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It is good to see you all on this morning . It is my pleasure to stand before you introduce our speaker. Many of you heard her yesterday, Miss Caitlyn Baby. Miss Betty is an acquisitions editor

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with brussels Press, a division of baker books For nearly 10 years. She has served as an editor at Christianity today where for four years she served as the magazines youngest and first female managing editor. She's

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a native of Dayton Ohio and a graduate of Calvin College. So there's a bit of a connection here with Austin Presbyterian. She's also the author of the text called A Woman's Place, a christian vision for

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your calling in the Office, The home and the world. It was published by Howard Books in 2016 . She's also written for several periodicals and uh monthly publications including the atlantic the new yorker, the new

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york times, Religion, News service and Religion and Politics. I won't belabor you with her CV many of you have heard her information on yesterday but I will commend her on a very fine and thank her

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for a very fine talk yesterday. We heard a talk yesterday on the crisis of both authority and identity and evangelical faith in America Miss Betty also informed us of the conversation or the potential conversation within the evangelical

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camp between what she identified as national versus international evangelicals , where the evangelical groups are dealing with the question of their relationship of evangelical identity to american identity. She also held out of the ways in which evangelicals

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struggle with the crisis of authority specifically around the question of biblical authority. Finally, she left us with two options with which evangelicals might perceive forward. First the Benedict option, more sectarian option where we are

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to remove ourselves from society, and a wilberforce option , a more politically activist, philanthropic and even abolitionists orientation to the social world. MS Beatty, thank you for the empowering talk yesterday. We look forward

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to the conversation that you will give us today. Will you join me this morning and please welcome you Miss Betty. Uh huh. Mhm. Yeah. Good morning. Thanks to those of you who decided

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to return after sitting through my talk yesterday and thank you Asante for that. Very warm and well researched introductions. The introductions have been very well researched, so I'm among academics, I can tell you this

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. We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow. So declared Reporter Chase Cook, the day that a man armed with a shotgun stormed into the offices of the Capitalgazette building with the intent to kill as many

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people as possible. Thankfully there were not that many people in the office that day, 11 in Annapolis Maryland, but of them five were killed in the attack. The shooter later charged with first degree murder

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, had long harassed the staff of the newspaper after it reported on criminal harassment charges against him. And yet the next morning the damn paper did go out as Chase Cook had said it would. The first

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the front page reported on the shooting itself. The opinion page was left blank except for the names of the five who were slain to put the paper out . Staff members camped out with their laptops in a

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parking garage across the street from their offices. One of the editors Jimmy D butts tweeted that he was quote devastated and heartbroken, heartbroken over the event. But he said this about their work. There are

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no 40 hour weeks. There are no big paydays , just a passion for telling stories from our community . The reporters and editors put their all into finding the truth, finding the truth. Now, if

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you are a cynical reader like me of the news Fed on a steady diet of spin and sensationalism, you might respond as pontius Pilot did in his discourse with jesus. What is truth after all? Can

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any of us really claim to know and convey the full truth? Doesn't the truth look a little different depending on whom you ask and when the who, what, where, when and why of a story

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differ wildly oftentimes from one storyteller to another. Who do we trust to tell us the truth? These are all very timely questions in what's been called our post truth era. The 2016 Word of the Year

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for Oxford Dictionaries was post truth. It's a time when, according to the definition, objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. So in a post truth era

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, it seems audacious, if not maybe foolish for the Capitalgazette. And hundreds of newspapers like it across the country to keep on putting their all in defining the truth. When many of us, many of

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their readers may not be interested in hearing it. For christians living in a post truth era, though I believe that there are few other institutions as critical to our common life and health than the institution of

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the free press from our country's founding A Free press has helped citizens to stay informed so that they could participate well in our democracy. It's one institution that holds our other institutions, especially our government bodies accountable

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. And because of this, a free press is the envy of people living under repressive regimes. The world over journalists risks and sometimes sacrificed their lives to pursue truth over and against the demagoguery of dictators and

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despots. Among the recent martyrs of journalism was Jamal Jamal Khashoggi named Times Person of the year last year alongside the Capitalgazette reporters. Time heralded them the guardians of truth Casio G. Was a Saudi Arabian journalist

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and later Washington post columnist Who openly criticized the Saudi crown prince for, among other things, the country's involvement in the war in Yemen, a war that has claimed upwards of 50,000 lives due to violence and

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famine. Last october, Khashoggi was reported to have been missing for a month after having arrived at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The next month, a Saudi public prosecutor announced that Russia had been given a

