Can a person of faith be a journalist or would such an affiliation impinge upon the professional integrity of a journalist? Does loyalty to a higher power mean that a journalist’s ability to seek out the truth is nuzzled or muted?
In this week’s episode, we chat to former Sydney Radio Announcer, turned church minister Dominic Steele to find out whether the two are compatible!
Interview Transcript:
Nick: Well welcome to Resolved. On today’s show, can a Christian in good conscience work in the secular media or do the demands of the profession preclude itself from believers in Jesus? Can a journalist be a Christian or does it compromise their ability to objectively cover the news of the day?
With me in the studio to discuss his life in the media and in Christian circles I’m joined by Dominic Steele. Dominic, welcome to the program.
Dominic: Hey Nick, thanks for having us.
Nick: Dominic, tell us about how you came to work in the media?
Dominic: I’d always been passionate particularly about working in radio. My first go at work experience working at 2SM when I was in Year 10. At that stage, 2SM was the number one station in Sydney. I worked as a volunteer at 2SER FM and Radio for the Print Handicapped and then got my first gig working in media at 2MO Gunnedah in North West NSW and then came and worked at 2UE down here in Sydney.
Nick: So just to verify, at the time you weren’t a Christian?
Dominic: Oh no, I wasn’t. I didn’t have a personal relationship with God, I wasn’t going to church, so I don’t think at that time, when I started at 2UE that I could describe myself as a Christian. It was actually during the time that I worked at 2UE that I actually began a personal relationship with Jesus.
Nick: And what was it that sort of spurred you on to pursue that relationship with Jesus? How did that work?
Dominic: Humanly speaking, there were two people involved: there was a girl who wouldn’t go out with me because I didn’t have a personal relationship with God and I wanted to have a relationship with her and she wouldn’t have a relationship with me because I didn’t have a relationship with God and that rocked me, because there was something in her life that was more important than me and at the time, there was nothing in my life that was more important than her.
When we, we didn’t go out, when the relationship was over she sold me her car and moved to London and it had one of those fish stickers on the back of the car. You know the stickers that bad drivers have on the back of their cars? Anyway, I had to decide what to do with this sticker and I was showing the sticker to one of the other guys, a guy called Russell Powell and I said to Russ: “Here’s my new car, pop-up headlights, sunroof”, everything that I’d wanted in a car and he said: “What’s the sticker?” and I said: “I’m trying to work out what to do about that” and it just seemed like to take the sticker off was the final statement in “get lost, God” and I kind of knew in my bones that God existed and I actually think, all of us know that. You look at the mountains and that speaks that there’s a mountain maker. You look at a new-borne baby and that says there’s a God and just the idea that you, complex individual that you are came about by accident, I just think is a bigger leap of faith than to believe that there is a creator, so I knew in my bones that God existed and I wanted to have a relationship with him but I just didn’t know him.
As I talked to my friend from the radio station, Russell, over a period of months, talking with him, going along to his church, listening to the Bible being explained, I gradually became convinced that it was true: that Jesus existed, that Jesus had died to pay for my wrong, to pay for the way I had rejected God and had risen again from the dead and as the one who had risen from the dead had a claim over my life and so, there was a day, where I prayed, apologising to God for the way I had lived in rejecting Him and saying: “I now want to live in a personal relationship with you, recognising you as my personal God and Jesus as my personal Lord” and thanking him that Jesus’ death had paid for my sins and so I’d say that that was the day that I trusted Christ, that was the day that I became, if you like, a Christian.
Nick: How did becoming a Christian impact upon your work?
Dominic: It changed some of my focus, in that I think I was pretty driven in the media industry. Up until then I thought the only thing I was living for, really was to be famous on the radio, to do the radio well. I then came to see that there was actually other things outside the media industry, outside being on the air.
One of the things, I think, you go into the media and actually, lots of people who go into the media come from pretty much the same place. I never knew how important home loan stories were to Australia until I got a mortgage. Intellectually, I kind of knew but I didn’t know what a different it makes, a quarter of a percent interest rate rise until I got a mortgage. I didn’t know how education stories were important until I had children at school.
I was editing the breakfast news on 2UE at 21 and I had such little life experience, really. I now think, twenty years later, that I’m just about old enough and wise enough to take on some of the editorial responsibilities that I had twenty years ago and I think I was living in a world where people totally denied that there was any kind of spiritual existence to life and the only people of any kind of spiritual thing that they came across were Fred Nile and we weren’t actually meeting credible Christians.
So I think for me, becoming a Christian was, on one level it’s like having a child or taking on a mortgage, it was adding another dimension to my life, that helped me to have a broader perspective, it actually helped me realise that more people go to church every Sunday than go to football games in Australia. You think about the enormous amount of column inches that get spent on football coverage in Australia and yet more people go to church in Australia. Whatever the football code, all of the football codes, more people go to church.
So, to say “Can you be an effective journalist in Australia and be interested in football?”, well, to say “Can you be a Christian and be an effective journalist”, it’s basically as stupid a question as that!
Nick: Now you’ve subsequently left the industry and are now the Senior Minister of Village Church Annandale and Christians in the Media, why the change in professions and how did you handle the transition from being a voice that all of Sydney heard on their radios to becoming a Christian pastor?
Dominic: Well, I don’t actually see myself as having left the industry, I mean next month I’m hosting the Sunday night program on 2CH and next month, I’ll be sitting in your chair and interviewing people. But you’re right, I’m no longer doing it as a full-time gig and there are some things-
I was thinking about it the other day, that when the twenty fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre came up, people were talking about “What were you doing when this happened?”. Well, what I was doing was reading the news, announcing that it was happening and that was a big part of my life, at the time.
