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 Washington Post’s first female publisher, Katharine Graham, delivers a memorable line, that newspapers are 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 written word 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 matters 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 Washington, D.C. 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 U.S. recognizes Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people, or when the U.N. rejects the Jewish connection to our holy sites, the mainstream media looks back 50 years to the Six-Day War or 70 years 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.
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.
Breaking Israel News, which started five years ago, points out God’s hand each day throughout the news cycle. Thanks to our largely Christian audience, we now have more than 2 million page views per month and have quickly become one of the largest English news sites in Israel.
Great events are unfolding on the streets of Jerusalem and in the headlines of our newspapers every day. As the ones with front row seats to the fulfillment of biblical promise after promise, Breaking Israel News is taking a fresh approach to news from our ancient pages of the Bible.
Reprinted with author’s permission from News Max
