The “northern muckraker” - as he was known - W.T. Stead, should be a household name in a time of sexual and media mayhem.
Stead was the youngest editor to be appointed in the country when in 1871, he resolved to turn his paper, the Northern Echo, into a pulpit.
He told his journalists to go into the slums and “be Christs." He wanted them to sacrifice ambition and expose poverty – and rape.
The country was plagued with sex trafficking – sound familiar?
Stead ended the trade in young flesh with an infamous campaign not unlike that of Andrew Norfolk’s for The Times in our own day. He exposed the covert sale and abduction of young virgins by arranging the abduction of a 13-year-old himself, in order to report on how it was done, since, like today, the police were complicit in the trade.
Stead’s series the “Maiden Tribute of Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette ran for weeks, scandalising society. Then he was sent to prison, even though the Archbishop of Canterbury had stood as guarantor of his bona fides.
That no one today has heard of Stead speaks for itself... So why dig him up now? Well, because revitalising the connection between reforming journalism and religious zeal, which is foundational for our world, could help save it, when seemingly little else can.
The current landscape
As it is, the statistics of collapse are stark.
In the UK, in the years between 2005 and 2018, as reported by the BBC, more than 200 local newspapers closed, the number of regional journalists halved, and 58 per cent of the country no longer had a dedicated local newspaper.
In the US, it is just as bad; the newspaper industry lost $1.3 billion worth of editors’ and reporters’ jobs in the decade to 2018 – or 60 per cent of its workforce.
And the decline just keeps on happening [1]. Reuters reported in February this year that people are spending less time even with online news, turning away from news negativity [2].
Reuters' Craig Roberts writes: “Drawing attention to this trend is important because this declining news engagement may have negative implications for democratic participation and for combating misinformation, among other things. The news media provide people with information they may need in their daily lives...”
Why should evangelicals care?
The Western tradition of communication goes all the way back literally to the beginning of the Bible – to the religious scribes who invented Hebrew to communicate the revelation of God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Until that moment, there was no vernacular language in writing on the planet, only inscriptions on royal boundary markers and the like. But the spiritual energy that was galvanised by the giving of the Law to Moses erupted in the writing down of the Torah. The histories of the Old Testament, and the prophetic literature on which civilisation itself has been based, followed.
As we travel right back in time, a picture emerges through the fog of cultural amnesia that goes all the way back to the beginning of our story; we ignore it at our peril.
The truth is fading away in what are becoming the news deserts of our age, erased by the easy lure of social media.
Why raise this now?
Projects like the News Futures Forum [3] at the University of Central Lancashire seek to alert a new generation to the importance of Public Interest News that has moulded our world.
David Lush, co-author of the Forum’s report Lessons from Southport, spoke at the launch of Saving Journalism at the Kirby Laing Centre in Cambridge in May. Lush writes: “Understanding journalism’s spiritual roots helps explain many journalists’ brave and determined pursuit of social justice – and why reconnecting with its soul is important for journalism’s re-invention and survival.”
Back to W.T. Stead...
W.T. Stead
Stead was not unique. Indeed, he was merely a follower in a long, unbroken chain of prophets for whom public utterance was the catalyst for world change.
He harked back two hundred years to the battle for souls fought out in the burgeoning Press of the Civil War, and before that, to the Protestant Reformers, for whom, as former New Statesman editor Paul Johnson put it: “Printer’s ink [was] the incense."
Without the Christ of the Gospels, communication and the system of government with which we are familiar would not have happened. The impetus simply would not have been there.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was the father of journalism and an earlier self-professed prophet. He had the same Puritan zeal as Stead. Through his campaigning reports for various newspapers, he inspired not just social reforms of every kind but the nurturing of public opinion, the very basis of parliamentary democracy.
“It is mainly a matter of spiritual energy,” writes his biographer James Sutherland. God, he believed, had given him special insight – and he must report the truth as he saw it.
Defoe “never lost the earnestness and the stubborn conviction of having an ‘inner light’ that are at once the source of the Puritan’s strength and of his limitation.”
The newspaper: Its history
Meanwhile, over in the new colony of Massachusetts, the newspaper was developing along the same lines as it had in Reformation Europe – as printed reports of providential action, produced with a prophetic impetus and tone.
