. The vote set off a week of frenzied attention from journalists, columnists, editorial writers, cartoonists, cable television pundits, radio talk show hosts, and late-night comedians. Since then, the convention's annual June meeting has reliably yielded controversial -- and to many, calculatedly outrageous -- pronouncements and resolutions about the role of women, the legitimacy of other faiths, and homosexuality. Women should be submissive wives and not be pastors. Jews, Muslims, and Hindus should be targeted for conversion during their holy days, and Roman Catholicism is based on false doctrine. Homosexuality is evil, and gays are on the offensive with an aggressive agenda.

To some degree, the media are getting used to this mutually manipulative exercise, so used to it that The New York Times has not sent a reporter to the Southern Baptist Convention's last two meetings. In that context, the latest salvo in the culture war comes from the Southern Baptists' publishing arm, Broadman & Holman, a powerhouse in the world of Christian books; the target in the cross hairs is The New York Times, flagship of what evangelical Christians call "the secular media."

William Proctor, author of The Gospel According to The New York Times, is no backwoods, Bible-thumping yokel. He is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard Law School, and a former reporter for the New York Daily News. His fervor, however, is as intense as that of any preacher in the pulpit. What he rails about in this book, to varying effect, is what he calls "culture creep." This he defines as "a subtle but highly potent process of journalistic proselytizing" -- through news stories, editorials, and op-ed pieces --that has "the potential to shape individual minds, alter personal beliefs, and produce broad-based social and political changes." The Times's gospel "is rooted in a kind of secular theology that purports to convey infallible social, moral, and political truth -- a truth that the paper fervently promotes with all the zeal of the fieriest proselytizer." By virtue of its "quasi-religious status," the Times "permeates our entire culture" as the "single journalistic hand that sets the public agenda for all others."

To demonstrate the paper's power to influence the culture in ways that ultimately ruin lives, Proctor provides six "case study" capsules. These unnamed culture-war casualties include: a young woman who had an affair with a married man, lived with him after his divorce and considered having a child by herself after being abandoned; a man who once considered joining the Marine Corps, but eventually found himself voting for candidates who advocated reduced American power abroad; a woman whose intense environmentalism led her to animism, meditation, Hinduism, and vegetarianism; a man who "cast aside any heterosexual feelings he harbored," embraced gay sexuality and died of AIDS; a woman who had an abortion in the second trimester of her pregnancy; and a man who deserted a Bible-believing church when he accepted evolution.

There is little doubt whom Proctor is speaking for. "Perhaps the greatest threat to the social and political agenda of The New York Times is conservative religion -- especially evangelical Christianity," he writes. "The paper doesn't hesitate to allow its pages to be used for subtle and not-so-subtle potshots at . . . conservative Christian groups, such as Southern Baptists." A particular sore point among evangelicals, Proctor notes, is that the Times and other secular media that follow its lead use the term "religious right" to "dismiss anyone with a Christian faith who happens to be slightly right of political center." And that the inflammatory term "fundamentalist" is used as a way to pigeonhole more orthodox Jews, Muslims, and Christians as "anti-intellectual, anti-social, bigoted, mean-spirited or even violent."

To reinforce his thesis, Proctor offers story counts from the Times's own data base. For example, in a search covering a one-year period from 1998-99, he calculates 1,522 stories on welfare; 1,481 stories on gays; and 980 stories on abortion. In another 365-day period covering 1998-99, he found 119 articles on the subject of intolerance, and a search for the word "bigotry" turned up 122 articles. This weight of coverage, he says, is an accurate barometer of the paper's corporate belief system; the more readers are exposed to an issue, the more they may be influenced on it. In a third year-long search, he makes a more interesting argument about what he calls the use of "loaded language." Thus the term "anti-abortion" appears in 169 articles, while "pro-abortion" appears only fourteen times. The same is true of the term "religious right," which appears frequently, and of the term "religious left," which is virtually non-existent. Unfortunately, such legitimate complaints are obscured by Proctor's rhetoric and insistence on attributing Machiavellian motives to the Times.

News stories "are really opinion pieces in disguise," he says, although most of his cited examples for this charge involve headlines and the way stories are framed. He criticizes a 1998 Times story about an NBA playoff game because it did not include Knicks guard Charlie Ward's televised comments crediting his religious faith for making a critical three-pointer. He condemns the Times for allowing NBC and The Wall Street Journal to be first with the story of Juanita Broaddrick's rape allegations against President Clinton. A 1998 story about Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's support for a domestic partners bill in New York, with the headline, gay groups rejoice in mayor's move as critics deplore it, was "heavily weighted toward the gay position" and "revealed an almost total absence of 'the deploring' that was promised in the headline." And he attacks a story written by Gustav Niebuhr at the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention about the denomination's declaration that wives should "submit" to their husbands. Barely quoting the text (or naming the author, whom he praises elsewhere in the book), Proctor charges that the story "presented the issue as primarily an attack on the rights and dignity of women -- and a misguided attempt to return to some outmoded principles of family relationships," rather than as a simple defense of Scripture. He takes the Times (and public broadcasting) to task for not including God in their coverage, because he says they reject "any possibility that events can be explained in supernatural terms."

For all his criticism, Proctor is of two distinct minds about the Times. He considers it indispensable reading and the best newspaper in the country, the primary reason for its influence over other media. "No morning is complete without my 'Times fix,'" he acknowledges. "I will always read the Times, regardless of its other deficiencies." Yet he spends most of the book trying to prove that it is a malign influence on society, attributing to it incredible powers over its readers and other media it affects. Curiously, Proctor mentions but does not explore in depth a less sinister (and more logical) explanation for the coverage he deplores -- namely that it may be the result of the shared cultural and political assumptions of reporters, editors, and editorial page writers. He is obsessively apoplectic in discussing the columnist Frank Rich, who has taken dead aim at Pat Robertson, James Dobson's Focus on the Family, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Sometimes, Proctor's musings straddle the line between silliness and paranoia. As a result of the Times's advocacy of globalism and, in particular, international peace-keeping missions, "it's conceivable that at some point in the not-too-distant future, a Chinese Communist general might be poised to lead a force into the American South or Midwest. His mission? To keep the peace after violent riots have broken out over some rights issue." This is the same Proctor who elsewhere warns like-minded critics against making charges of a media conspiracy, because "such an accusation smacks of the tactics of wacky conspiracy advocates who are easy to dismiss."

At the conclusion of the book, Proctor suggests to conservative readers eight "defenses" against the Times. Some are good for readers of any ideological coloration, like reading critically and analytically. Others are admittedly fanciful, like launching a corporate takeover, which is virtually impossible given the Sulzberger family's control of the stock. Or starting a rival news organization, which is equally unlikely, considering the Times's prestige and century of credibility. There are alternatives, he notes, like the Washington Times and the Christian Trinity Broadcasting Network, but none with sufficient stature to mount a serious challenge.

Proctor's thesis that The New York Times is an evil empire is likely to prove persuasive and perfectly reasonable to the constituency for which it was written: conservatives and evangelical Christians who believe America has gone haywire and are looking for something to blame. At the same time, this book is so extreme that it is likely to seem otherworldly to most Times readers. Such is the extent of the cultural disconnect in the U.S. today, between liberals in the major metropolitan centers and college towns on one hand, and conservatives in the rural and suburban areas of the American heartland on the other. As a Times reader living in a Sunbelt suburb, I sometimes wonder if my Southern Baptist friends and I are talking about the same country.

Mark I. Pinsky, a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, covers religion for the Orlando Sentinel. He has reported on the Southern Baptist Convention for the past five years. In the 1970s, he was a regular stringer for the New York Times national desk.