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lethal injection inside the consulate and that his body had been dismembered. Such can be the cost of telling the truth when others don't want you to speak it . The late john McCain knew that when journalists are

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prevented from doing their job of pursuing the truth, all of us suffer In 2017, he told CNN if you want to preserve democracy as we know it , you have to have a free and many times

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adversarial press and without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That's how dictators get started. But I believe good journalism is about more than preventing dictators from

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cropping up as important a task as that is. When journalists attempt however imperfectly to give us the truth about our world, they can provide a groundwork for understanding God's redemptive activity in it. Good journalists can

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bear witness to the ways that sin and evil have marred God's world and God's image bearers, but they also often witness to the ways that seeds of redemption are being sown. In the unlikeliest of places,

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journalists remind us that this world is the arena of God's redemptive activity, that this is the world God and christ came to save and make new and so when I open up the sunday new york times or

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get a news alert from the Associated Press, I expect that what I read could very well bear witness to how broken we are, how badly the whole human enterprise needs redemption. But yet I also hope

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as a christian and anticipate that I will see evidence of how God is working through humans and human institutions to bring healing to the nations. We, as christians can read the news, anticipating that the God

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of the universe will show up in the headlines. So I want to spend some time this morning giving voice to the gifts that good journalism gives us. Now. It may strike you as a strange time

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to do this because trust in the media, trust that journalists are giving us a fair and balanced and fact checked account of reality has perhaps never been lower in our country Gallup polling found that from 2003 to

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2016, The percentage of Americans who said they have a great or fair amount of trust in the media fell from 54 to 32%. And of those who said they had lost trust a full 30% said that

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their trust in the media could not be restored. Both conservatives and liberals say that they have lost trust . But the mistrust seems to run deeper among americans who identify as conservative. They see a liberal medium

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bias among major outlets and that mistrust has given rise to a proliferation of news outlets that counter other outlets , progressive blind spots and spin. It was once the case that most americans turned to the same major

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news outlets, the same three or four outlets to provide national news and that provided us with a national shared narrative. Now, each of us can choose the news that gives us the account of reality that

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we want to hear. The current president of course has exploited our mistrust of media and decrying reporting that casts him and his allies in a negative light as fake news. And I asked President Wardlaw if I

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could do an impression of trump and he said no . So I I'm like really resisting saying fake news in a certain way, but I think you can probably hear it in your in your head. President

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trump has gone so far as to call journalists and enemies of the people. That phrase is alarming not least because it's the same language used by the italian totalitarian leaders to describe people who challenge their regimes.

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And so even conservative media who generally support trump have sounded this alarm about trump's repeated attacks on the media . Still there is a reason that this fake news language resonates with a segment of americans. I was

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traveling overseas last month when reactions to a video shot at the Lincoln memorial in Washington D. C. Started popping up on my twitter feed and it is to my chagrin that when I want to know what's

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going on in the United States I do go to twitter first to see what people are twittering on about . The video shows a group of teenagers, many of them wearing maga hats seemingly mocking an older native

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american activist. That activist Nathan Nathan phillips was participating in the indigenous peoples march in D. C. And that coincided with the annual march for Life. The video shows phillips playing a tribal drum while facing

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a teenage boy. The boy who is later identified as Nathan Sandman is smiling in a way that's hard to discern. But many viewers interpreted the smile as mocking phillips phillips told reporters that he heard boys in

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the group who were from a catholic high school in Covington, Kentucky chanting, build that wall, build that wall and doing tomahawk hawk chops with their hands in a mocking way. Several news outlets went forward

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with a story about the incident based on the footage and phillips account and as you know, the reaction was swift and fierce. But then more footage emerged that seem to complicate the initial story. There was

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a longer video that showed members of a group called the Hebrew Israelites, insulting both the teenage boys as well as the native american activists. At one point in the video, phillips moves into this large group

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of boys and Sandman, the one who smile had initially enraged so many. We're not entirely sure is he actually trying to engage phillips with respect? It's unclear more reports, phillips apparently had never been deployed

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to Vietnam as many outlets had reported and that could have been confirmed by a call to the pentagon. No footage of the boy saying build the wall could be found and many commentators who had condemned the boys

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for their behavior backed off. Now between us, I personally believe it's possible that the boys were harassed by the Hebrew Israelites and also we're mocking phillips. These things could both be true in light of the

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two videos, but the media coverage of the encounter gave many of us ideological with flash. If this coverage of that encounter can teach us anything, it's that the truth can't always be slotted easily into categories

