21st Century Fox Photo
The Post movie
Meryl Streep (right) stars as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks as editor Ben Bradlee in Steven Spielberg's movie "The Post."
If you haven’t yet seen the movie “The Post,” I recommend investing a couple of hours to view it. Its theme applies not solely to its own era, nor to the current state of American media, but to our collective need for vigorous journalism to keep watch on powerful institutions, including religious institutions.
Seeing “The Post” left me with a mixture of nostalgia, grief and discomfort. It’s set in 1971, the year before I started as a college journalist. Old newspaper hacks like me will revel in the production’s authenticity. In the movie, reporters use manual typewriters to write stories on copy paper with big red margins to enable measuring newspaper space. The paper copies are rolled up and shipped downstairs to the composition department via vacuum tubes like those now used only at drive-up bank tellers. The stories are prepared for print by typesetters using machines that string together metal characters to make sentences. Paste-up pages are set on slant boards for editing. Web presses hum with the urgency to “get the sheet on the street.” The only thing missing from “The Post” is the heady aroma of fresh ink on newsprint.
This era was when I learned journalism. In my case, those lessons translated into long, smoky sessions with the local city council, birddogging council members whenever three of them – a voting quorum – were together, even following them to the local watering hole. Over my five years of apprenticeship I learned to swear colorfully, smoke too many cigarettes, stay out too late, interview reluctant neighbors at gruesome crime scenes, and never drink my late-night deadline beer from a “tallboy” (large can) because the typewriter carriage knocked it over.
At the same time, I gained my life’s purpose. My boss and mentor, an irascible old CBS News veteran named Judson Bailey, made our “little country weekly” newspaper’s mission as clear as Florida's sapphire sky: we were a public service-oriented business that existed to protect the interests of the people.
I remembered that purpose some 20 years ago when Thomas McAnally, who was then director of United Methodist News Service, and I, as managing editor of the United Methodist Reporter, consulted about a disturbing trend: the decline of support across the denomination for genuine news. We struggled to find ways to counteract church bureaucrats’ mistaken idea that the messengers of news were to blame for the institution’s decline. Sadly, we couldn’t come up with an effective way to overcome the mindset that the institution’s reputation must be protected at all costs – including the cost of seeking the truth about the denomination’s operation and effectiveness.
Fortunately, some leaders since have realized the perils of this approach. Annual conferences with top-notch communications programs now regularly publish good news that shows churches at their best, along with frank, factual reports of conflicts and their resolutions. Best annual conference examples of this encouraging trend include Baltimore-Washington, Eastern Pennsylvania, Michigan, Northern Illinois, Iowa, Great Plains, Pacific Northwest, California-Nevada and Desert Southwest, and the Mountain Sky episcopal area serving Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain conferences. It’s a telling detail that most of these well-communicating conferences are located in the three U.S. jurisdictions – Northeastern, North Central and Western – that paid the highest percentage of their “fair-share” apportionments in 2017, according to the General Council on Finance and Administration. News reporting apparently didn’t stymie church giving in these regions.
Yet even with these achievements, an overall tilt toward secrecy continues to pervade United Methodism. Chief example: The Book of Discipline officially requires open meetings at all church levels, yet meetings frequently are closed with the merest hint of an exception. Nor are they always “reported out,” as also required by the Discipline. In laypeople’s terms, the approach seems to be, “if they don’t ask, we won’t tell.”
That’s why it has become even more crucial to ask penetrating questions of church leaders and to persist until the questions are answered adequately, because the people who pay the bills and live out the mission deserve to know how their resources are used. In the words of no less a personage than British Prime Minister Theresa May: “Good quality journalism provides us with the information and analysis we need to inform our viewpoints and conduct a genuine discussion.”
Thankfully, glimmers of hope are returning. Since the debacle of the 2016 General Conference, more individuals have become brave enough to push back against United Methodism’s cult of secrecy, even at their own risk, and communicators have stepped up to their role to “give voice to the voiceless, and hold those in power accountable,” as one of the journalists who investigated the Larry Nasser sexual abuse scandal said recently. Overall, however, United Methodism remains under-scrutinized, partly through lack of reporters and partly through the continued penchant for closing meetings and doing business by phone and email.
If there’s a lesson from “The Post” for churches, it’s that religion journalism's task is the same as that of secular media: we exist to defend the interests of the governed, not the governors. Painful as such scrutiny may prove, Religion News Service columnist Jonathan Merrett had the right idea when he quoted Norman Vincent Peale in a Feb. 3 tweet: it is better to be saved by criticism than ruined by praise. That’s what serving the people is all about.
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.