“The mass media are open to bright, energetic, qualified young Christians,” says John McCandlish Phillips, news and feature reporter for the New York Times since 1955.
Christians can penetrate the secular mass media
By John McCandlish Phillips
Prologue
Newspaper reporting is, in many ways, not like other kinds of work at all. It is a fast-paced, exciting life, full of variety and surprises. It has more hurry, more sudden changes of pace, less regularity of hours, and more tension than most lines of work. But it probably offers more sheer fun than most lines of work, too.
I have been a news and feature reporter for The New York Times since 1955. I went to work there by the clear leading of the Lord. I cover something different nearly every day. When I report to work I almost never have any idea of what my editors will assign me to do. I can be sent almost anywhere—across the block or halfway across the country—on an instant’s notice. The editor may send me to a parade, a fire, a picket line, a magician’s convention, an interview, a riot, a science lecture, a press conference, a banquet, a disaster, a circus, City Hall, the zoo, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A reporter’s job is simply to respond to assignment. The work is rarely dull. Most of the time it is interesting, but sometimes it is grim or harrowing. I was on a university campus one night where students were rioting. Two people were killed that night, including one reporter. A while ago a man I was interviewing threatened to take my life.
A reporter gets, as someone has pointed out, “a privileged seat, up front, at history-in-the-making.” He meets the great or famous (and sometimes the evil and infamous) up close and asks them questions. With his press card he gets to walk through the crowds, past the police barriers, past the ticket takers, and to go way up front—where the action is.
The hours can be crazy, and sometimes the pressure can be severe as he races against the clock to get a story before the deadline. There are days when nothing much seems to be happening. He sits around the office until, say, 4:30 p.m., and then all of a sudden big news breaks and he begins his day’s work late. In a year, a reporter for a big city daily will turn out close to two hundred major stories. He has a tremendous variety of different experiences, and he meets an amazing variety of people.
In all this variety, no matter how tough the assignment, no matter how late in the day it has come or how big it has been, or how seemingly impossible to do, my experience has been that—no matter what—God is able.
Should a young Christian consider becoming a news reporter? In these critical days, with world events turning more and more on the hinge of great end-time Bible prophecies, a Christian reporter can occupy a strategic place in the Lord’s service.
Part I
In the world there are basically two kinds of news—bad news and good news. Most of the bad news gets reported; much of the good news is ignored.
I wonder if it has occurred to you that one reason for the unsatisfactory and in-adequate coverage of news of religion, news of what the Lord is doing, in the nation’s press may be traced to the almost entire abandonment of the mass media of communications by evangelical Christians?
It would be my guess, based on more than a decade of acquaintance, that there are fewer than five evangelical Christians employed as reporters, editors, or editorial writers on the twenty biggest newspapers in the United States, and not three employed in such positions on the nation’s twenty best and most influential newspapers.
Satan, the god of this world, exercises a near-monopoly control over the mass media of information in this nation because Christians have let it be so. We have Christian dentists, Christian lawyers, Christian salesmen, Christian doctors, Christian teachers in profusion, Christian manufacturers, Christian stockbrokers, Christian writers—why on earth do we not have just a few more Christian newspaper reporters, editors, television and radio newsmen, Washington correspondents, columnists, and news commentators? Would it shock you if I suggested that one born-again young man planted in the newsroom of a large newspaper might be more useful to the Lord than three pastors?
There is hardly a community of any size in our country that is not served by one or more daily newspapers. We live in a democracy—a free society in which the people are governed by their own consent. Citizens must be informed on what is going on if they are to be effective. Newspapers are the chief means by which information on just about everything that is going on in the world is made readily, cheaply, regularly, and completely available to the public. A good newspaper is a fabulous window on the world. Since a democracy could not function without an informed citizenry, newspapers are a necessary part of the landscape of a free society.
The thousands of words that flow out on the nation’s news wires every day reach into every city and hamlet, and they do a lot to determine the tone and quality of the American culture.
Unbelievers are writing and editing nearly all the nation’s news. They are not bad men—many of them are hard working, honest, and well-motivated—but they are blind men. The Bible says that “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him,” and he is not able to understand them. The Bible describes such men as “the children of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2) who follow “the course of this world” and “the prince of the power of the air.”
The devil is at work in our society-today, and we see signs of that as evil erupts around us. But the Lord is also at work, mightily at work, and we don’t hear very much about it.
Have you noticed—let some person stand up and loudly proclaim some new threat to the peace and order of our society, some new excess of the flesh or of the human spirit, and it is almost instantly communicated to the entire nation through television and newspaper accounts.
This has the effect of spreading the evil more quickly. The hippie movement, for example, could never have spread so far so fast had it not been winged out on the news wires. The same is true of LSD. Do you ever wonder why every new wickedness or radicalism that the devil and his agents are foisting on the masses—from miniskirts and bold perversions to threats of violent racial upheaval to marijuana—gets such mediate, widespread and lavish coverage in our newspapers and magazines, while what the Lord is doing, with few exceptions, gets so very little public attention?
Make no mistake, the devil is a strategist. He wants to control the communications media of this nation: He knows he can use them to spread his works and his words all over our country and pull our society down into deeper and deeper sin.
How does he control these mass media? He controls them quite simply—by keeping believers out and by putting unbelievers in!