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of good or bad, left or right, racist or inclusive. Nor can the truth be rushed. That's really hard. In our 24 7 news media , climate, good journalism takes time. It means

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getting on the phone with sources and going into public records and backing up your claims with sourcing in fact checking. And it means that if you can't get sources on the phone, or if you can't confirm

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key elements of a story, you don't publish the story, especially a story involving private citizens. The insider journo talk for this is the story is not there, it's just not there. And if the

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story is not there, you don't publish it, at least not yet. You keep looking into it , you keep digging. Speed, kills good journalism . And in a moment when both sides of our

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polarized public square want to rush to condemn the other side, the rules of journalism require that they refused to play into ideological narratives. When the on the ground truth is more complex. So it's because of

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sloppy and skewed and half baked reporting that many americans think of journalists as little more than professional gossips. But when journalists do the hard work of digging into a story and many of them do every day,

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their work can be no less than a revelation and a bomb. In 2002, investigative reporters at the Boston Globe unveiled decades of sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic Archdiocese. In Boston. Not only the

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abuse itself, but the ways that other priests and leaders in the church had protected the abusers powerfully depicted in the Oscar winning film spotlight. The reporters spent months rifling through church directories interviewing victims, petitioning courts

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to release your documents, even speaking with some of the priests accused of the abuse. Now, spotlight makes clear that these journalists are imperfect vessels and their work is tedious and unglamorous. The movie is kind

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of boring people going around interviewing people and reading documents . But the results of the spotlight teams work could not be more of shattering the eventual, eventual unveiling of decades of cover up that went all the way

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to the Vatican and as a result of their reporting , five priests were criminally prosecuted and several victims. One lawsuits lawsuit is an imperfect justice, but it's some measure of justice. Nonetheless, Washington post executive

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editor marty Baron oversaw the spotlight team when they broke the abuse scandal And he had this to say. Upon receiving the Hitchens award in 2016 for excellence in journalism. He says, I was often asked how

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we, at the boston globe we're willing to take on the most powerful institution in New England. This question really mystifies me, especially when it comes from journalists or those who hope to enter the profession,

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because holding the most powerful to account is what we are supposed to do. If we do not do that, then what exactly is the purpose of journalism ? The truth is not meant to be hidden.

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It is not meant to be suppressed, It is not meant to be ignored, It is not meant to be disguised, It is not meant to be manipulated, it is not meant to be falsified.

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Otherwise wrongdoing will persist, end, quote, The truth is not meant to be hidden. Barons. Words bring to mind, Jesus is teaching in the gospels. The gospels themselves arrive to us as eyewitness

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news of sorts, as multiple accounts of what different people saw and heard about this galilean preacher who claimed to be the messiah in first century judea. According to their eyewitness accounts, Jesus says no one lights

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a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead they put it on a stand so that those who come in can see the light for there is nothing hidden that will

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not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Jesus is telling us that we shouldn't be afraid of the light of truth, because we will all be standing

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in it one day in that apocalyptic time when all things are revealed for what they are now. Of course, Jesus is talking about the light of the good news, the news that he came into the

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world to save sinners, and that forgiveness and renewal of life are available to all who put their trust in him. But I think Jesus words here could be a life verse for journalists at the least.

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Good journalism can shed light on suffering and injustice and exploitation of the vulnerable. It can bring dark things into the light and can spur powerful institutions to do the same. If my robust reformed education at Calvin

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College taught me anything, it's that God leaves traces of grace throughout the world, even among people and institutions who don't believe in God and would probably scoff at the notion that they are doing the Lord's work

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. As the theologian, Cornelius planting a says, God's spirit works everywhere in the world to pour out good gifts on the merciful and Unmerciful on the grateful and ungrateful on believers and unbelievers alike. God checks

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the spread of corruption by preserving inhumanity, a sense of divinity and the voice of conscience. Good journalism is a common grace in so far as it checks the spread of individual and institutional sin from having its

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full effects in the world. It is thus a gift to us, but it can be hard for many communities to receive this gift when the sin being reported on is our own. I started my career

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as an editor at Christianity Today magazine and over the decade that I worked there. As you can imagine , sometimes, we had to report bad news about christian leaders and organizations and as you might imagine,

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this didn't always please our readers. Last spring, many of you likely followed the news of Willow Creek Community Church and the allegations of misconduct against its founding pastor. The Chicago tribune were the ones to break

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the story. After months of investigation and the tribune found that a group of former pastors and staff members at the church had accused Bill Hybels of inappropriate behavior towards several female colleagues. The report resulted in Hybels

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early retirement and his two successors as senior senior pastors stepped down amid the fallout. Both Christianity Today and the new york times followed the story, and in fact, leaders at the church had learned of these

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allegations several years before the Chicago tribune broke the story . The problem was that the Willow Creek Association board had voted not to investigate the allegations when they came to light. So this led several high profile board

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members to resign, and even after several reports went came out that were detailed and balanced and thorough. The leaders of the church defended the founding pastor, but then later apologized to the women who had come

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forward with allegations. Christianity today had actually learned about these board resignations a few years before the story broke . And we had to um then do the work of following up with these allegations. And it actually

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took about three years. We put a lot of time and energy into getting the story right because we knew its effects. Should these allegations prove to be credible would be enormous in the evangelical world. Unfortunately

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, some of our readers did not think too highly of our reporting. Now, online comment sections do not generally cultivate a generous or thoughtful spirit among users , but I'm just going to give you a snippet

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. I have done the hard spiritual work of going through those comments and selecting ones that are perhaps emblematic of larger attitudes about the media. So these are these are a few quotes. Is he guilty as

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charged with his resignation? We will never know guilty or not. He becomes another casualty of a media takedown fake news. The elders cleared bill after years of thorough investigations, women lied and recanted, but

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lawyers and the media are still trying to ravage this man's character. Bill Hybels has been one of the greatest and most influential christian leaders with soaring accomplishments in church and leadership development. Perfect. No, but

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how sad to live in a time when to be male and accused is to be presumed guilty. That's the end of the comments. You can breathe a sigh of relief. These comments reveal, at the

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very least, a mistrust in women who come forward with allegations of misconduct, but also in the journalists whose job it is to hold leaders accountable for the way they use their power. Now, I understand

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that if you are a member of Willow Creek or you've had a positive experience with the church, you are going to have a bias for those leaders. They have done good things for the Gospel. The

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church has touched millions of lives for the Good. If anything, this story suggests that two things can actually be true about our leaders and institutions. They can both use their power for godly and ungodly purposes

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. One does not negate the other christians of all people affirm that the human heart is a muddled thing and that all of us are simultaneously saints and sinners alike. As the Russian novelist, alexander Solzhenitsyn famously

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wrote the line separating good and evil passes not through states nor between classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart and through all human hearts . Good journalism shows us the evil that can lurk

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and even holy institutions in ways that we can't always see if we are deeply invested in that institution. And good journalism prevents us from putting our leaders on pedestals, the kind of pedestals that resist accountability and

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are actually unhealthy for the leaders themselves, for no one of us can grasp at power without it affecting our souls. So when we read critical news about christian leaders and institutions, many of us naturally crouch

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into a posture of defense. As I mentioned, when CT reported on Willow Creek, several members of the church found the reporting so hard to believe not because it was inaccurate, but because it didn't accord

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with their positive experiences inside the church and that cognitive dissonance is real and it is painful, but we might more readily receive this bad news as a strange grace as an opportunity to reflect and repent and reform

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the Church, after all, claims to be the clearest representation on earth of the love and mercy and goodness of God. In christ God has set the bar exceedingly high for God's people and so should we

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, because the church is not supposed to be just like any other flawed human institution As media outlets have uh, continued to follow the Catholic church abuse scandal over the past now, almost going on 20 years

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, new york times columnist ross, doubt ross doll fit encourages fellow Catholics and I would say christians in general to receive this kind of media scrutiny as quote , a spur to virtue and a sign that their

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faith still matters, that the church still looms large over the affairs of men and that the world still cares enough about Christianity to demand that Catholics live up to their own standards. The church is a target

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because it asks to be a target because it aspires to set a higher standard, an answer to a higher master than Prince's governments and civic institutions. End quote is God's gathered people, we want to leave

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the aroma of christ wherever we go, but sometimes outsiders sniff out a stench among us. Now personally , if I smell bad, just like hypothetically if that ever happens and someone comes to me and gently

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but clears clearly tells me that I am walking around stinking up the place. I'm actually very grateful for this feedback. Knowing that I smell bad, it keeps me from further embarrassment and from offending the people

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sitting next to me on the train or in chapel as it were to use a more serious metaphor. If a medical scan reveals that I have a tumor that will metastasize and become deadly if it isn't removed

00:30:22.940 - 00:30:36.790

. My response is not to scoff at the medical technician for finding a flaw in the body that I thought was healthy. Now the hard work remains of removing the tumor and recovering full health. But without

