SOMETIMES, I feel that I should apologise for the number of American stories in this column, but there really is so little religious news in the British secular press; this week, there is a Times story, but that’s about an American reality-TV series about glamorous Mormon wives who have a huge following on TikTok.
Nothing in it compares with The New Yorker’s take, a few weeks earlier: “In another episode, Jessi, a thirty-one-year-old MomToker who owns a hair-care brand, announces that she’s decided to get a labiaplasty, since after having two kids she needs to get a ‘mommy makeover.’ For the MomTokers, becoming a mother is a crucial part of being a woman, but erasing any mark of that event is just as important. ‘I’ve gotten my boobs done three times and now I’m getting my cookie redone,’ Jessi tells the camera brightly. Later she lowers her pants to show a few of the women her newly reconfigured labia — a kind of inversion of a consciousness-raising ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ moment.’”
The Mail Online had two religious stories, but one of them — “Ex-priest and a former missionary become OnlyFans stars who film lesbian romps for their followers” — was foreign news, from the Brazilian Pentecostal scene. The couple met at a “Miss Bumbum” contest, which celebrates bottoms enhanced with plastic surgery.
BOTH of these are, in fact, showbiz stories, not about religion. They are about performances, not people. You might say that any news story dehumanises its subjects, if only by taking them out of context and stripping from their lives all that is irrelevant to the audience. But that is inevitable and essential to the process. What is different here is that the subjects have done it to themselves, for money. They are selling images, figuratively as well as literally.
The money will be much bigger on TikTok, because it comes from the surrounding advertising. Whoever makes a fortune out of the porn on OnlyFans, it won’t be the performers.
The difference between advertising money and money paid for the stuff that fills up the spaces between advertisements was nicely pointed up by the Financial Times, which looked at the value of Rightmove, the house-listing site that Rupert Murdoch was trying to buy, although he gave up on Monday after it turned down his latest bid of £6.2 billion. The bid was made through the equivalent Australian site, REA, which Murdoch controls. His stake there contributes 70 per cent of the profits of News Corp — far more than any of the news businesses. This is because property websites supply the users with information that is important to them in a way that newspapers hardly ever can.
Similarly, the German Axel Springer group just sold its classified sites, which list property and jobs, for €10 billion, to a private equity firm. The newspapers that made its name are valued at one third of that.
Auto Trader, the classified-ad business that The Guardian sold in 2014, is now worth three times what the paper got then.
As journalists, we like to believe that readers value the truth, as we do. But, if truth is what readers will pay for, why do they use sites largely written by estate agents and used-car salesmen?
I think that there are two checks on dishonesty here. One is internal: we all know the language of marketing fluff, and filter it out almost unconsciously. The second and more important is external: there are laws against false advertising, and people who have been cheated can make use of them.
THERE are not, in general, laws against false news. The freedom of the press is implicitly a freedom to lie as well as to be mistaken, and it has to be, because we do not trust governments to distinguish between a falsehood and an inconvenient truth. Things are different if you’re a Roman Catholic, because the Vatican, if not infallible, is presumed to have a moral authority in a way that secular governments are not.
This makes the latest spat in the schism of the American far Right interesting in terms of journalistic ethics: one of the ten people sanctioned by the Vatican last week was a former editor of the Catholic News Agency, an American outfit owned by the reliably right-wing EWTN cable news network.
Alejandro Bermudez was expelled from his (Peruvian) religious order for “Offences against the apostolate of journalism” — lying, in other words — in several of his anti-Francis articles. So far as I can understand the story, he did nothing that would seem out of place in The Daily Telegraph or in most of the rest of the British press. He has not been excommunicated or anything. But Pope Francis has clearly had enough. He has described EWTN’s coverage as “the work of the devil”. I’m sure that there are Anglicans who feel like this about the press, but it takes a pope to say it out loud.