The only way the Lord and His works will get equal time and space in the nation’s news media is for believers to occupy places as reporters and editors in those media. For years the cry of my heart has been, “Lord, break up the news monopoly”—that is, the handling of the nation’s news almost exclusively by unbelievers.
Christians, perhaps out of a distorted sense of what separation from the world really means (if you want to know what it really is, study the life and acts of Jesus Christ), have abandoned places in the vital sectors of our society—in labor unions, in government service, in political office, in the great news media—leaving them all to be occupied by “the children of disobedience.” That may be why things are as bad as they are and are getting worse fast.
We hear, and are glad, that Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon knows the Lord Jesus Christ. But should there not be ten or fifteen more like him sitting in the United States Senate? Why are there not? Because very few Christians have ever set out on the difficult road that leads to public office and then to high public office. It takes about ten to twenty years of prior service for a man to rise to become a United States Senator. It would take about that much time for a Christian to become editor of a daily newspaper, but it would also make a big difference when he did.
The first step is for called Christians to begin at the beginning points. Young Christians must get in now at the starting points that can lead to high public office, get in now on the newspaper jobs that can lead to editorships or places as columnists or commentators later.
The fact is the mass media are wide open to bright, energetic, qualified young Christians. There is no bar against them whatever—except maybe a psychological one within themselves—and no lack of jobs for them to take and fill. All you have to de is walk in in faith and apply when you are ready.
In the Press section of the October 31, 1966, issue of Newsweek there was a story titled, “Help Wanted.” It told of the efforts of the American Newspaper Publishers Association to attract young people into news work.
The Newsweek story said: “In recent years all but the top half dozen of newspapers in the United States have found ii more and more difficult to attract ambitious journalists to city rooms.” The story said that the nation had 1,751 daily newspapers. So there is plenty of room.
I certainly cannot tell you that news reporting is God’s calling for you. But I can say in no hesitant way that it is not beyond the horizon of God’s possible call to young Christians for Him to lead some of them into newspaper and television reporting or editing. The strategy of the enemy I believe, has been to depict it falsely as beyond the scope of God’s purpose for any child of His, thereby to reserve it to himself.
I have walked by faith in the hectic, deadline-oriented world of big city daily newspaper reporting for twelve years. At times I have been tempted to find some more tranquil occupation, but each time I have been checked at the point of departure by some pointed reminder of His calling and of His purpose in that calling. I have wondered why others are not called.
Could it be that they are not listening?
In the Center of God's Will
The man who took me to the church in which I received Jesus Christ as Saviour, shortly before I was drafted in 1950, got just one main idea into my mind. The idea—he said it over and over—was that the only place for a Christian to be was “right it the center of God’s will. To be in any other place would be to be out of place.”
Few ideas have had a more governing influence upon my life than that. The Lord has a plan for the life of each Christian, and it is the duty of a Christian to be diligent in getting into that plan and sticking with it.
Nothing—absolutely nothing—in the following pages, not one word, applies to any young man or young woman who has not yet truly abandoned his life to the Lord, to do with as He wills. If you have never come to that point of surrender, that is the first thing you must do.
While I was serving in the Army I was at church one Sunday evening, and the speaker asked a searching question. He aimed it at the young people. “Are you willing,” he asked, “to go anywhere in the world and do absolutely anything the Lord wants you to do?”
That hit me hard. I had some plans of my own. I saw that I had not wholly surrendered my life to the Lord.
In the last weeks of my Army service, something—I am sure it was the gentle guidance of the Holy. Spirit—led me to get up before reveille in the early morning and to walk out alone to the small post chapel to pray.
How I recall the wonderful closeness and presence of the Lord those mornings as I walked in the cold blue light of pre-dawn to the little chapel. There one morning I gave up my life to the Lord to do whatever He wanted to do with it—no holds barred.
After we are born again, there are few issues as critically important to young Christians as the decisions that govern what they do with their lives—the choice of vocation. Whatever we work at, after all, is what we spend a third or more of our adult lives and half of our energy, doing. To make the wrong step here is a very big mistake.
Most Christians just go ahead and make their own career choices and plans, and then they pursue them. They ask the Lord’s help and blessing, of course, but they never really ask the deeper. question, “Lord, what will Thou have me to do?”
It is only after you have stopped giving the Lord your own choices of what you would like Him to lead you to do and have said; “Here am I, Lord, send me,” that you will begin to get a sure, clear idea of exactly what He wants you to do with your life.
After my surrender, the Lord led me as clearly to the news department of The New York Times as any minister or missionary is led to his field. The leading was specific and clear and surprising.
On the day of my release from the Army, I was filled with a great sense of adventure and faith. I didn’t have any idea at all of how or where the Lord would lead me, but I was sure that He would, and I was curious to see how it would turn out.
I really thought I might end up in the pastorate or out on the foreign. mission field. I bought a train ticket to go home to Boston, but I never did get there. I was led to get off at New York City and then to apply for a job at The New York Times.
The next morning, still in Army uniform, I was sitting in the personnel office next to two imposing looking gentlemen. “What college did you go to?” one of them asked. I had never been to college. One of them said that the paper had copy boys working in the news department who had master’s degrees and some who had Phi Beta Kappa keys. In that very moment the Lord gave me the words to speak, and I could see that He was giving favor with those men. A few minutes later they agreed to hire me—as a copy boy at $29.50 a week, working on the night shift from 6:00 P.M. to 1:45 A.M.
