From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press (History of Communication) - Hardcover

Underwood, Doug

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 025202706X ISBN 13: 9780252027062

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Presenting religion as journalism's silent partner, From Yahweh to Yahoo!provides a fresh and surprising view of the religious impulses at work in contemporary newsrooms. Focusing on how the history of religion in the United States entwines with the growth of the media, Doug Underwood argues that American journalists draw from the nation's moral and religious heritage and operate, in important ways, as personifications of the old religious virtues. 

Underwood traces religion's influence on mass communication from the biblical prophets to the Protestant Reformation, from the muckraker and Social Gospel campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the modern age of mass media. While forces have pushed journalists away from identifying themselves with religion, they still approach such secular topics as science, technology, and psychology in reverential ways. Underwood thoughtful analysis covers the press's formulaic coverage of spiritual experience, its failure to cover new and non-Christian religions in America, and the complicity of the mainstream media in launching the religious broadcasting movement.

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Doug Underwood is a professor of communication at the University of Washington. His books include Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss and The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction: Journalists as Genre Benders in Literary History.

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From Yahweh to Yahoo!

The Religious Roots of the Secular PressBy DOUG UNDERWOOD

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-02706-2

Contents

Preface.................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Journalism Facing Faith...................................................................................................................11. Prophetic Journalism: Moral Outrage and the News.....................................................................................................192. The Profits of Reform: Printers, Capitalists, and the Priesthood of Believers........................................................................333. Skeptics of Faith or Faith in Skepticism? Enlightening the Journalistic Mind.........................................................................474. Mystics, Idealists, and Utopians: Journalism and the Romantic Tradition..............................................................................615. Muckraking the Nation's Conscience: Journalists and the Social Gospel................................................................................766. Mencken, Monkeys, and Modernity: A New Metaphysic for the Newsroom...................................................................................887. Pragmatism and the "Facts" of Religious Experience: The Model for a Synthesis........................................................................1028. Trusting Their Guts: The Moral Compass of a Doubters' Profession.....................................................................................1179. "I Will Show You My Faith by What I Do": A Survey of the Religious Beliefs of Journalists and Journalists' Faith Put into Action.....................13010. Religion, Morality, and Professional Values: A Study of the Ethical Sources of Today's Journalists..................................................14811. The Cult of Science and the Scientifically Challenged Press.........................................................................................16512. The Mind of the Inquiring Reporter: Psychology and the Science of the Soul..........................................................................13. The Press, Politics, and Religion in the Public Square14. Foundations of Sand: Technology Worship and the Internet............................................................................................20615. The Gospel of Public Journalism: The Newsroom Communitarians and the Search for Civic Virtue........................................................21616. Jesus without Journalists: Miracles and Mysteries, Minus Media Reports..............................................................................23317. Visions of Mary and the Less Than Visionary Press: Religious Apparitions in the Framing of the Modern Media.........................................24918. Proselytizing and Profits: The Growth of Televangelism and the Collaboration of the Mainstream Press................................................25319. Pluralism and the Press's Blind Spots: The Coverage of Religious Diversity at Home and Abroad.......................................................264Afterword...............................................................................................................................................271Notes...................................................................................................................................................281Selected Bibliography...................................................................................................................................319Index...................................................................................................................................................331

Chapter One

Prophetic Journalism: Moral Outrage and the News

When the Protestant-dominated Long Parliament in England faced an upsurge in polemical religious literature in 1643, it did the accustomed thing: it passed an ordinance that attempted to control the content of printed material through licensing and censorship laws. At the time, a young man was wandering the English countryside, preparing for a ministry that would challenge religious and governmental authority, thereby playing an important role in ending censorship of the press in England and laying the foundations for today's press freedoms.

George Fox is best remembered as the founder of the Quaker movement, but the spirit embodied in his radical campaign cannot be separated from the communications mission that we now identify with modern journalism. In his biblically based, prophetic writing and speaking, Fox called for political reform, defended the sanctity of individual conscience, and advocated freedom of expression—all precursors to the vital principles that make up today's journalistic credo. While Fox is not as widely recognized as a pioneer in carving out new press freedoms as, say, John Milton is, Fox's motivation for demanding the right to express his conscience without restriction draws on religion as its source as much as did the Puritan poet-scholar Milton. Although modern media historians tend to see Milton's classical defense of press freedoms in largely secular terms, the religious partisans of the seventeenth century would not have missed the religious overtones in Milton's message.

It is almost forgotten in our more secular times that many of the early advocates of freedom of the press were preachers and proselytizers whose religious zeal—and the writings that poured forth from their pens—placed them solidly in the tradition of the world's first "journalists." While the values of free expression put forth by these religious reformers have been transformed into secular principles that we now identify as constitutional (as in the protections of free speech and press freedom in the U.S. Constitution) or professional in nature (as in journalists' defense of the "public's right to know"), the origins of these bedrock principles of a free press can be found in the passionate religious disputes of a time when religion was interwoven with virtually all controversies of public life. Few journalists would recognize that when Milton talked about truth in his famous maxim—if truth and falsehood are pitted in an equal contest, truth is sure to prevail—he capitalized Truth, meaning that he was confident that God's truth would be revealed to people who were receptive to it. Journalists today seldom recognize that the prophetic impulse to protest injustice and to root out corruption—which Fox found spelled out in key passages of the Bible—still rests, admittedly in diluted and secularized form, in the modern journalistic commitment to social justice and reform.

Back in the 1600s, in the period of the English civil war, most of what embroiled England had to do with religion, and that counted for the news, too. The religious cauldron that was England at that time—where Protestants took full power of the English government in 1649, beheaded the Catholic-sympathizing Charles I, and established a theocratic government that unsuccessfully tried to unite a nation teeming with dissident religious groups—was also the breeding ground of the modern newspaper. The first printed newssheets hawked by booksellers and circulated in the marketplaces contained a form of journalism...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 025202706X
• ISBN 13: 9780252027062
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 346
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar