23AR28-10

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AR 28:10 - A veteran journalist calls out editorial pressures

In this issue:

ABORTION - the Associated Press is "tinkering with reality"

CULTURE - "when the door is open, be very, very careful"

Apologia Report 28:10 (1,607)
March 30, 2023

ABORTION

Just when traditional media sources are straining to retain an audience, comes this: "The Associated Press turns crisis pregnancy centers into 'anti-abortion' sites and that's that" by Julia Duin (GetReligion, Feb 14 '23) -- "There comes a time when some journalists feel they must dissent from the prevailing winds of their occupation, and I've finally reached that point. ...

   "The Associated Press or AP, for those of you not employed by news organizations, sets the correct titles and grammar for work in American journalism. Everyone follows whatever AP decides something should be called, using the evolving standards of the Associated Press Stylebook.

   "Until now. Typically, AP leaders have tried to avoid taking sides in the abortion and gender debates. However, their most recent rules makes it quite impossible for some journalists - including myself - to cover this complicated topic the way AP insists that we cover it. ...

   "The Associated Press (AP) issued new guidelines advising reporters not to use the terms 'crisis pregnancy center' or 'pregnancy resource center' but to instead refer to centers that offer pro-life counseling and support as 'anti-abortion centers.'

   "Reporters should 'avoid potentially misleading terms such as pregnancy resource centers or pregnancy counseling centers,' because 'these terms don't convey that the centers' general aim is to prevent abortions,' according to the AP's Abortion Topical Guide. ...

   "In its updated guidance, the AP states that though the centers provide 'counseling, material support and/or housing,' because their purpose is to 'divert or discourage women from having abortions' they should be labeled 'anti-abortion centers.'

   "With that sort of logic, abortion clinics should be termed 'anti-birth centers,' or some other similar attempt at a neutral term. Right? No, AP says those institutions should be given their term of choice - women's health clinics. ...

   "The AP instructs reporters to frame the abortion debate as 'anti-abortion' or 'abortion rights' and to not use the term 'pro-life' or 'pro-choice.'

   "Reporters are also advised not to talk about a fetal heartbeat when referring to laws that ban abortion after a detectable heartbeat. Rather, the guide says, they should use the term 'cardiac activity' as 'the embryo isn't yet a fetus and it has only begun forming a rudimentary heart.'"

   Reflecting upon the "subtle transitions in speech in our media," Duin notes that in "the previous (2012 and 2022) stylebooks, AP devoted six or seven lines to the topic. Now it's a small treatise. 

   "AP has erased the phrase 'late-term abortion,' or even the accurate medical term 'third-trimester abortion,' instead telling reporters to use 'abortion later in pregnancy' which is more vague. That appears to be the goal. ...

   "Remember the Orwellian doctrine: Those who control the language control the masses and what they think. ...

   "As Plato said, 'Those who tell the stories rule society.' Whoever controls the narrative, controls the culture. ...

   "The AP additionally devotes an entire section in the revised style guide to transgender sports, warning writers not to 'misgender or imply doubt' about transgender athletes, specifically males competing in women's sports. ...

   "In other words, use the language that has been chosen by the 'good' people in this debate, while erasing language linked to inconvenient information or arguments used by 'bad' people on the other side.

   "Thus, the supposedly even-handed AP style book now takes philosophical stands on gender issues while pretending to be an objective style guide. The 2012 volume didn't even contain a 'gender' reference. The 2022 book devotes six pages to it. ...

   "Does DNA and biology have anything to do with this? To be sure, large sectors of our society have embraced these new doctrines. ...

   "It's truly getting crazy out there. Call up APstylebook.com if you don't believe me. Read what they have to say about using the word 'female.' 

   "Female, woman: Revised guidance noting that some people object to the use of female as a descriptor for women because it can be seen as emphasizing biology and reproductive capacity over gender identity. It can also sometimes carry misogynistic tones that may vary in severity by race, class and other factors.

   "One begins to wonder: Who wrote this stuff? Now we can't use the word 'female' in our copy?"

