What in the World Are You Looking At?

Van Gordon Sauter was the president of CBS from 1982-1983 and again in 1986. He recently wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal claiming "The ‘Liberal Leaning’ Media Has Passed Its Tipping Point." At some point, he claims, "objectivity, balance and fairness" was the gold standard for journalism. No longer. The underlying perception of the media giants today is that our country is severely flawed and they believe their job is to point out those flaws. That is, there is a growing gap between American media and American people -- the American media (who classify themselves as "elite") don't like the American people.

True or not, it got me to thinking. How did the American media come to hate America? (I'm talking in shorthand here.) They're part of America. They are Americans. How did they come to hate ... Americans? And I got to thinking that perhaps it's like other folks in similar circumstances. Consider, for instance, police. They generally engage the job with eagerness to help, to protect, to defend, all that good stuff. The longer they stay there, though, the more jaundiced they tend to become. Their primary job is to deal with offenders -- criminals. When your primary job directs you constantly to one classification of people, eventually you will tend to classify everyone as either in or out of that one classification of people. You'll start to see criminal elements everywhere. And you'll isolate yourself from the perceived element whether it's genuine or not. So police notoriously isolate themselves from non-police because they've been conditioned to look for problems and, eventually, see them wherever they look.

I wonder if it's not the same for the media. They're conditioned to report on the outrageous, the outliers, the unusual, the problem areas. They don't report on the normal; that's not news. Is it possible that, after some time at that task, they begin to see in anything or anyone outside of themselves the outrageous, the outlier, the unusual, the problem? I don't doubt that it's possible. I suspect it's almost unavoidable.

One might think that I'm on an anti-media rant here. I'm not. Nor am I offering a soothing view of their position. "Oh, yeah, I guess I can understand that." I'm actually wanting to point the finger at us. If it is true that you end up going the direction in which you are looking -- police, media, whatever -- then we should also be aware of that for ourselves. If we pursue conspiracy theories here and there, it is natural to begin to see them everywhere. If we see racism here and there, we begin to see it everywhere. And so on. At some point our observations in one direction become expectations in that direction and drive what we see -- what we expected. Anyone of us is susceptible.

That's why we are told not to dwell there. That's why we are told,

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. (Php 4:8-9)

We have a hymn that says, "Turn your eyes upon Jesus -- look full in His wonderful face -- and the things of Earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace." Proverbs warned, "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he." (Prov 23:7) We become what we think. When we dwell on something we start to see it everywhere. If our primary attention is on evil, we begin to see it everywhere and become it ourselves. We need to dwell somewhere else. We need to heed what is true, honorable, right. We need to embrace excellence. We need to turn our eyes on Jesus. Or we risk becoming the jaundiced souls we castigate in our world.