Who’s Afraid of Reporting the News From a Biblical Perspective?

January 30, 2018

3 min read

Tuly Weisz

Steven Spielberg’s new film The Post portrays the story behind the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s and explores the tension between journalism and government. In a poignant scene at the end of the movie, the Post’s first female publisher, Katharine Graham, delivers a memorable line, calling newspapers the “first rough draft of history.”

To the media elite, this assertion rings true. Yet I believe it harmfully overstates the role of journalism.

As the publisher of Breaking Israel News, which presents news from a biblical perspective, I’d like to suggest that a more illustrious literary source plays an even greater role in the development of history: the Bible.

The Bible, however, is not the first rough draft of history, it created history.

In his 1998 book The Gift of the Jews, Thomas Cahill explained that other ancient societies saw the world in cyclical terms, with seasons repeating over and over again. As such, everything that appears had appeared before and would appear again. Nothing really mattered, nothing had significance. Cahill writes that the Bible, the gift of the Jews, changed that mindset for subsequent history.

Abraham, Moses and King David introduced to the world the utterly transformative idea that events do not repeat, they move forward.

“Most of our best words, in fact ‘new, adventure, surprise; unique individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice’ are the gifts of the Jews,” writes Cahill. Every individual matter and everything we do has great consequences.

The Post movie drives home this central idea in the dramatic portrayal of Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers at great personal and professional risk. In their roles, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep show how a few individuals working at a relatively small local newspaper could have a major impact on the arc of history.

Yet, for millions of Bible believers, it is the Israel- based news outlets that truly provide an even more important local and eyewitness account of the events shaping our world.

When the US recognizes Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people, or when the UN rejects the Jewish connection to our holy sites, the mainstream media looks back 50 years to the Six Day War, or 70 years back to the establishment of the State of Israel for context. Breaking Israel News looks back 3,000 years and explains these current events from a biblical perspective, not just a political one.

Christian media regularly interpret events based on their understanding of religion and spirituality, without shame, without apologetics.

Next month, thousands of Christian journalists and media leaders will gather in Nashville, Tennessee, for the annual conference of the National Religious Broadcasters, whose mission is to “advance biblical truth.”

Jews, on the other hand, prefer a wall between the press and the pews.

Famous secular Jews have long made an outsized contribution to quality journalism, with prominent names such as Joseph Pulitzer, Arthur Ochs, Carl Bernstein and even Katherine Graham. Some Jewish journalists might even occasionally point to Jewish values of truth and justice in guiding their work.

With so much of the world’s attention focusing on Israel as never before, Jewish media should go beyond embracing universal Judaic values. We must reclaim our heritage to provide an authentic Jewish voice and biblical context to a struggling media landscape in a fast-paced world struggling to make sense of it all.

In the age of superficial social media and “fake news,” we need eternal truth more than ever and should take down the wall we have built between news coverage and spirituality.

For 85 years the printing presses ran at The Jerusalem Post, providing an eyewitness account of the miracles unfolding in Israel. The Post should be commended for recognizing the Christian interest in the Jewish state back in 2005 when it established a Christian Edition magazine that goes out to 40,000 print subscribers around the world today.

Reprinted with author’s permission from The Jerusalem Post

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