I guess what happened was I was working at WS and reading the news and at that stage, our radio station was very significant in Western Sydney. We were rating forty five percent in South West Sydney, but I was going through a period of working through that there were more important things in life than traffic jams and potholes on roads and more important things spiritually. So I was actually working out that in my own life, the things that I cared about were people coming to know Jesus and growing in Christ and I wanted to be doing that, full time, helping people.
Actually, one of the things about radio is that you do it and it’s gone, it’s been broadcast, it’s finished and yet, actually, if you speak the words of God into people’s lives then that actually changes their life into eternity and so has eternal implications and so, I was beginning to do that in a part time way and seeing more and more that that is what I was interested in and so, over a period of time, transitioned from doing the radio full-time and doing Christian ministry in kind of bibs and bobs, to doing Christian ministry full-time and doing radio in bibs and bobs, around the edge.
Nick: Why Christians in the Media as opposed to say Christians in plumbing? Are there challenges that Christians face in the media that they wouldn’t face in other professions?
Dominic: I think so. Why Christians in the Media? Firstly, I noticed that there were very few Christians in the media world. In fact, what Christian churches have done down through the centuries is sent missionaries out to lost tribes in Africa. Well, you could call the editorial floor at Fairfax, or the editorial floor at the ABC a lost tribe and so, rather than go and be a missionary to Africa, I set out as a missionary to the lost tribe of the media.
I think the percentage of Christians has traditionally been lower in the media industry than in many other segments of the community of Sydney and the people who work in the media were people that I cared for, they’re my friends, they’re the people who I’ve loved for years, and years, and years and so, of all the people in the world that I most want to see know Jesus, trust Him, be in a relationship with Him, it’s my friends in the media.
But you’re right, as well, in your question. There are specific issues that you confront in the media, that you don’t confront as a Christian plumber or as a Christian shop assistant. There are some jobs, actually where really, the way your Christian faith impacts the way you do the job; the Christian faith says: “be honest, have integrity” but actually, you’d hope that the boss of the accountant would be saying: “be honest, have integrity”.
I found, as a Christian in the media, there is often in many editorial, decision making processes an almost unspoken bias against Christian faith. It’s rarely articulated, I don’t actually think it’s deliberate really. But, I remember noticing it one day, years ago. I was reading the news on 2UE. There was nothing happening in Australia, it was Christmas Eve. Everything had stopped and I knew, because I was Christian, that at midnight, a zillion people would be getting up out of bed, going to midnight church services, on Christmas Day.
I stopped off at St. Andrew’s Cathedral and recorded the (Anglican) Archbishop of Sydney’s address in the 8PM service, knowing that there’d be another address at the midnight service and we played some audio of that in the midnight news and we led with it and we led with the sound of church bells and things like that.
Over on 2GB they were running “oh, the union movement says something about the government that says…” and nobody could have given a fig at midnight on Christmas Eve, going into Christmas Day. But you could see that I actually understood what was going on in people’s lives in a way that that editorial guy at the other radio station didn’t because it just never, ever occurred to him that people would go to church. But if a fifth of Sydney is getting out of bed, to get up to go to church at midnight, that’s a genuine news story!
Nick: Do you think Christian parents have traditionally feared the prospect of their children becoming journalists or screen and radio producers and what’s at the core of that fear?
Dominic: I think probably they did, twenty years ago. I actually think that’s no longer the case, really. I think, just by the fact that our group, Christians in the Media exists it actually says: “it’s possible to be an authentic Christians in the media”. I don’t hear that as much as I did twenty years ago.
Nick: How do you think churches can better reach out to media workers and what is Christians in the Media doing to help out with this?
Dominic: There’s two issues that media workers face: one is an intense cynicism and the other is shiftwork and bizarrely actually, shiftwork is probably the bigger one. I think churches, generally, are not very good at reaching shift workers, whether they’re shift workers in the hospital, shift workers in the police force, or shift workers in the media and often it’s because structures of a church are all organised based on the premise that you work 9 to 5.
One of my friends is a shift worker. He’s joined a church because it meets on Saturday nights at five o’clock. He works all day Sunday and he has for the last ten years and he’s just delighted to find a church that meets Saturday night at five o’clock that he can take his kids to. Now that church, I don’t think they probably set themselves up to be “that particular shift worker church” but they’ve ended up being “that particular shift worker church”.
On the question of cynicism though, I think that just in the way you teach the Bible as a preacher, you’ve got to show people that you’re aware of what’s going on in the world, that you’re aware of the nuances of how that’s going to land in your workplace, you’ve got to anticipate some of the pushback that people listening to you are going to get if they were to repeat what you’d said in the workplace, the next day.
You’ve just got to work harder at understanding where the people who are listening to you are at. I think it’s possible for a minister to end up in a bubble of information, a bit detached from the world and I think you’ve got to work hard at not doing that.
Nick: So with all that in mind, safe to say that faith in Jesus doesn’t preclude someone from working in the media?
Dominic: I’m absolutely clear that faith in Jesus doesn’t preclude someone from working in the media, in fact, I think it makes you a better worker in the media. I think it makes you a better worker all round. I stopped stealing things from my employer when I became a Christian. I’m not talking about major things, but there were integrity lapses. When I crashed the car, I fessed up to it immediately, do you know? There’s just things that poor behavioury-type (sic) things.
But I actually think that media outlets would be healthier with a variety of staff who have different perspectives. I’d want to see young Christians in the media, I’d want to see young Agnostics in the media, I’d want to see young Buddhists in the media. Not just a blinkered consensus that Atheism is correct.
Nick: Dominic Steele, thank you for your time.
Dominic: Thanks very much for having me, Nick.
More details about Dominic Steele’s ministry work can be found at the Village Church Annandale and Christians in the Media websites.
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