Plenary session address:  The Future of Faith Coverage in Canada (1)

A daily journal of moral conduct

A newspaper is a daily journal of moral conduct A presentation by Neil Reynolds, editor of the Ottawa Citizen to the June 7-9, 1998 Faith and the Media Conference I think I would start with an observation from that celebrated skeptic, Mark Twain, who said, "I thank God every day that I am not a newspaper editor, and I live my life in such a way that He will never make me one."  I think that I would offer my definition of a newspaper first as a premise for remarks that we might make later. A newspaper is many things, but it is certainly not a temple. A newspaper, as we all know, is half filled with advertisements (or at least we hope it's half filled with advertisements!) pages of stock quotes, horoscope, comics, frivolities of all kind, fun stuff, and yet Thomas Arnold, the father of the poet, Matthew Arnold, writing in his journal on his deathbed, said, "Reading a newspaper is the most solemn experience in the world if you do it properly."

My own definition of a daily newspaper is that it is a daily journal of moral conduct. I think that immediately demands a definition of morality, and by morality I mean "thou shalt not." Now, from the Biblical example, we have an appreciation for parables and I would suggest to you that newspapers , at their best, are a vehicle for parables about people and how they make moral decisions. Morality asks what is broken? It's as simple as that: what is broken? And secondly, whose job is it to fix it? Newspapers are remarkable in the sense that after all these years we still have our daily editorial page and we still endeavour, as best we can, to tell people or to help people understand what it is that is broken and whose job it is to fix it.

We happen to have just finished a century, in my opinion, where the moral curiosity, the moral inquisitiveness, got lost a bit because we offered up too simplistic an answer, which was, well, it's government's job, government should fix it. And for many, many years -- and I've lived through most of them -- that was the daily mantra in newspaper. I think we're entering a period where we realize that morality still resides with the individual and that whether the newspaper is writing about nuclear assistance to India and Pakistan, or whether it's writing about orphan birds, the question implicitly arises, what's wrong here, whose job is it to fix it?

There was a fascinating sociological experiment in the States a while back. Edmund Wilson used this experiment to draw a conclusion on morality. This was the experiment where a valuable car was left abandoned in an affluent suburb some place in California, and also another one in the Bronx. And within hours, the car in the Bronx had been stripped. The car in the affluent suburb in California had not been touched. The next day the experimenters took a sledgehammer to the car in California and smashed all the windows and the headlights. Within hours, it had been completely stripped. And Edmund Wilson's conclusion based on that one experiment was, anything that is broken and not quickly repaired incites, invites, induces criminal activity.

Now, there is a lot wrong in human society. Newspapers tell these stories as parables and try as best they can to draw conclusions from them.

So you can tell that I look at journalism in a very biblical sense. I think of Ezekiel as the first columnist. This is the guy who, I think, when his latest column had not been read, he ate the whole scroll. Ezekiel lived during the Babylonian times. What the biblical prophets invited people to do, as I understand it, was call for society to avoid excesses. I think that whether newspapers are writing about the latest in fashion trends or offering up health tips–the whole variety of things that newspapers do on a daily basis–is similar: does this work, is this right for us, is this excessive?

Now, newspapers in 1998 do not moralize overtly in a preachy sense, nor should they. Or if they do, they save that for the editorial pages. But without hitting people over the head–and I think often without even knowing what we're doing–what we're really asking people to do is to weigh the things that are happening around us in our own lives and saying, "Does this work? Is this permissible at this moment? Indeed, can we get away with this?"

It is excessive, for example, to kill off the entire cod stock. That is also immoral. That is also against any religious code that one could imagine . You can approach that subject as a political story and you can end up with a series of stories on your front page which talk about the restructuring of federal departments, but you can go across the country and ask every political party in existence and none of them would favour the elimination of the cod stock.

Or, since we haven't learned from that one, take the Atlantic salmon, which is now down to maybe 100,000 fish, from a time when there were millions and billions of these creatures. Is this just a political issue, is this just a Liberal-Conservative-NDP issue, or is this a fundamental moral issue with deeply religious implications? I think it's the latter.

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Last modified: 29 October 1999