   We empathize with Duin's pleading questions: "This tinkering with reality by AP bodes ill for journalists not willing bow to these new teachings about gender, sexuality, abortion procedures and the nature of reality itself. I do wonder what will happen to those not willing to go along: Submit stories without bylines on them? Change beats? Walk off the job?"

   Duin concludes: "I'm glad I'm in the twilight of my career where the costs of such choices is low. I pity those people of conscience for whom it is not. We are going to end up with newsrooms that are even less diverse - in terms of culture and beliefs - than what we have right now." <www.bit.ly/3nkw5a3>

 ---

CULTURE

"Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful." by Ross Douthat (New York Times, Feb 1 '23) -- Douthat considers how "the dissolution of the old order of American religion - the decline of churches and denominations and the rise of deinstitutionalized spirituality - means that more and more religious lives are lived in between worldviews, in experimental territory where it's a mistake to expect coherence, theological consistency, a definite set of prior assumptions or beliefs."

   Then he explains: "I want to defend the rationality of this kind of spiritual experimentation and then to warn about its dangers."

   Douthat opens with a familiar context in which "an extension of the self-help spiritualities ... have been attached to American religion since forever" and observes that "it's unclear to what extent any of this can be called belief."

   He includes the example: "Even some people who explicitly identify with witchcraft seem to have this ambiguity in their identification; they are participants in a culture of ritual and exploration, not believers in a specific set of claims.

   "A second example is the increasing fascination with psychedelics and hallucinogenic drugs, which takes secular and scientific forms but also has a strong spiritual dimension....

   "Now a third example, very specific: Recently a statue appeared on a New York courthouse, occupying a plinth near famous lawgivers like Moses and Confucius. It's a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with braided hair shaped like horns, roots or tendrils for arms and feet, rising from a lotus flower. ...

   "The golden woman ... is clearly an attempt at a religious icon as well, one forged in a blurring of spiritual traditions. ... But the imagery of the courthouse statue is also pantheistic, the roots and flower evoking nature-spirituality, 'a magical hybrid plant-animal,' as one art critic put it. And then finally it's very hard not to see the braids-as-horns, the tendrils that look a bit tentacle-like, as an appropriation of Christian images of the demonic in a statue that stands against the politics of conservative Christianity. ...

   "For the stringent materialist, everything I've just described is reasonable as long as it's understood to be playacting, experience hunting, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does it offend against rationality.

   "However, stringent materialism is itself a weird late-modern superstition, and the kind of experimentation I'm describing is actually far more rational than a life lived as though the universe is random and indifferent and human beings are gene-transmission machines with an illusion of self-consciousness. ...

   "But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, an ordered and mathematically beautiful cosmos that yields extraordinary secrets to human inquiry and supplies all kinds of wild spiritual experiences ... makes a general openness to metaphysical possibilities a fundamentally reasonable default. And this is especially true if you have no theological tradition, no religious upbringing to structure your encounter with the universe's mysteries - if you're starting fresh, as many people nowadays are.

   "But precisely because an attitude of spiritual experimentation is reasonable, it's also important to emphasize ... the importance of being really careful in your openness and not just taking the beneficence of the metaphysical realm for granted.

   "If the material universe as we find it is beautiful but also naturally perilous and shot through with sin and evil wherever human agency is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension would be different - no reason to think that being a psychonaut is any less perilous than being an astronaut, even if the danger takes a different form.

   "There is plenty of raw data to indicate the perils.... 

   "I'm writing as a Christian; my religion explicitly warns against magic, divination, summoning spirits and the like. (Atheist polemicists like to say that religious people are atheists about every god except their own, but this is not really the case; Christianity certainly takes for granted that there are powers in the world besides its triune God.) And it makes sense that in a culture where people are reacting against the Christian past there might be an instinct to ignore such prohibitions...."

   Douthat concludes: "Some element of danger is unavoidable. The future of humanity depends on people opening doors to the transcendent, rather than sealing themselves into materialism and despair.

   "But when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in." <www.bit.ly/3nxOAYP> (paywall awaits)

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