That was the beginning of a great adventure.
Conflict
A stronghold that the enemy has held for a rather long time, and that he has found very serviceable for the steady advance of his kingdom, is not to be entered and taken without conflict and resistance.
Unless you are prepared for the resistance, you may be taken by surprise by it and rendered ineffective.
It was in November, 1952 that I joined The New York Times as a night copy boy at the wonderful wage of $29.50 a week—purely by faith. I had a job near Boston that had been held open for me for two full years while I was in the Army, and it would have paid about three times that salary. I got some opposition from home on this clear leading of the Lord.
Soon I came to realize that I was the Only born-again Christian among all the reporters, editors, news clerks and copy boys in the huge, block-long news department—one out of about two hundred fifty. But I swiftly learned that I was one more evangelical Christian than the devil wanted working at the nation’s most influential newspaper.
My first two years as a Christian, even though spent in the Army, were wonderful years of walking with the Lord as a baby Christian. Life with Christ was all blue sky and bright sunshine and feeling the love of the Lord. I knew nothing of resistance, of enemy attack, of conflict.
Conflict began the day I was to report for work as a night shift copy boy at The Times. I was to go in to work at 6 P.M. About 4 P.M, I was hit suddenly with virus or grippe—with fever, chills, nausea, and an awful feeling of physical weakness. It was a knockout blow delivered just before I was to go in to the job the Lord had given me. I had to crawl right into bed.
Here it was my first day at work, and I had to call in sick. A splendid impression that would make. Then a suggestion of faith came. I got up slowly, feeling sick and wobbly, and somehow I made it into the news department. At certain points I had to hold on to walls and railings to keep my balance. But I was there on time.
Less than two hours later every symptom of that virus attack left almost as suddenly as it had come. By 9 P.M. I felt completely strong and well.
I believe Satan sought to withstand me in this way just as I was moving into God’s purpose for me. If I had believed the symptoms rather than the Lord and had stayed in bed, I have an idea the virus would have kept me low for several days. I suppose I might have lost the job before I ever got to it. But the Lord gave the victory over this attack.
The next attack was quite different. One night I began to argue with my immediate boss, and anger rose in me. I felt it coming up, and I had a moment of clarity when I should have—and could have checked it. But I did not. I spoke a few hot words, turned on my heel, quit, and walked off the job. I had left The Times.
At my rented room. I sat down in my chair. But it wasn’t there! I sat down hard on the floor. And that woke me up! I prayed, and I knew that I had to go right back to that office, make apologies, and try to get the job back. The boss chewed me out, but I was told I could go back on the job the following night.
One Sunday afternoon I heard, on radio, the most stirring call to the foreign mission field I have ever heard. When the speaker had finished, I just about leaped from my chair, lifted up my hands, and cried to the Lord to let me go.
Never have I received a quicker or clearer answer to prayer. It came so plainly that the sense of it can be captured in these few words. “Be still!” There was the sharpness of command in it. “You are where you are because I put you there. I have a plan.”
The next attack was far different, far less direct, far more subtle. I knew I was in the Lord’s place, but I had waited many, many months for promotion. Thoughts kept coming into, my mind saying it was weak and foolish to sit around waiting for God to do something.
Being a copy boy wasn’t much of a job—running out for containers of coffee for the editors, cleaning off desk tops, carrying proofs to the copy desks, jumping up every time someone bellowed “Boy!” to see what he wanted me to do. And I wasn’t a kid any more. I was twenty-five years old!
I didn’t feel much like a boy. But the job was by divine appointment, and I don’t think there ever was a harder working copy boy. I did the work as unto the Lord—with speed, courtesy, and goodwill. After one full year, I was still a copy boy. Only older.
Finances were so tight that I walked home from work every night at 1:30 A.M. to save the ten cents subway fare. I yearned to be promoted to reporter, but only about one in thirty-five copy boys hired at the paper ever makes it to reporter. I saw at least two dozen guys, many with better qualifications than mine, give up and leave.
Then one day I was given a raise, to about $49.50 a week, promoted to news clerk, and sent to the Washington Bureau, which was a very pleasant place to work. The job paid more, but it was basically the same work. I still went out for coffee and sandwiches for the reporters.
The months went by. I knew that the Lord had put me there, but faith began to waver. What guarantee did I have that I would ever be promoted to reporter? Satan was now trying a more subtle tactic—whispering suggestions of unbelief into my inner ear. Thoughts said I should rise up, take things into my own hands, and go out and get a reporter’s job on some other newspaper. Why wait forever?
I waited a little longer, but time had worn my faith thin. One Thursday night I just gave tip and gave in Faith went out the window. I was going to do something. I sat down and wrote a letter late that Thursday night applying for work with The Baltimore Sun. I didn’t have a stamp on hand, so I figured I would take it to the office the next morning and stamp and mail it there.
I walked into the office on Good Friday morning in 1955, exactly eleven hours after I had run out of patience, overthrown my faith, and written that letter. I hadn’t been in the office five minutes before James Reston, then the chief of the paper’s Washington Bureau, came over with a piece of news.
“They want you back in New York,” he said. “You’ve been promoted to reporter.”
I looked down at that unstamped, unmailed letter!
“Promotion comes neither from the east, nor from the west; promotion comes from the Lord,” the Bible says.
