By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
I’ve been fascinated by news, primarily as it is peddled by means of the daily “broadsheet,” since grade school when I single-handedly founded a newspaper for ensuring all eight grades of my parochial school would be well informed on the matters of the day.
I remember well the saintly woman, Mrs. Dumais, a busy mother of about six children, who patiently and expertly typed all of the articles onto a wax Gestetner form. The keys of the manual typewriter would pierce the wax so that the form could then be attached to a drum containing ink. As one rolled the drum over paper fed through the machine, ink penetrated the typed holes, bleeding onto the paper, resulting in the finished product of letters forming words, paragraphs, and the resulting mental pictures painted by stories.
I don’t remember how long the St. Mary’s Elementary School “official” newspaper survived, but the experience fed later into a gig as the editor of the Pallotti High School paper, then work as a reporter for The Ram, the official paper of the Fordham University student body. All of which led to the words over which your eyes pore at this moment in the weekly column I now pen for The Wanderer.
No doubt my years as a delivery boy for The Washington Star also fed my fascination with newspapers. The route fell to me also while in grade school. Each day as I lugged the papers around on my bicycle, in early mornings by turns freezing, wet, or somewhere in between, I watched history unfold. Dramatic moments like Nixon’s resignation and the fall of Saigon stand out in my memory, as banner headlines splashed across the paper’s front page above the fold. I kept that paper route just about until the time came for me to go away to college.
Today there is much talk of news, but in many cases only to make the charge that it is not worthy of being called such. Charges and countercharges of “fake news” are themselves getting headlines. President Trump is playing no small role in the discussion.
What is news? It depends.
I discovered as a very young editor at St. Mary’s that I held a lot of power when it came to deciding what was newsworthy. If I felt something was important enough, I could put it in the paper. Whether or not my public read it, it was there all the same for their information. My good intentions sometimes had to be their own reward.
I also realized early on that the more controversial a subject was the more likely the intended audience was to notice the paper, pick it up, and read it. Headline writing proved thus to be an important element in the getting and keeping a constituency.
Whether or not adequately served by writers, editors, and publishers, from the point of the view of the consumer, news is information about matters important to him, which he could not otherwise obtain. All of us in some way rely on the witness of others to inform us. Newspapers and other media fill this role.
With social media, the playing field has been leveled. We all trust the news and family photos on a friend’s or family member’s Facebook page because it is posted by someone we know and trust. A headline in The New York Times or on CNN, however, may not deserve the same credibility.
As I found out early, writers can massage the facts to get the desired outcome. Statistics can be manipulated. Negative aspects of a story can be emphasized to the neglect of a more balanced perspective.
The brass ring for every reporter is his byline on the front page of the paper. The only front-page story I scored in four years of writing for The Ram was when I chose as my headline the fact that the school of general studies — a program of evening classes offered by Fordham for working people — had just suffered a 10 percent decline in enrollment. Focusing on the negative achieved my objective.
As for offering context which may have softened the impact of the story, there may not have been much. An editor’s limit on story size sometimes provides a reporter’s alibi.
That episode tells a lot about the mainstream news business and the reason why papers have to intentionally carve out space for human-interest stories: Otherwise, they would be crowded out by negative trends of every sort. That is where fake news comes in: relentlessly finding what is bad about everything to the neglect of balancing context.
The ability to identify and reject fake news is a must.
An example of fake news was calling the protests on January 21 a “Women’s March.” The organizers were all too clear about the fact that they are unambiguously pro-abortion and that pro-life women were not welcome. The result of this, the real news, is that Catholics who participated caused scandal and must repent through Confession and receive absolution before returning to reception of Communion. Adults who took young people to the events are guilty of particularly heinous scandal.
What’s news for us? What is the truth for us? The “Good News,” the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ does not look at us impersonally, from a distance, but He reads our lives back to us from within, as He did with the Samaritan woman we heard about on the Third Sunday of Lent. His love works through our conscience. Knowledge of our sins is real news, but we are called to respond not emotionally and with denial as if the information is fake or useless.
Christ is Incarnate God with a heart like ours beating in His breast, One who was tempted as we are yet without sinning, One who walked the Earth as we do, One who suffered fatigue and weariness, who needed to sleep and eat, needed to love friends and family.
The Lord “publishes” the news of our sinfulness with His death on the cross. In the Resurrection He gives evidence of the real news of His merciful love which confers a share in His life without end for those who express sincere sorrow for sin.
The Lord proposes Himself as both the means and the reward for those who through faith seek self-understanding by means of an honest examination of conscience. Christ is the true “good news” for all of us but, before we can accept Him with authentic love, we must first face the fact that our sins are not “fake news” and respond with repentance.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
@MCITLFrAphorism
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