Is Our Culture Dead? | Power Line

Is Our Culture Dead? | Power Line
"There was a time when people in certain occupations were assumed to be educated, and educated people could be presumed to know certain things. 
There was, in other words, a common culture. 
That era wasn’t so long ago; I actually lived through it. 
But I am afraid it may be gone.

Exhibit A: A reporter for National Public Radio–a prestige media outlet, ostensibly–had no concept of basic Christian theology:

An NPR report on Good Friday described Easter inaccurately and, in doing so, practically begged Christians to renew charges that the media is biased against them.

“Easter — the day celebrating the idea that Jesus did not die and go to hell or purgatory or anywhere like that, but rather arose into heaven — is on Sunday,” read an article on NPR’s website.

...A reporter shouldn’t write about Easter without having the faintest idea of what it is all about, and someone who thinks Jesus “did not die” has no business writing about Christianity. 

My point, of course, is not that reporters need to be Christians, but rather that the basics of Christianity are fundamental to our culture and should be understood by anyone who holds himself out as educated and undertakes to write on the subject.

Exhibit B: Ancient Greece and Rome are the other major contributors to Western civilization, along with the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Iliad is essential to our understanding of Greek civilization. There was a time when reporters knew something about ancient history and literature, but those days are gone at the New York Times Book Review–again, perhaps not coincidentally, an allegedly high-quality outlet:

From the corrections column in this morning’s New York Times Book Review:

The Long View column on March 18 misstated the circumstances surrounding the Trojan horse in Greek legend. It was the Trojans who allowed the horse within the gates; it was not the Greeks, whose soldiers were inside the horse..."

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