Surveys show just shy of one third of Americans trust the news media, a staggering decline from half a century ago, when more than 70% of U.S. adults believed reporters to be fair and honest.
Certainly, some of that can be attributed to the decentralization of media (factor in the rise of social media) and the hyper-partisan nature of culture over the last decade or so. But those things alone — while contributing factors — aren’t driving the shortage of confidence people have in the news media.
Famed investigative journalist Lee Strobel, the erstwhile Chicago Tribune reporter who rose to fame when he (unsuccessfully) tried to factually disprove the evidence for Jesus and ended up becoming a Christian, recently appeared on CBN’s “Faith in Culture” Podcast, where he asserted it’s the motivation that drives people toward journalism that has changed — and not for the better.
“It saddens me so much,” Strobel said of the state of journalism today, going on to explain that, in college, he was “trained to tell both sides of the story” because his “job was to report the news.”
When he asks journalism students today why they are pursuing careers in news media, Strobel said he often hears they “want to change the world.”
“That wasn’t our motivation, and that was not our role,” he said of his time as an investigative reporter. “Our role was to report the news and tell both sides.”
“The Case for Christ” author recalled his years as a legal reporter for the Chicago Tribune, where — as an atheist — he often reported on abortion stories. At the time, he was staunchly pro-abortion (and even admitted to helping arrange an abortion for a woman while he was in college).
“I wrote a million articles about court cases involving abortion and, guess what?” he asked rhetorically. “If you read any of those articles, you would not be able to tell where I stood on the issue, because I told both sides. And I quoted good people on both sides. And I tried not to skew the story one way or the other. That was the approach we took to the news.”
Strobel, now a Christian who holds to a biblical pro-life ethic and opposes abortion, said the lack of Christian representation in newsrooms across the country is concerning.
Additionally, the journalism industry writ large seems, in his view, “to have lost this value of seeking objectivity and trying to tell both sides,” a trend he finds worrisome.
“Our First Amendment is there because — it is our First Amendment because of how important it is,” he said. “A free press is foundational to our republic and, when we can’t trust anymore what we’re being told by a free press, that’s a very dangerous position for a republic to be in.”
We talked with Strobel about so much more on the “Faith in Culture” Podcast. Listen now:
As the number of voices facing big-tech censorship continues to grow, please sign up for Faithwire’s daily newsletter and download the CBN News app, developed by our parent company, to stay up-to-date with the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.