The Media’s Secular Orthodox Church

L. Brent Bozell III
The Media Research Center
March 23, 2005

(excerpt)
The Easter celebration of the redemptive death and miraculous resurrection of Christ is a suitable occasion to remember that the religious believer in America has to recognize the difference between finding a way to God and finding a way through the news of the world.

It’s a stunning disconnect. The creators and salesmen of news are the least likely people to see the world through what might be called an eternal perspective. Rarely do they offer reverent silence on the sacred, while happily profiting from the profane. The media’s tone on religious questions is predictably wary of demanding ancient dogmas, preferring a comfortably modernist rethinking of religion, one that acknowledges that primitive men once had primitive creeds, but now — Thank God? — we’ve built up enough of a deposit of worldly wisdom to see through them. They have the arrogance to form God in their own image.

They think of themselves as the manufacturers of the latest trend, the publicists of the latest passion, the keepers of the most sophisticated daily zeitgeist. You won’t find framed and posted on their walls the C. S. Lewis adage "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date."

In 2004, the media were shocked to discover that President Bush was re-elected by a flock of people they clinically identified as "values voters," people who marched to the polls in resistance to liberal agenda items like unlimited partial-birth abortion and the "marriage" of two men or two women, or perhaps trios and quartets as the progressive future unfolds. These journalists had every right to be surprised. After all, they’d worked so very hard to ignore opponents to this agenda, or dismiss them as an unhealthy threat to the Jeffersonian notion of the separation of church and state.

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