“The news is where you look.”
A friend of mine, a fellow journalist, made this observation recently. He says he didn’t invent the line, and he isn’t sure who did—but we’re both convinced of its wisdom.
Among other things, it points to the challenges and opportunities people of faith confront in the modern media. It also sums up the modest effort I’m making at Hillsdale College to train a generation of journalists who will improve the quality of the news by looking for it in different places and in fresh ways.
The news of course is everywhere, and it’s breaking all the time. People who seek to keep up with it can take in only a portion. The media strives to help them make sense of a big and confusing world, or at least it should.
The journalists who comprise the media are the lookers who observe events and decide what’s newsworthy. It’s no coincidence that the world’s oldest surviving magazine is called The Spectator. We need journalists who have a wide field of vision and who use good judgment as they distinguish between the important and the trivial and even between right and wrong.
Because the media is such a mighty force, it matters who does the looking. They will decide what becomes the news. They possess enormous power to shape what people think, the way they vote, and how they believe.
The New York Times, the most influential newspaper in the United States, claims to do a lot of looking. It makes a daily boast in a box in the top left-hand corner of its front page: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once joked, “It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world always just exactly fits the newspaper.”
What we need are better lookers—or, perhaps more precisely, journalists who are willing to look for the news in the places where the hive mind can’t see.
Seinfeld’s quip is funny because it reminds us of the truth that we all have our limits, even a newspaper with millions of readers and loads of resources. The limits of The New York Times include the number of pages it can publish for each edition, or, nowadays, the amount of content it can post on its website. Yet it has more metaphorical limits too. When it comes to political and cultural coverage, its writers and editors commonly fail to see beyond their secular progressivism. It’s their guiding light, but like the drunk who insists on searching for his lost keys below the streetlamp, they can’t find what they need because they are not capable of thinking to look elsewhere.
Much of their blindness is the result of sheer ignorance: It may never occur to them to wonder, for example, whether two-parent families are best for the raising of children. A lot of it is willful. Have you ever noticed that when a so-called “mainstream” newspaper stoops to print a photograph of people who walk in the March for Life, it often focuses on the most outlandish participants? This is known as “nutpicking,” and its devious purpose is to make the oddest folks seem like the typical representatives of what viewers are supposed to conclude is a movement of lunatics.
Curiosity is perhaps the most important characteristic of any journalist—a desire to learn about the way the world works. Yet the drive for ideological conformity often overwhelms any interest in alternative or unconventional ideas. I’ve seen the mechanics of this at work many times but never so vividly as during a Senate contest more than a dozen years ago when I was covering the race for a national magazine. At an hour-long debate, I sat among daily newspaper reporters from around the state as we watched the candidates deliver short speeches, offer rebuttals, and clash over politics and policy. It was the usual stuff for this kind of forum. There must have been a thousand ways to sum up what had happened. I didn’t have to try because I was writing a profile of one of the candidates, but my newspaper colleagues were on tight deadlines to describe what they had just witnessed. They needed to write quickly and accurately. When the debate ended, however, they didn’t rush away to file their articles and beat their peers to press. Instead, they stopped and huddled so they could agree on a single idea that would become the takeaway point for readers everywhere. As any experienced watcher of liberal media bias might have predicted, they settled on something the Republican had said and that they regarded as controversial. That’s how they made the news. It was all about where they looked.
Their behavior goes by many names and labels: groupthink, a herd mentality, an echo chamber. Survey data suggest that this narrowing of thought occurs routinely. More than three-quarters of Americans say that journalists “should always strive to give every side equal coverage,” according to a study by the Pew Research Center in 2022. Yet among journalists, who are overwhelmingly secular and liberal, the figure is only 44 percent. That’s a huge gap between what consumers of the news say they want and what producers of the news are inclined to give them.
What we need are better lookers—or, perhaps more precisely, journalists who are willing to look for the news in the places where the hive mind can’t see.
That’s where the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College comes in. I’ve served as its director for fourteen years in a modest effort to improve the media.
At Hillsdale, we’re big believers in founding documents, which is why we’re one of the few schools in the country that requires every student to take a course on the US Constitution, no matter whether they aspire to become scientists, accountants, middle-school teachers, stay-at-home parents, or journalists. We also honor the college’s own founding documents, passed down from 1844 and calling upon us to undertake our work “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land, and believing that the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of those blessings.”
The students who come to this liberal arts college know they’re signing up for a rigorous education that takes faith seriously. This mission animates the journalism program, which has its subsidiary commitment to “the restoration of ethical, high-minded journalism standards, and to the reformation of our cultural, political, and social practices.”
One of the core principles of the Dow Journalism Program is that you learn journalism by doing it—and so we push our journalism students to work at the campus newspaper and at the campus radio station. We have faculty advisors, but we believe that the best teacher is experience. At the paper, students are reporters and editors who investigate news at the college and in the community, learning to tell stories about everything from the results of a math competition to a local church’s appointment of a new pastor to how the city funds road repairs. They become writers, editors, photographers, graphic designers, and more. At the station, with its spoken-word format, they host and produce shows on politics, business, and religion. They also deliver news and weather reports and offer live play-by-play broadcasts of football, basketball, and baseball games.
We keep journalism in its proper place too. Hillsdale College is a liberal arts school, not a vocational training center—and so journalism is a minor and not a major. We offer a few courses in journalism, but we want our journalism students to devote themselves to traditional academic disciplines, in which they study politics, economics, science, and more with excellent professors in those departments. Through this classroom learning, they’ll gain much of the knowledge they’ll need to become first-rate journalists who report on elections, interest rates, and technological advances.
We have outstanding students, and their hard work has led the Princeton Review to rank The Collegian as a top ten campus paper and the Michigan Association of Broadcasters to name WRFH the state’s best college audio station for the last three years. Many of the students who write for the paper and work at the station don’t go into journalism, though their experience in the newsroom and before microphones may help them become effective communicators as they move into professions that call for the drafting of legal briefs or making stump speeches at fundraising dinners.
Ultimately, though, our goal is to encourage more Hillsdale students to become professional journalists. The media is too powerful to ignore, and the only way to solve the problem of its ideological and secular tilt is to bring more viewpoint diversity to newsrooms, radio stations, podcast studios, YouTube channels, and social media platforms. We’re enjoying some success, with faith-filled alumni who work everywhere from The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner to First Things and the Catholic News Agency.
As they look for the news and find it, the rest of us will start seeing it differently—and, we can hope, more truthfully.