I took a core sample of broadcast news on the evening of November 23, 2019, on NBC. There were brief glimpses of the president’s tweeted and shouted responses to this week’s public impeachment testimony. There was a story on the most recent outbreak of salmonella poisoning from romaine lettuce, without any information as to the frequency or causes of such outbreaks. There were two minutes of gushy unpaid advertising for “the best apple ever,” similarly devoid of scientific or historical information, a testimonial that will financially benefit the developer of this particular apple. Then came the heart-warming story that always ends the national news, in case the earlier stories have depressed us. This story was entitled “Divine Intervention.”
Anchorman Jose Diaz Balart presented the case of a young woman named Kyra who had been driven into bankruptcy by medical debt, since she had kidney disease but no health insurance. This woman was rescued from her dire straits, Balart told us, by “divine intervention.” He read from the letter Kyra received from RIP Medical Debt saying that her “debt had been cancelled and abolished, courtesy of a nearby church.” Kyra cried with gratitude as she addressed the church congregation, which was clearly delighted with itself. Separately, a spokesman for RIP Medical Debt got two seconds to state flatly that “Medical debt is oppression.”
The trouble here is that RIP Medical Debt is a secular, not a religious, nonprofit organization. Leveraging the donations it has collected, it has wiped out nearly a billion dollars of medical debt for needy individuals, often paying ten cents on the dollar. The organization was founded by two former debt collectors. It’s true that many faith congregations have made donations, but the effort is not otherwise connected to religion.
NBC completely failed to give credit where credit is due. Kyra was rescued by HUMAN, not divine, intervention. This was a compassionate human response to a problem caused by humans. This was love in action, not some kind of supernatural miracle. Balart is free to credit God as much as he likes, in his private life. But what kind of journalistic code allows him to inject his religious views into supposedly objective reporting?
Broadcast news tends to standardize the stories it covers, lending its indifferent gaze to wars and celebrity gossip alike. We don’t expect context. We don’t expect anchors to connect the dots for us. We don’t expect commercials for Botox to be followed by interviews with angry feminists. We don’t expect much, really, since broadcast news declined to the lowest common denominator decades ago. But I do think most of us hope to get our sermons from pulpits, and not from the nightly news desk.