The incident of the letter taught me a lesson in faith that I have never forgotten. It might be summed up this way: When you have reached absolutely the end of the line in patience and faith, when you can’t wait any longer, wait at least one more day!
Please note one thing: Each of these at-tacks was very different in nature; but each had as its aim precisely the same purpose to get me out of the place where God had put me.
A New Level of Conflict
As we walk in faith, the Lord does not allow the devil to throw more at us than we can take. “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (I Corinthians 10:13 RSV).
Each of the foregoing attacks—designed to get me to abandon my position of faith—I would call pretty ordinary. Routine enemy artillery.
It was after I was promoted to reporter that the heavier artillery was rolled out against me: I had been in conflict; I came into great conflict. Within a short time I was walking along the street one day when suddenly—out of the blue—I experienced what I can only call a nervous collapse. This surprising and unexpected event seemed to drain me of personality and assurance. It made me fearful. I wanted to be alone and quiet. It made reporting extremely painful to me. I was subject to a strong desire to leave the city and flee into the countryside where it was peaceful and quiet.
I did not know what had hit me. But I felt its effects. They were acute. It was only later that I recognized that I had left myself open to this attack. The ground for the assault was a specific area of sin in my life that had not been put away.
The process of healing, I suppose, began fairly soon. But it was very, very slow, and I worked under great discomfort for a long, long time. In that condition, I could not make it on my own. Reporting for me became an act of radical trust in the Lord.
Faith alone held me at my place. Often I was sorely tempted when thoughts and suggestions came, saying that someday God would let me down and I would be caught short. In spite of it all, God prospered me in the way. I cannot account for it apart from His daily help.
The paper then had a local column called “About New York.” It was written by the late Meyer Berger, perhaps the best writer the city staff has had in this century. The next summer, when he went away on vacation, I was told, as a cub reporter with less than a year’s experience, to fill in for him on the column. That caused a lot of comment in the office because a very junior reporter was jumped ahead of so many established veterans. I filled in for Mr. Berger each summer until he died.
One of the weeks when I filled in on the “About New York” column I had to turn in three columns. I turned in the first. It was fine. The next one was liked by my immediate editor who accepted it, but a higher editor sent down a veto on the ground that it was more impressionistic than reportorial. I turned out a substitute column, and it got through. Then, for the third column, I wrote a very funny, if somewhat macabre, story that had been told to me by one of our foreign correspondents. It was good, I was told, but The Times did not want it.
So there I was. I had turned in four columns for the three I had to write, two had been rejected, and now I was out of time and out of ideas. I had nowhere to turn. I sat down at my desk rather wearily, “Lord,” I said, “here I am. All I can do is ask You to help me.” I just sat there, numb, for half an hour.
Then the phone rang. “Mr. Phillips?” a voice asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Then a very cultured Irish accent asked me if I might possibly be interested in a story about an Irishman who lived in a slum on East 29th Street and who wrote, printed, bound, and published entire books in his tiny living room, on a hand press made out of discarded junk.
Would I! I was in a taxi in three minutes and was knocking at the door in fifteen minutes. The press was a wonderful contraption. Its working parts included a broom handle, the wheel of an old sewing machine, something out of the engine of an automobile, and a dozen other odd pieces, and it worked splendidly, if slowly. In about an hour, I got everything I needed.
It made a wonderful column, a good deal better than the two that had been turned down. The editors loved it. It ran, and the publisher sent me a $100 cash bonus for it.
You might think that would be quite enough. But the little bit of faith and trust that I put in the Lord on that difficult occasion just kept paying off over and over again.
About a year later a man told me that that same Irishman had gone into the New York Public Library and had gained access as a scholar to certain famous letters that had been willed to the library on the condition that they would not be published for at least fifty years. He had careful memorized choice excerpts from these letters and had printed them up into a nice little volume.
It made a most unusual and delightful page one story under the headline, “The Case of the Purloined Letters,” and, of course, it was exclusively mine and the paper’s. The bootleg edition, and the literary tempest that was kicked up over rollicked on for days, both on and off page one, and finally went to court where the Irishman staged a scene that could not have been any better if Oliver Goldsmith had written it beforehand. I had the inside track on it exclusively all the way. There has rarely been a more perfect news feature with more rare and brilliant a central character.
Some months later another major page one story came out of it indirectly, and as recently as last January 1 had a long and amusing feature on a side result of the literary controversy.
This was a case in which, as the Bible says, the Lord did “exceeding abundantly” above all that I asked or thought.
Liberal arts courses, with some concentration on literature and history, are an excellent preparation for journalism. A good general education stands by a journalist all his days.
The young man, or young woman, who does not go to college before entering reporting must be the exception, not the rule. There are many such exceptions. The late Meyer Berger did not have a day of college, and, as it was sometimes said by college men on the staff, “Mike can write rings around the rest of us.” That was true. Meyer Berger had a way with words.
The medium of the newspaper reporter is the written word. The medium of the radio and television newsman is the written and spoken word. Therefore a reporter must have a facility with words.
It is essential that a reporter be able write clear, grammatically accurate, concise English sentences. A reporter needs to have a good working vocabulary—a bank of words to draw on by which he will be able to convey facts, moods, scenes, people, events to the reader.
