by Pastor Michael Salemink
My grandma used to talk back to the news. Occasionally she’d even yell. She lived alone, and human nature needs interaction. Perhaps a pet would have served her better. She did have a cat, but the thing preferred running and hiding.
Now I’m finding sometimes I argue with the news, too. It seems much more polarized—biased?—than I remember from my youth. Of course, Christians don’t just ignore public events. We enjoy the privileges—and the responsibilities of community and culture. We care about our neighbors, what’s happening to them, what they think and feel about it. This especially concerns the sanctity of life in public practices and personal experiences.
The news can keep us connected, aware, and engaged outside of ourselves. But it requires active participation. If we only passively absorb reporting, it can deceive and mislead us. Our Lord invites us to employ His gifts of both reason and emotion. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). So “I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also” (1 Corinthians 14:15).
May I suggest ten ways to make good Christian use of the news?
- Consult multiple sources. Include the reporter’s sources. (We call these the primary sources, while the journalists serve as secondary sources.) Some may confirm your initial intuitions, and others may challenge your values. Additional details and different points of view give crucial context. As the old proverb goes, “Every story has three sides—yours, mine, and the right one.”
- Ask questions and listen. Consume more than just headlines. What are they leaving out? What happened before, and what happened after? What might I have done in such a situation? How is it affecting everybody involved? What can I do about it?
- Withhold reacting (or at least restrain the impulse). Remember news is a business, an industry with a product. It wants to keep people angry and afraid because that stimulates appetite for more news—and for solving problems with the advertiser’s merchandise. Pause, reflect, digest, until later today or tomorrow even, before making up your mind or stoking emotions.
- Converse with others about it. Knowledge is power, and power corrupts, but information doesn’t equal knowledge anyway. News works best when it turns us toward our neighbors and brings us together, creating relationships and servanthood. They may have wisdom we don’t. Societal affairs and common matters often open opportunities for Gospel ministry.
- Acknowledge biases. Every news story has them—on purpose—along with motivations, pressures, and narratives (the implied meaning of the data). Recognize them, as well as your own. (Yes, even Christians have biases that cloud judgment.) Try to distinguish the information from the assumptions.
- Identify common ground. When you feel disapproval for a particular report, find some element of the account with which you can agree. And when you feel approval of a report, determine some dimension you disagree with. “Test the spirits” (1 John 4:1) instead of simply swallowing or spitting out.
- Admit limits to the conclusions and applications. News has to do with specific instances, and very rarely does it color or characterize the whole world and all of reality. Just because one occurrence went a certain way doesn’t mean everyone and everything must operate like that. One bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch, nor does one especially sweet apple represent anyone’s salvation.
- Address emotions. We naturally respond passionately to drama, and the news knows it. They choose words and images precisely to provoke it. God has given us a holy sympathy for what people around us are going through. Stay conscious of how the news wants to make you feel as well as how your emotional state may influence your assessment of the story.
- Explore “so what.” What, if any, action does this news reasonably and appropriately call for? Given my vocation and my convictions, does this article really matter? Does it intend to emphasize or accomplish anything except distracting me from more important obligations? Is it leading me into temptation toward sinfulness?
- Move on. Twenty-four-hour coverage doesn’t make twenty-four-hour consumption healthy. You don’t have to get the news more than once a day, or even every single day. It offers a very poor remedy and lousy self-medicating for what ails us. Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ gives the real good news. Turn the screen off, seek His leading in Scripture, and lean upon His peace in prayer.