It shouldn’t take a miracle for journalists to write about miracles

This has been a topic that has intrigued me for decades now because at the heart of it is a very important journalism issue, and that is what happens when you just quote somebody making a truth claim.

the simple fact of the matter is that journalists have decided that certain types of truth claims are valid and other types of truth claims are not valid and we can see this all over the place and the the basic rule is that if a scientist says it or if lots of scientists say it it's true For example, this was a factor during COVID coverage.

Now that's something far away from discussing miracles, but it's the same basic principle.

you had people who were critical of the vaccines and critical of some of the treatment decisions and the cultural decisions.

But those people didn't represent the official scientific voices that were endorsed by the US government and most importantly by their editors.

And thus one set of statements was taken as true even though there was conflicting scientific evidence in the debates.

And you had people with very high credentials arguing on both sides.

But it was never really treated like a debate until there came a time when it had to be covered, when things just were undeniable.

That's a story like COVID, which is one of the biggest news stories several decades now.

The miracle stories are interesting because if you start off by saying, if science says it, it's real, then you get to another attribution issue, which is, well, what if a person says this happened to me? I know it's true because I experienced it.

And basically, What journalists tend to do is divide that into things that the journalists believe are physically and materially possible, can be quoted, and can be attributed as fact.

But things that the journalist either doesn't understand or doesn't believe, or it doesn't fit a material worldview, automatically goes into the category of belief.

And it's just that religion thing.

And sometimes it's not even worth looking into.

What I've tried in lectures to editors and a bunch of other stuff through the years, I've tried to get them to look at it this way.

Basically, belief, prayer works, miracles are real, I was healed, I had a vision.

That's a belief.

It's an individual person's belief.

Now, the question is whether you want to downgrade it because he's saying something that doesn't fit your worldview.

But here's the fact that journalists have to take into consideration.

It's a fact that millions of people, and not all of them crazy religious types, scientists even, it's a fact that millions of people believe that prayer is real.

and they believe that miracles are possible.

Now you can say, oh, Terry, that's just a statement of belief.

Well, no, it's a scientific fact that there's that many people who believe it.

And if newsrooms are going to ignore the fact that that many people believe this kind of thing, they're going to have trouble covering a lot of important news stories.