College makes you read; it makes you write, it may even make you think. College puts a student through several years required reading, expanding his vocabulary, his acquaintance with ideas, his conceptual basis, his knowledge of history and human events.
But—whether in college or not in college—get to know words. Learn how to use them. Increase your store of them. Aim to write clearly to start with, and if you achieve that, aim to write well. By reading, learn of style.
The best way to learn to write is to read. The best way to learn to write well is to read good writing.
There are certain basic skills, techniques of reporting and newspaper work that must be learned. To some degree they can be picked up in recognized journalism schools. But there is no better way to learn them than by going out and doing them.
Basic things I learned, while working on a high school newspaper, equipped me well for later newspaper work. Doing a variety of news jobs on a college paper can be excellent training.
The one year that I put in working for a chain of three weekly newspapers near Boston, gave me a thoroughgoing education in the whole process of newspaper production. I covered stories, in person and by phone. I wrote news. I wrote headlines. I wrote editorials and humorous essays. Then I went down into the printing room—a nonunion shop—and I set headlines into type on a Ludlow machine.
I know of no adequate substitute for that kind of nuts-and-bolts experience, not even good journalism schools, which give it pretty much secondhand.
You can get this kind of experience while still in college by working summers for a small daily paper or a weekly paper. A year of it in total is all you need.
McCandlish Phillips covers a group protesting the tearing up of a city-owned park.
Journalism Schools
The purpose of journalism schools is to give one or two years (depending upon the school) of specialized education as an immediate preparation for careers in news reporting, on daily papers, or in radio and television news operations.
Good journalism schools, are often a shortcut to good employment. A good journalism school serves, at graduation, as a most efficient employment agency. There is a shortage of able young reporters and copy editors, and publishers line up to get their share of each year’s crop.
Working as an editor on a large college paper will give you a grounding in the basics of newspaper editing and production comparable to a year in journalism school.
My high school education was built on a base of heavy, voluntary reading while I was a grammar school pupil. I got some basic experience while working as a reporter, columnist, sports editor, sports columnist, and finally editor-in-chief of the high school paper in four years.
Immediately on graduation, I got a job on a weekly all-sports newspaper, The Boston Sport-Light, now defunct.
I think that, in His sovereign plan for me, the Lord knew that I needed some solid, basic experience without the pressure of a daily deadline. I got a chance to work in the newsroom of a chain of weekly newspapers just outside the Boston line—The Brighton and Allston Citizens. The pay was low, I worked hard, the hours were long. I learned a great deal of high value for the future. During that year, through a man who worked in the advertising department of that paper, I was converted to the Lord Jesus Christ, and I was almost immediately drafted for two years of Army service.
If you are not a college graduate, if you have not attended a journalism school, if you cannot get a job as a reporter, you can still get into journalism. All you have to do is hook on with the news department of some newspaper, even a major daily in a big city. You may have to sweep the floor, the pay may be low, but once you are inside, no matter what job you hold, you have a good crack at promotion to reporter if you show yourself to be alert and eager by doing your job well, by bringing in stories to the city editor, or by asking editors to let you cover small stories or features.
I believe you can do the same thing in the electronic media, by taking a job running coffee in the newsroom of some radio or television station and keeping an eye open for chances to get ahead.
Reporting is for me entirely a mission in the Lord’s will. I have sought to do my job thoroughly and well each day, whatever it has been, without otherwise seeking to gain the favor of men and without asking for advancement. It has been a walk of faith, and I have prayed much, on the job and in free time.
I have seen the hand of the Lord at every turn in the way, and in fourteen years I have seen Him raise me up from a $27.50-a-week copy boy, to a news clerk, to a cub reporter with a desk way at the back of The Times’ block-long newsroom, finally to a desk up in the front row. Raises in pay have brought my wage to more than ten times what it was to start. I cannot tell you whether I will be there a year from now, because I am in service to a King, and I will move at His command, wherever He may say, to do whatever He may bid me. That is part of the adventure of being a Christian.
The Key News Centers
A Christian, called of the Lord to journalism, will be useful to the Lord at almost any paper. But since there are so few Christians in secular news reporting, it would seem a better strategy for Christians to aim at key communications centers.
The words a reporter writes for the paper in Peoria may reach 65,000 homes, but the words he writes in Washington, D.C., may reach more than one million readers. The effort is about the same, but the reach is greater.
The Lord led me straight to The New York Times. I had not had one day-of daily newspaper experience before I joined that paper. At the rate our society and culture are slipping on the down-path, if Christians are to become effective instruments—salt—for the Lord in the area of mass media and mass communications, there is no luxury of time left. That is why it is better strategy to aim quite high.
Hundreds of thousands of words are transmitted to the entire country every day from the key communications centers of the nation. And these words have something to do with the formation of our culture and the ideas that inform it. Those key centers are New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles—pretty much in that order. I believe generally that these cities should be the prime targets for Christian penetration now.
What Can You Do for Christ as a News Reporter?
The Lord’s man in the Lord’s chosen place at the Lord’s appointed time does not have to worry much about the specifics of what he will do for his Lord. All he has to do is let the Lord use him.
The first thing a Christian newsman has to do is to do his job and to do it well. There is no substitute for that.
