'REVEALED' TRUTH

Jay Rosen, author of What Are Journalists For and point man for the public journalism movement, has helped found The Revealer, a daily weblog on religion and the press at www.therevealer.org. His debut essay suggests eight ways journalism functions as a religion or a priesthood. He makes some playful but apt analogies, including journalism schools as seminaries, reporters' righteous indignation at "the sin of religious certainty," the First Amendment and other creeds reporters hold dear, and public journalism as a breakaway church calling for repentance. But he ignores the question of how other institutions justify similar parallels; much of what he says could apply to Fortune 500 companies, politicians, the military, environmentalists, basketball coaches, and so on. I suppose the difference (though Rosen doesn't say it) is that journalists do more pious introspection and hand-wringing over their Role in Democracy and Duty to the Public.

The Revealer amplifies discussion of how religion is covered in the mainstream media, and carries on relevant conversations—including one about Celebration, Florida, (see Places below) as an Eden. While even more time could be spent dealing with the daily distortions of religious topics in the media (all too common, as Christian Smith writes in the current B&C, a column that was reprinted at The Revealer), you have to appreciate intelligent references to Pascal's Wager and the Mars Hill Review in the same blog. That and more make The Revealer worth a bookmark.

Related:
The Tribune Tower as a cathedral of journalism, from my Chicago album From the Indianapolis Star: Editors worry about reporter ignorance, too—when story is about them
Earlier:
Christians in newsrooms
'Bright' belief as a religion

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

International Falls, Minn., hangs like a stalactite from the Canadian border, and [its] "Ice Box Days XXIV" … is a celebration of its idiosyncratic fame. … Not so fast, says Roland Fowler, a 64-year-old former Army mule skinner, or driver, who lives 120 miles away in Embarrass, Minn., a hamlet with 640 people, just one gas station and no visitor accommodations. "There's no way International Falls can keep up with us," he said earlier this week, when the thermometer outside his farmhouse recorded a low of minus 25 and a high of minus 14. "Even in July we've had garden-killing frosts." For two decades, Mr. Fowler has argued that International Falls has been dining out on its status as America's "Ice Station Zebra" for too long. Way too long. On Feb. 8, 1982, Embarrass hit 52 below on an unofficial thermometer that shattered while the mercury was still headed south. But it wasn't until eight years ago that Embarrass, honoring trademark laws, started billing itself with a less poetic, but more straightforward slogan: "The Nation's Cold Spot."

CELEBRATION, Fla. — The gossip along this town's determinedly quaint main drag these days is bigger than the typical "who left their trash can by the curb," or even "who added on to their house without permission." The Walt Disney Company, which built Celebration just outside the Walt Disney World gates in the 1990's and has been the planned community's benefactor and strict parent, put the town center on the market last June. The pastel-colored shops and restaurants that make up Celebration's signature squeaky-clean vista will soon change hands, and as a sale is negotiated in secret, residents and business owners are wondering who will take Disney's place. … Officials at Disney's development arm here, the Celebration Company, said they were negotiating with a potential buyer and hoped to announce a sale as soon as next week. They would not identify the buyer of the town center, which includes 16 retail shops, 6 restaurants, 105 apartments and 94,000 square feet of office space.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• Whether or not you hear it said tomorrow night, the State of the Union depends on the state of the middle class, says Michael Lind in the Atlantic Monthly's annual special section on domestic problems and solutions. The most tenable and common dream of Americans is to reside in the middle class, not the upper class—it is a dream of comfort, not a dream of wealth (or at least it might be, in a world without greed). The demographic dominance of the middle class has long been one of America's defining peculiarities, coming on the heels of yawning disparity between poor and rich throughout world history. But lest we forget, this dominance is fragile, since the middle class was "artificially created by government-sponsored social engineering," Lind says. Now, the disappearance of high-paying middle-class jobs and the rise of low-paying service jobs is sucking the life out of the middle class. This trend may eventually divide the nation into a quasi-feudal setup "in which most Americans provide personal services for the rich few." Lind vastly overstates this possibility, and then resorts to redistribution as his prescription. He is more convincing in articulating the problem than the solution, but even that may be more than the fine-tuned rhetoric of President Bush's speech, and the Democrats' response, will accomplish.

Also in the Atlantic's roundup: The costs and causes of social rage; low-income students' tuition crisis; and Francis Fukuyama on nation-building
Earlier:The real state of the union from last year's Atlantic

• Friedrich Hayek is known—when he is remembered at all—for his post-World War II book The Road to Serfdom, which warned of the dangers of centralized economic control. It was received as reactionary; then it became conventional wisdom. But Hayek was more than an economist, says Virginia Postrel in the Boston Globe's Ideas section. He made connections between money and ideas, between information and culture, and had prescient insights into cognitive science and information theory. Postrel's otherwise useful tribute focuses too much on economics—despite ignoring the important question of whether today's multinational corporate conglomerates represent the economic diversity Hayek considered inherent to the free market. Full story
• Speaking of the problems with the private sector, let's give Halliburton a fair trial, says James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. "No serious person believes that the United States launched a war for Halliburton," he says, although that company's ties to the White House and its bidless receipt of a contract to work in postwar Iraq stir the imaginations of conspiracy theorists. What's truly worrisome is less sinister,  Surowiecki says—not conspiracy but the pervasive privatization of daily maintenance of the military. "The military once ran its own mess halls, handled its own communications, and maintained its own weapons systems. No longer." The rise of outsourcing and distrust of bureaucracy crept into the Pentagon, to the point where one-half of national defense work is now done by private contractors. But outsourcing and efficiency don't always go together, Surowiecki says. "Effective as outsourcing can be, doing things in-house is often easier and quicker." Full story
• "There is a pox upon our public speech," pronounces Don Watson with the kind of bluntness and clarity he says is disappearing. Read a university's Web site blather incoherently about its "quality management … underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework," and you recognize the problem. Watson says "managerial language" is ruining politics, business, education, and the arts, resulting in what the Melbourne Age calls "the death of clarity and irony and funny old things called verbs." Ever since George Orwell's 1946 essay Politics and the English Language (which is scandalously unmentioned here, though Orwell is brought in for a brief bow at the very end), we have been vigilant for jargon in the halls of power. But now, Watson says in his book Death Sentence, everyone is starting to sound like middle management. Full story To his credit, journalist James Button displays the virtuous—and, playfully, some of the contemptible—lingual tendencies under discussion while writing the story.

Related:
On disfluencies: Humanities profs say "um" more than science profs, from the New York Times
Business jargon in the fine arts, noted in my personal notebook
In what language do deaf people think? From the Chicago Reader
Earlier: The problem with bad language, and the purpose of dense writing

• Miscellaneous: Our seven most shameful emotions, from Psychology Today - New York City's subterranean human population, from the Chicago Reader - Bakery employs disenfranchised, makes deluxe cakes, from CBS' 60 Minutes

• Previous/Archive/About/Feedback/Links/CT blog

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.