It was anything but infotainment. Clickbait meant a matter of life and death.
The new country’s first writer/editor was Massachusetts’ best-known preacher, Increase Mather (1639-1723), a Calvinist clergyman. He was urged to provide careful coverage of “Illustrious Providences” which “all showed a glimpse of God’s purposes." This was intended to encourage, guide and admonish the new colony into the ways of prosperity and peace.
It was the same in China – the first real news periodical, the China Monthly Magazine was founded in 1815, written in Mandarin and published by London Missionary Society’s Richard Morrison and colleagues. China had had print for a thousand years, but not the “spiritual energy” to use it for social reform.
The iron nexus between liturgical worship and news is another facet of this unique story of civilizational development, since cathedrals were the biggest consumers and markets for printed materials.
The original St Paul’s Church had been the site of the “folk moot” where freemen had been summoned to meetings of national gravity. It developed into the prime site for reinforcing political and religious establishment. After printing arrived, news built naturally on this tradition, such that two centuries later, the eminent Victorian Thomas Carlyle could with hindsight describe St Paul’s Cross in the 17th century as having been “the Times Newspaper” for the nation, “edited by Heaven itself."
It was where printers looking for business naturally set up their stations (hence the Stationers’ Company) and where “newes” was posted literally on the actual walls of the building.
But today, if content – which is king, in the industry’s adage – is downgraded, it will spark consequences, as we are seeing.
And if the truth-teller is implausible, and the motivation becomes corrupted, something deep inside us revolts. We intuitively switch off.
'Trust the messenger'
The Reformation scholar Andrew Petegree tells of an old European tradition to trust the messenger rather than an anonymous written report. A news report gained credibility from the reputation of the person who delivered it.
There were two monasteries in rural Wales, in the 11th century, a hundred miles apart across rugged terrain. Every third year they would exchange messengers who would live in the other house for a week, to share the news.
Medievals had a profound suspicion of information that came to them in written form so they would live with the messenger to see what kind of man he was.
Veracity, or truthfulness, is incarnational – to be worth trusting or internalising, news had to be embodied, or “personed”, and embodied well. The very words “truth," “trust” and “troth” share an etymology.
News: Where are we today?
In our own time, the online platforms are fixing it so that you don’t get priority news, only what commands click-throughs. And what governs that is algorithms that follow the money, not the matter.
News has always relied on advertising to pay for its purveyors and distributors. But most people today don’t want to be upset by what’s in the news; they’d rather have fun.
They have the power now to choose to opt out in a way that makes money for the platforms, not for the publishers who are forced then to downgrade their own reporting priorities.
The result is attrition in the quality of information and corruption in our institutions.
It used to be the case that if it wasn’t in the news, it hadn’t happened, or it didn’t matter. Now the opposite is true.
Gareth Edwards wrote just a few weeks ago that Surrey Pride was founded by a man who is now serving a sentence for child rape. He had been given £24,000 of taxpayers’ money last year from the council. “The media didn’t do its job,” says Gareth in The Spectator. “I know from experience that people often refuse to believe you when you tell them the plain facts about this period. Because you can’t possibly be telling the truth – it would have been on the news!”
'Spiritual energy is the key to communication'
Martin Luther tackled papal corruption in the early 1500s. He kept three printers busy, generating both widespread literacy, print distribution on a Europe-wide scale, and the first consumer product, the printed vernacular Bible, giving rise to capitalism and the nation state. But he also sparked the Peasants’ Revolt and Thirty Years War. His pamphleteering gave rise to newspapers – and civil strife.
Spiritual energy is the key to history – and to communication. The digital revolution is disincarnate, and a product of apostasy. It is a real revolution. It is also, like the print revolution, provoking confusion and strife.
The modern media is now cast by eminent former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, as “the most prodigious capability for spreading lies the world has ever seen."
Young, spiritually energetic Christians have the antidote. Will they use it?
Saving Journalism: The Rise, Demise and Survival of the News by Dr Jenny M Taylor is published by Pippa Rann Books, £18.95, ISBN: 978-1913738-33-4.
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