While he is doing his job as unto the Lord, he will also—by the very fact of his being present in the midst of a news-gathering organization—have personal contacts to which, in due season, he may give personal testimony to his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
As I was driving upstate with a photographer the other day, the Lord opened up a natural and wonderful opportunity to tell him about the saving power of Jesus Christ and the necessity of conversion, and the man came within a trice that day of going all the way to decision. Over lunch some day, you will have a chance to tell another reporter or an editor what Jesus Christ has done for you and what He can do for him.
The important thing is that you be a Christian, open and unashamed, among your colleagues.
Whatever you do, you cannot launch out on any crusades. You cannot aim to change the whole setup of things. But you can, and you surely should, have a living, genuine testimony to Jesus Christ. And you can witness as a saved sinner to unsaved sinners.
About six years ago I became quite dissatisfied with the lack of Christian fellowship within the news department (there was none) and with the seemingly go-nowhere pace of the work of the Lord there.
I set aside a couple of days for fasting and prayer, and when it was over, the Lord gave a very specific instruction: “Put Your Bible out on top of your desk.” That was all. I balked a bit. I thought it might look showy. But I did it. I did it every day. For years.
Nothing happened. There wasn’t even any comment. Then one evening one of the paper’s brightest young editors came over and asked me, very casually, what I thought about the Bible. I told him I believed it was the Word of God. In a few days he was converted through a friend of mine. Shortly thereafter he received the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and he became a radiant, on-fire, witnessing Christian.
One night he said to me, “You know, I believe the Lord wants us to start praying together right here in the newsroom.” So we went into a far corner where it was quiet and prayed—and that was the beginning of the prayer and Bible study group that meets for an hour every week in a large, comfortable conference room at The New York Times.
One afternoon, at the close of a worship service in my church, I asked for special prayer for the work of the Lord at The Times.
Several persons prayed, but something happened when Mrs. Hannah Lowe, a veteran missionary to South America, prayed. She got into urgent intercession. The thrust of it was a pleading with the Lord that He would bring me together with someone else at the paper important for me to meet.
I had no idea who it might be. Early the following evening, I was tight on my deadline and writing fast. A tall, willowy. young man of nineteen came over and asked me a question. I tried to wave him away. Too busy. But he just stuck. I glanced up and tried to get him to leave me alone. “I just thought you could tell me where to go to church,” he blurted. I invited him to my church. One night after a Bible study he became convicted of his need of full surrender. That night at home he made a radical decision to give his life utterly to Jesus Christ.
And he, too, was on fire for Christ in the news department. He began witnessing with authority. And things began to happen. It was through his zeal that the weekly prayer meeting expanded from three to seven regulars. He has since departed for the overseas mission field.
The editor who was converted took a different job, but the prayer and Bible study meeting goes on. I have seen the tremendous increase in the pace and effectiveness that occurs when the Lord has several channels through whom to do His work.
The Bible has an interesting comment on how efficiency increases: “One shall chase a thousand, but two shall put ten thousand to flight.” That’s a onefold increase in manpower but a ninefold increase in output! Two or three Christians, working together at a paper, can do much more than one can do alone.
What about impact on the flow of news? What may a Christian reporter do for Christ in that regard?
One thing is certain: You cannot set out on a crusade to change the character of the news. Again, it is just your very presence in the newsroom, if it is by the Lord’s appointment, that will make the difference.
One afternoon a couple of years ago, an editor tossed me a short piece of wire service copy from upstate New York. It told of a controversy about the Bible in a school there. “See if there’s anything to this,” I was told.
I picked up the phone and started making calls. The high school yearbook had sent some students out to solicit ads. A man had paid for an and had ordered few verses of Scripture to be run in it. Oh no, the principal objected, that would violate the Supreme Court ruling against religion in the schools.
The student returned the money to the man. The man’s pastor told the wire service bureau about it, and they sent out four paragraphs, routinely.
I called the man. He told me he had been a drunk and had been converted to Jesus Christ and had gone sober. The pastor told me that two dance halls and a saloon had placed ads in the yearbook. Discrimination against Christianity, he called it. I called the principal and, as I recall, the boy who sold the ad.
I knew it was a good story. I wrote good, lively summary of the facts for editors, and they decided that it should go on page one. The story quoted the verses the man had tried to put in the yearbook (increasing their circulation, incidentally, from a few hundred students to about 800,000 readers, at no cost to him). I did not put those verses in so as to jam Bible verses into the news columns. I put them in because they were an essential part of that story.
I always give a story a good, hard try. In this case I took a particular interest, because the subject was very interesting to me.
Another reporter might have made couple of short phone calls and then have strolled over to the editor and said, “Well, there’s a reformed drunk up there who religion and tried to get it into the high school yearbook.” He could have written his summary of the story in the same way. And the editor could have said, “Give me about five paragraphs on it,” and it could have ended up on page 28.
The difference that day was just being there, in the Lord’s place, at the Lord’s time.
One thing any reporter may do—indeed, has the professional duty to do—is to call his editors’ attention to anything going on that he thinks may be news.
Two or three times a week I write a memo to my editors suggesting some story possibility. These are on a great variety of subjects, and once in a while they include news of Christian significance. Roughly half of these story ideas are assigned to be covered, and they shortly appear in the paper.
Foreign missions would provide a rich source of good news matter, if foreign correspondents were aware of them. A Christian foreign correspondent would not be likely to ignore that good news vein.
