Media and Spirituality: The Journalism of Denunciation

Media and Spirituality: The Journalism of Denunciation

An article published in the magazine “Les trois mondes” no. 14

By Jean-Luc Delfin

Insofar as the spiritual minorities express and experiment with the qualitative values denied and ignored by the mercantile society, they represent targets particularly aimed at by those whom Serge Halimi calls “the new watchdogs”.

People who take an interest in the new forms of spirituality are always astounded by the ignorance, the prejudices and the superficiality with which the mass media give an account of them. It must be said that nothing is more opposed to the tempo and tone of the media than a spiritual path. While the time of the media is that of immediate news, paced by the spectacular and the sensational, spirituality awakens in the secrecy of an unsayable experience. While the media aim at consensus, authentic spirituality always supposes a break with the ambient conformisms.

Media and spirituality thus represent two contradictory “points of view”: that of the body in search of “strong sensations” and that of the soul in search of subtle inspiration.

A few specialists have studied the way the media give an account of the spiritual minorities labelled cults. What emerges from these studies is that the very great majority of journalists respect no ethical rule in this field: no field investigation, no cross-checking of information, no verification of sources, most do nothing but copy out the files conceived and drafted by anti-cult back-offices which use, while modernising them, all the techniques of the inquisition: rumour, denunciation, “testimonies” of penitents, amalgam etc. These practices confirm what one professional says (1): “Journalism, in 90% of cases, is copying out.” If many journalists thus resemble parrots, there are a few who behave like scavengers, ready to swoop on easy and fragile prey designated as scapegoats…

These pitbulls of disinformation represent the armed, media wing of a “catho-secular” lobby in which hysterical housewives, psychiatric normalisers, unscrupulous lawyers and more or less villainous politicians come together. Media disinformation is one of the key elements of the modern inquisition: it demonises the spiritual minorities through campaigns that accompany every political, administrative or legal decision concerning them. Any new or alternative path will be judged non-conforming and presented under a folkloric, condescending, ridiculous, delinquent or indeed criminal aspect.

A study of this journalism of denunciation enriches the reflection on the normalisation mechanisms of the modern media. Under the mask of journalism, the procedures of low policing and the crude devices of propaganda are used: editing tricks, fakery, fabrication and false testimony are charged with illustrating a single, accusatory point of view. All the other points of view, that of the leaders and members of the spiritual minorities, like that of informed specialists, are systematically set aside. We could thus cite dozens of cases, across all media, of patent disinformation. In a society where the information market obeys the laws of supply and demand, the point is to give the reader or viewer images and information that comfort him in his prejudices.

There is, quite evidently, beyond the ideological and financial interests, something pathological in the way certain “journalists” confuse their role with that of inquisitor, informer, policeman or prosecutor. Those who, in the persecution of their neighbours, find compensation for their impotence are the same who, during the last war, held forth with antisemitic discourses on the official airwaves, who denounced the bad Americans during McCarthyism, or who combat dissidents, today in China as yesterday in Russia. The spokesmen of the ideologies of intolerance always express the same fear and the same hatred of difference.

Everyone can react to this generalised disinformation and to this intellectual terrorism, whose aim is to frighten people away from all alternative forms of life and thought. By being active within associations that fight for freedom of conscience and constitute poles of vigilance against disinformation. By responding systematically to media caught with their hand in the bag of lies and amalgams. By creating relational networks and media capable of circulating free information on the new forms of spirituality.

While he was fighting against all the political, judicial and media authorities, Zola wrote during the Dreyfus affair: “Truth has within it a power that carries away every obstacle. And when its path is barred, when someone succeeds in shutting it underground for a longer or shorter time, it builds up there, it gathers there such an explosive violence that, the day it bursts out, it blows everything up with it.”

The diehards of disinformation risk being the first struck by the explosive surging-up of a truth they have buried under the weight of lies and prejudices.

Read also The end of the traditional media? and “Do the media lie?” by Le Kiosque

1 Journalistes précaires, éditions Le mascaret (return to text)