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that scan, I might not live much longer. I'm grateful for the bad news because it means I don't have to face worse news later today we think of journalism as a secular enterprise protected by key tenants

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of the constitution. In fact, many americans think of the national media as having a bias against religion and religious people are simply cheer ignorance of how beliefs and values animate daily lives. That said, it's

00:31:08.800 - 00:31:30.400

worth noting that key journalistic principles like free speech, freedom of conscience and political reform Arguably arise from Christian beliefs, those of Protestants in 17th century England in a fascinating book titled from Yeah, Way to Yahoo

00:31:30.410 - 00:31:45.380

the religious roots of the secular press. I'm just jealous. I did not come up with that title . Scholar Doug Underwood shows how George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement and the puritan poet,

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Scholar john Milton Use pamphlets in 17th Century England to express religious and political dissent in the public square news books as they were called, circulated among booksellers and included stories of political intrigue, as well as hard

00:32:05.090 - 00:32:22.770

hitting theological salvos. George Fox used the printing press to issue pamphlets to challenge the State Church and plead the cause of people trampled by injustice. He understood himself to be working within the prophetic tradition. We're

00:32:22.770 - 00:32:39.630

in the prophets warned the Israelites about the consequences of neglecting God's calls to care for the poor and oppressed . We see a secular version of this prophetic tradition when journalists hold the powerful, accountable and draw attention

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to injustice faced by fellow citizens who often can't speak for themselves and over and against the stereotypes of a godless media machine. It is worth noting that christians are found in every major news organization in the country

00:32:58.960 - 00:33:12.420

. I happen to know a few of them, many of them, like the investigative reporter Marshall Allen , bring a deep sense of calling to their daily work. Allen began his career at the Las Vegas

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sun. He says how ironic that God sent him directly into Sin City for his first assignment. He was assigned to the Healthcare Beat And Alan began compiling data that showed that hospitals throughout the state we're not

00:33:27.520 - 00:33:43.000

as safe as they appeared to be. Nevada has hospitals at the time had the worst national rate of readmissions, meaning that many patients had to return to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged. The

00:33:43.000 - 00:33:59.490

state had gathered in patient data for decades, but that data was well, largely controlled by the hospitals and not easily accessible by the public. Alan and his colleagues spent two years digging into the data with

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the goal of helping citizens make informed decisions about their medical care. The research revealed inadequate staffing, flawed oversight and sometimes patient abuse, that in a few cases lead to death writing for the new york Times

00:34:15.880 - 00:34:32.530

, Allen said journalists, particularly those who do investigative reporting tend to annoy people in powerful positions. Some people might think that christians are supposed to be soft and acquiescent rather than muck rakers who hold the powerful

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to account. But what I do as an investigative reporter is consistent with what the bible teaches. The bible teaches that people are made in the image of God and that each human life holds incredible value.

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So when I learned that medical mistakes are one of the leading causes of death in America, I called attention to the problem end, quote Alan reminds us that sometimes obedience to God looks like upsetting the rulers

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and authorities of the day. He notes that he started his career before he was at the Las Vegas Sun in christian media and he found some resistance among editors there to report about leaders. If the reporting

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cast those leaders in a negative light. Today, the administrations of several christian colleges, notably Liberty University in Lynchburg Virginia, insist on reviewing their student newspapers and will sometimes pull stories that cast the school in

00:35:38.690 - 00:35:54.380

a negative light at Liberty. President jerry Falwell JR reviews and signs off on every story in the Liberty Champion. And since 2016, based on a report in World Magazine, he has pulled articles that are

00:35:54.380 - 00:36:13.420

critical of our president or that speak well of anti trump christian leaders. Last year, when some editors for the student newspaper asked whether this review policy might violate some basic principles of journalism. Two editors were

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fired and several more resigned in protest. Today. Liberty Champion staff sign a nondisclosure agreement that prevents them from speaking on record if an outside media outlet wants to report on something happening at Liberty non disclosure agreement

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for students. That seems really strange an extreme. The students are barred from using social media to share news about Liberty. When Liberty and other christian colleges create this strict review of their student newspapers, they

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are training their students to work at P. R . Firms, not newsrooms. Now, public relations has its place. But once you treat a student newspaper like a marketing department, you've traded truth for

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propaganda reflecting on the Liberty story for Religion News Service . The scholar, Jeremy Little said, I don't think that Christianity has always had a good relationship with journalism. You now have two generations of evangelical christians