A friend of mine, Scott Webber of the staff of the Nyack Journal-News in upstate New York, heard a minister give a prophetic sermon on the Lord’s purpose for the Gentile nations and for Israel. This came a few days after the Arab-Israeli war in June, 1967. The sermon was very topical. Scott took notes, told his editor, and the editor was pleased to let him take nearly a column of space to report the sermon. The sermon was newsworthy. But it was reported only because a Christian reporter heard it and then told his editor about it.
That is how it works. I never let my Christian enthusiasm confuse my sound news judgment about what is, and what is not, a story.
Once I told my editor That Billy Graham was to speak at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast at the Waldorf-Astoria, and I suggested that he might assign some one to cover it. He thought it over and then decided not to have it covered.
I went to the prayer breakfast, not intending to cover it, but Mr. Graham made some remarks about General Douglas MacArthur that were so interesting that I began taking notes. The general had died that week.
Back at the office, I told my editor what Mr. Graham had said. He told me to write it, and it went out on page one. The story would not have appeared at all if I had not gone to that breakfast.
When editors want a story, they want it, and they don’t care if it looks impossible. They assign you to it. And they want it now.
A financier fled to South America to evade legal prosecution for tricky dealings running into the millions. The paper wanted a complete life history and psychological depiction of the runaway financier, and I was assigned to produce it.
It was a big order. The story required the kind of investigation that would take a week or more of intensive work, but I had less than two days to turn it out.
I went over to the water fountain next to the telephone books and prayed. “Lord,” I said, “this is impossible. I’m going to flop on it unless you take over.” I put down my rather panicky nervousness by an active assertion of faith.
I went out to the paper’s morgue, where old news clippings are kept on file, to see if I could find any leads there. In the corridor I passed a tall man I recognized as a financial news writer who used to work for the paper. I had never known him, but I gave him a welcoming “Hello,” and a casual, “What brings you in?”
“Well, ” he said, “I’ve been working on a big magazine piece on—” and he named the financier! “I came in to check out one fact in the morgue.” He told me he had been working on the story, for a national magazine, full-time for 3 weeks. I was awed at the way the Lord had brought him into my path.
I told him I had just been assigned to do a long profile on the financier and that I didn’t know where to start.
He sat down and, in the next five minutes, gave me a rundown on the man, supplying facts and details that, when fitted into the pattern of things I learned a little later, gave me a marvelously complete and persuasive profile.
After that, I walked back into the financial news department, on the chance that someone there might know something of the man. As I passed a desk, my eye fell on a letter with the expatriate scoundrel’s name at the top of it. It was—incredibly—a long, close description of the life, habits and manners of the man, written by an associate.
“Look,” I said to the man on whose desk I found it, “would you let me take this and read through it?”
“Sure,” he said.
The thing ran for pages and it was filled with intimate detail. By this time, I had been “working” on the story for a couple of hours.
I had not made so much as a single phone call on it, and I found myself in possession of information supplied by a man who had just spent three weeks digging into the financier’s background, and of a communication that someone had been moved to write, disclosing detail after detail.
It was not long before I was able to turn out a two-and-a-half column long biography of the man. That paper ran it all. I got credit for a “brilliant story.” But I knew that God had supplied it.
How well the Lord knows our needs! In December, 1962, I was in California on a survey story when the unions struck The Times and shut it down (for what was to be a four-month-long strike). All the reporters went right off work. I decided that since the paper had paid my way to California, and since it was still putting out a daily European edition, I would finish the survey and write it before stopping work.
I flew back to New York, wrote the story, and turned it in at 5:30 P.M. on the fourth full day of the strike. I walked back to my desk to pick up my notebook. At that moment my telephone rang. It was an editor named Ewald of The Saturday Evening Post.
He told me that he had read something I wrote five years ago, that he had been meaning to call me, and that he wondered if I would like to try something for The Post.
“I wouldn’t,” I said frankly, “unless you want something on the Christian religion.” He said that might be okay, to come over and see him. The next morning we talked, and he assigned me to make a tour of eleven states for a story on the charismatic movement within the major Protestant denominations. No one knew how long the strike would run, but the story took the whole four months, kept me fully occupied during that time, and paid me just about the same sum that my salary at the paper would have come to for that period.
The timing of the Lord on that one was to the very minute of my need.
I could tell you a good many stories of that kind about the Lord’s provision, and I could recount several hundred instances in which I know He helped me to cover a story and meet a deadline.
He is the Christ also of the city room!
Trust
Reporting for a daily newspaper gives a Christian a tremendous education in trust. I, like you, have waited weeks, or months, sometimes years for the Lord to answer certain prayers—if, in fact, He has answered them at all. But as a reporter I have seen, perhaps on several hundred occasions, the Lord provide, immediately and in unusual ways, so that I could meet a deadline that simply would not wait.
I had a terrible assignment some time ago. A girl from Brooklyn had been murdered in London, and a boy from the City College of New York had been placed under arrest there by the British authorities.
The editor called me up to the assignment desk about noon and, in that bland way editors have of asking the impossible, ordered me, in effect, to go out and solve the case. My head swam with the difficulty and complexity of it. But I am long, long past the panic point. I know my Jesus far too well.
I made some phone calls. The people at City College froze me out cold. They would give nothing on a student accused of crime. It was July, classes were not in session, so there was no point in going up there to try to find some student or teacher who might know him.
