By the time I was 12, I knew I ness. By the time I was 16, I knew the reason why: because being a reporter, being in news, was the closest thing I could find to telling the truth, at getting at the truth. That seemed to be at the very heart of journalism.
After 20 years in the business, I still find journalism at its best to be truth-telling. But my view of the news business now is part of a far broader panorama of truth and a deeper understanding of what truth is. I think every good newsman and woman brings to his or her work an honest desire to tell or uncover the truth. But truth-telling informed by Christian Science portrays the unvarnished reality of the human situation, yet refuses to leave the reader/listener/viewer at that point of darkness and despair. That kind of truth-telling investigates who is looking for answers to the problems and what those answers might be. Because there is a solution for every problem. And if an answer isn’t obvious yet, someone somewhere is looking to find an answer. And that is a key part of any story.
Truth-telling informed by Christian Science also focuses much less on the surface evidence — the “face of the sky” — and much more on the “signs of the times,” to take a riff from Jesus’s statement in Matthew 16:3. That kind of truth-telling looks deeper at the thought trends, and puts human events into a deeper, richer brocade of meaning that can come from thought that gives credence to things of the Spirit. That kind of truth-telling doesn’t get thrown by the evidence of the moment, although it also doesn’t ignore the evidence.
Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, writes in her book, “Science & Health, With Key to the Scriptures”: “Acquaintance with the Science of being enables us to commune more largely with the divine Mind, to foresee and foretell events which concern the universal welfare, to be divinely inspired, yea, to reach the range of fetterless Mind.”
She also writes, in that same book: “The term Science, properly understood, refers only to the laws of God and to His government of the universe, inclusive of man. From this it follows that business men and cultured scholars have found that Christian Science enhances their endurance and mental powers, enlarges their perception of character, gives them acuteness and comprehensiveness and an ability to exceed their ordinary capacity .... It extends the atmosphere of thought, giving mortals access to broader and higher realms. It raises the thinker into his native air of insight and perspicacity.”
So for me, the goal of that insight and perspicacity is to truly get to the heart of things.
My own professional experience has been greatly colored by my faith. I can’t yet say that I am so in daily tune with God that I am able yet to see the future, but I hope to be able to. And in the meantime, I do believe it has affected my work in marked and tangible ways. And I would say that my faith affected my performance as much at CNN as it has at The Christian Science Monitor and Monitor Radio.
It would have to. I believe that any newspaper or magazine article, or any television or radio broadcast, is a window into the soul of the person writing and producing it. Every quality, every shard of knowledge, wisdom, insight — and yes, bias — is, I believe, glaringly obvious. And since Christian Science, the laws of God and their operation, is such an integral part of who I am and how I see things, it affects every little thing I do. It informs every little thing I do.
For example, when writing or editing medical stories at CNN, I was always more careful than most to do what every good journalist should do: source my copy. If the story is about someone dying of a disease, the copy must say that “doctors believe [the disease] to be incurable” or some other proper qualifying phrase that makes it clear that this is what the medical community believes. It isn’t necessarily so, because I believe as a Christian Scientist that no disease is incurable, because the root causes of disease are mental, so by changing one’s thought, the body follows. Obviously, I won’t go into that in a story, but I will carefully source medical comments about a disease and make it clear it is an opinion or a belief, not an unchangeable fact.
In doing a profile or an obituary, the focus is always on what the person contributed that makes a difference in the qualities that made the contribution possible, rather than on personality. For example, I wrote CNN’s obit of Katharine Hepburn, which of course has not run, since she is still with us. In that package script, I highlighted the qualities that made her, in the public’s view, more of an independent thinker, her seeming fearlessness, especially of being different. That’s what I believe sets Hepburn apart.
As the producer of a radio or TV program, I trust that the tone I set, and the stories I have us cover, tell what the reader/listener/viewer needs to know in order to not only be informed, but also to take action if s/he so chooses. I will not flinch from covering anything — but I will insist on covering it in a way that I feel is insightful and helpful. For example, we did a strong Monitor Radio segment on the right to die on the day that such a case was argued before the Supreme Court. Our producers had done everything right-almost. They had an overview piece explaining the issue and its relation to the case. We had a three-way between a show host, a proponent and an opponent of the Washington state law in question. And we had lined up commentary from a person who was ill and taking a stand for his own right to die. What we were clearly missing was the view of someone with the opposing view. So we got a healer (in this case, a spiritual healer, but it could have been someone from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute or any one of thousands of committed medical healers). The healer commented on the importance of caregivers being totally committed to choosing life. That she would never want some — one to give up on her, so she refuses to give up on anyone else. It brought a wonderful journalistic balance, plus insight from both sides of the right-to-die question.
So while I do not set aside my religious beliefs on the job — since those beliefs inform everything we do — l am quite careful to maintain rigorous journalistic standards of objectivity and fairness. At CNN, the fact that I was not raised with conventional medical thinking was the standard enabling me to bring a fresh perspective. For example, I was one of the few people who questioned the fact that the regular daily medical report at that time was sponsored by drug companies. I would bring a fresh view to almost any story. Not necessarily a rosy, optimistic view, but one informed by the preponderance of good over evil even when sometimes the opposite seems to be true.
My journalistic experience has never affected my religious belief in the long haul, but in the short-term, yes, it certainly can be challenging. It’s easy to be sucked in, to be mesmerized by the evil. Especially in the TV business, where the hypnotic power of the video image — especially at CNN, a 24-hour news network — can be shown over and over and over again. It takes constant watchfulness not to be sucked in. I needed to take steps on that front particularly during live coverage-whether at CNN or on Monitor Radio — where the thrill of the news chase and the adrenaline rush of getting the story out now can be virtually addictive, whether it’s covering the crash of Ron Brown’s plane in Croatia or CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War or a gunman taking over a school bus in Florida or a hurricane’s aftermath. What Christian Science teaches about how not to be mesmerized by evil definitely helps me do better news by not getting sucked in.
I do believe religious belief can affect the choice of subjects to cover, i.e., I would not choose to cover, say, much of the JonBenet Ramsay story in Colorado. But I would cover that story from an angle such as how beauty pageants for little girls affect those children and the people around them. So again, it’s more a matter of how the story is covered.
But my goal, in my daily professional life, is to be so clearly attuned spiritually that I will be able to help bring insight to what’s going on in the world. And so maybe the reader/listener/viewer feels a little more at peace, or understands a little better. Or, best of all, has a little mental lightbulb flash on, and says, "Ah, now I get it. And, I hope, takes some action in his or her private or public life to make the world a little better place.
That would be truth-telling at its finest.