Due to a variety of factors, journalism in the digital age has in many places been swallowed by PR. Part of this is a function of the way online networks tend to work, while part of it is due to the loss of a shared sense of reality, a necessity upon which the possibility of public argumentation is built.
One of the unhappy consequences of this transformation is that in public discussion arguments have been replaced by irritable mental gestures, usually offered in service to a pre-defined friend or enemy of the speaker. The effect here is that many media projects over time develop a predictable quality. You can name the topic, name the outlet publishing the take on the topic, and if you’ve been paying attention for any length of time, you can often predict what the take will be. In this respect, Christian media of all stripes has come to be something like a fundamentalist preacher—we all know where he’s gonna end up and if you’ve been paying attention long enough, you even know how he’ll get there. This applies to many centrist and progressive Christian media projects as much as it does to conservative outlets.
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