The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
God and Man on 8th Avenue
Prompted by last week’s notorious quote by the New York Times’s soon-to-be executive editor, reader Henry de Fiebre makes an interesting point regarding journalism, religion and journalism as religion:
Jill Abramson’s quote about the New York Times substituting for religion reveals something else as well. I’m neither a current Times reader nor religious. But if I realize most Americans are churchgoers, the editor-designate of the Times must also. So it’s reasonable to conclude she anticipated no potential problem with her quote. Why?
Because those running the newspaper believe–probably correctly–that the majority of those reading it prefer editors who, like themselves, are not religious (in the traditional sense, liberalism as religion being a separate matter). However, would any other newspaper in the country view its readers the same? I doubt it. And that’s the trouble. If the Times still sets the news budget for the rest of the country, the news Americans receive from the mainstream media is being determined by a niche audience whose central view of existence is the exact opposite of the general population’s.
A new Gallup poll finds that 92% of Americans “still say ‘yes’ when asked the basic question ‘Do you believe in God?’; this is down only slightly from the 1940s, when Gallup first asked this question.” By contrast, a 2010 poll found that 57% of Americans “say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly,” and a 48% plurality think the media are “too liberal.” A little humility might serve the Times well.
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