After about an hour and a half, having got through to nothing or nobody, I opened my Bible, and my eye caught the verse:
“Arise and go to the street called Straight and there, inquire ….”
The message seemed very clear: ARISE! GO! INQUIRE!
I got up immediately, taking my note pad, and walked briskly out of the office like a man who knew where he was going.
As I rode down the elevator, I thought to myself, Where is the closest place that I can go to inquire? The answer to that was to go to the home of the murdered girl. It was a large Manhattan apartment building.
I asked the doorman if he would announce me to the mother (as I did so I had a deep, calming sense of trust in the Lord that He would get me in to see her). “Yes, you can go up,” the doorman said. “She will see you.” It was the Penthouse floor, Apartment D.
The woman was all alone in the apartment. She led me into the living room, where I had a forty-five-minute interview with a very distraught woman. Of course I did not grill her or ply her with very many questions. I just talked quietly and slipped in a few questions along the way. I listened and took notes.
Three times I asked her quietly if she had any idea of a connection between the girl and the student. At the very end she remarked casually, matter of factly, that the murdered girl had worked in the bookstacks in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue with the same boy the London police had arrested. That was important, because it did at least establish a close previous connection between the victim and the suspect. I gave the woman a small booklet of Bible verses and left. I hurried over to the Public Library, where a personnel officer confirmed that the two had worked together there.
The Daily News, a tabloid paper of immense circulation that revels in this kind of story, put its sharpest and best crime reporter on the story. William Frederici got a brief interview with the mother—but during it he did not learn anything about this important link. I had the clue that made the story begin to make some sense.
The whole difference between me and the other reporter on that story was the Bible and the Lord. Without His help and direction, I would not have got that story. Without that same help and direction, the sharpest police reporter in New York City did not get it. The scoop was mine.
The next day the family of the dead girl called The Times when I was off, told another reporter something new about the London case, and remarked that the call had been made because Mr. Phillips had seemed so kind the previous day.
If I had seemed kind, it was because I was not in that apartment trusting my own abilities, my own skill at questioning, to get the story. I was in there trusting the Lord, and I could afford to be quiet, casual, relaxed. Trust will do that for you.
I am not the answer to what I do on my job. If what you do can be explained entirely in terms of who you are and what you can do—your native gifts, your talents, your energies, your imagination and drive—then you are the whole answer to what you do. What you do begins and ends with you. In that case, there is no room for God to show what He can do for you and through you.
In sheer truth, somewhat less than half of what I do on my job can be traced back to my capacities and energy, to what I am, or to what I can do. The larger share is what He can do, and what He in fact does.
Moses was not supremely gifted for the task that was assigned to him—he was just supremely selected for it.
As Moses made clear to the Lord, he had certain definite limitations that unfitted him for the job. He was, in fact, not an eloquent man. So he could not be God’s spokesman before the whole court of Egypt and to the whole people of God.
What a really bad choice Moses was for that job, in his own eyes. He was “slow of speech and of tongue.” But the Lord said, “Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth.”
The calling of God is all that counts. With it come His provisions for absolutely everything, within the scope of that call.
“I will be with your mouth.” That was what made the whole difference. Moses’ work on earth could never on earth be explained in terms of what Moses was.
It was Who was with Moses that really counted.
The classic boast of the newsman is, in James Thurber’s memorable phrase, simply: “I can get it and I can write it.”
That is elemental and complete. Get it. Write it. That’s all there is to news reporting. Well, my friend, I know that I can write it—if I can get it. Much of the time the Lord has to get it for me. And that is exactly what He does.
It used to seem terribly chancy and dangerous to me to operate on naked faith as a reporter, hoping for a miracle of God’s provision, but now I can operate on naked faith, and do it all the time, as a matter of daily course.
I am not a pushy or aggressive kind of man. I cannot fast-talk my way past guards, doormen, secretaries, receptionists. All I can do is ask, politely, and pray to the Lord that they will say yes.
When I go into a police station I cannot, as some reporters do, horse around familiarly with the cops, cracking jokes, talking their argot, slapping them on the back, winning their personal favor by camaraderie. All I can do is go in, stand there like a stranger, and quietly ask them to help me.
Reporters as a class tend generally to be aggressive, bold, assured, thick-skinned, assertive, outgoing, and extroverted. Find the opposite of all of those words, and you’ve got a good description of me.
Because I am temperamentally, and perhaps emotionally, unsuited—rather gravely unsuited—for one phase of the work that I am in by God’s appointment, I must walk in continual, conscious, daily dependence upon Him.
I could not and would not be a reporter without His real, on-the-job help. Let the Lord withdraw His part—the larger part that He does—and I would not last as a reporter for three weeks. I just don’t have what it takes. Praise the Lord!
There is a carnal security in engaging in something that we know that we can get by in without significant help from God. Millions of Christians have such security it would appear, but they cheat themselves out of discovering the higher security of real dependence, not on things or circumstances, but on Him.
Worse than that by far, they cheat God out of His right to use them in some way that would make a difference in the world.
You are called, not to do that which is possible to you—any unbeliever can do that—but to do what is impossible to you apart from His help.
“When I am weak, then I am strong,” wrote Paul.
Your weakness, whatever it is in you calling, is an absolutely perfect match for His strength.
Copyright by John McCandlish Phillips
(This appeared in Light and Life Evangel magazine in 1967.)