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who really don't know what the role of the press is. Liberty has the right legally to do what they're doing here. But that doesn't make it right , end quote. Yet. I am hopeful that

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this relationship between the Church and journalism can be mended and that christians can actually become known for supporting good journalism in the years to come. So how might we support local and state and national reporters who are

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doing their jobs? Well, even those who are perhaps vent on taking down christians or maybe ignoring all the good things done in the name of christ, what virtues make us proper stewards of the news first

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, I think we need the virtue of discernment with the proliferation of blogs and social media feeds and alternative news forums. It can be dizzying to figure out exactly what we are reading on the internet. Is

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this a news report? Is this an op ed ? Is this an advertorial an interview? Something else ? Is the writer trying to present objective reporting or opinion or analysis? Or is this a sales pitch

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? And if it's news is it's sourced and fact checked? And how can we tell does the reporter show provide links to show where they're getting their information if it's opinion? Is it clearly labelled opinion or

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is it attempting to present opinion as fact? The ability to know what we are reading when we read the news shapes our common life, our democracy and even our perception of reality. So we must commit

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ourselves to media literacy, to media discernment, learning how to read carefully and with a discerning eye to test everything and hold fast to what is good. We might need to have some conversations with friends and

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family members who share news on social media from websites that traffic in conspiracy and can spread harmful information and even lies. We must ask who pays for our news organizations and whether there's a proper division and line

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between editorial and commerce and when we see news doing a good job in providing essential and well sourced information , we should re board them by paying for it . I know that's hard to imagine. We should

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reward them by paying for it second in order to become proper stewards of the news. We need humility specifically about how much we know and how much we don't know. Now there are serious debates to be

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had about whether any reporter can claim to offer objective truth, since the subjective self is always in the mix. But there is no debate that we as readers, bring biases and blind spots to our media

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consumption. Our perception of reality is shaped by our family of origin are zip code, our race, our class, our education, our theology, our relationships, and sometimes even by what we ate for

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breakfast that morning. Most times we don't know what we don't know. We need to practice reading news from sources who present a different account of the world . Sometimes in ways that annoy us or make us

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uncomfortable. So for example, if you feed on a steady diet of terry, gross and the whole NPR gang, you might pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal or National Review. Or if

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you have a Wall Street Journal subscription, you could balance your media diet with the Washington post. Or if you're a christian century subscriber, you might occasionally pick up a copy of Christianity today. And if

00:41:24.390 - 00:41:42.890

you really enjoy Ct, you might pick up a copy of the christian century third. The virtue of love will never lead us astray including helping to become better stewards of the news. So for every talking

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head who gets paid to basically blow hot air on tv and you do not want to know how much they get paid. It's insane. There are hundreds of local reporters across the country, including in your

00:41:54.470 - 00:42:09.060

hometown who are doing the hard work of just trying to tell the truth day in and day out. They work long hours. They face a lot of criticism. Many of them have to report on horrible

00:42:09.070 - 00:42:24.650

things, tragedy, violence, crime, corruption. This wears on you. After a while There was a meme that circulated around the 2016 election that was in this kind of cutesy etc. Hand stitched uh

00:42:24.660 - 00:42:45.880

frame and it said journalism, it's a tough job with insane hours and pretty crappy pay. On the other hand, everybody hates you. So when was the last time that we thanked our local journalists?

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When was the last time we wrote a letter to the editor, expressing gratitude for a job well done . Um at one point at Christianity today, I was responsible for compiling the letters to the editor editor

00:42:59.250 - 00:43:15.450

section. I would say about 5-10 of the letters we received were simply offering praise. When you sit down to write a letter to the editor, it's usually because you're angry about something might your church or

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the liturgy you use actually include prayers for media for local journalists. Church leaders in particular might be reticent to form friendships with journalists for the fear that a reporter could exploit the friendship to make christians look bad

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. But if churches want good news about the church to start appearing in the headlines, they must build networks of trust and open communication and even friendship across the journalist. Church leader line. Finley Peter Dunne

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, the Chicago writer and humorist famously said that the journalist's job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable this key. Asmus sounds downright biblical to my ears that when justice and peace reigned under the rule

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of christ, when God puts all things to rights , the poor will be rich and the rich will be poor, the downtrodden will be lifted up and the rulers will be humbled. Those who are afflicted

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in this life will be comforted and those who are comfortable in this life will be afflicted. We get hints of this upside down kingdom whenever journalists use their skills to hold the powerful to account and to initiate

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reform, May we welcome this holy affliction of good reporting, knowing that so often the truth stings but it also heals and indeed could set us free and