A Perspective on Truth

Once upon a time Bruce Guthrie was a very powerful man. In a recent interview with Kerry O’Brien on ABC’s The 7.30 Report, he recounted how former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would send him text messages from football games. But that was when he was still editor in chief of the Herald Sun which (according to its own website) sells more than 554,000 copies a day.

In November 2008 however, he was dismissed from his job and he proceeded to take the owners of the paper to court. In Mr Guthrie’s opinion, he had done his job well and did not deserve to lose his position. The court ruled in his favour in May this year and ordered News Limited to pay him $580,808 plus interests and costs. Mr Guthrie then wrote a book (as one does) with the rather cheeky title of Man Bites Murdoch. For as we all know, Rupert Murdoch is the owner of News Corporation Limited.

In his interview with Kerry O’Brien, Bruce revealed that he did his job well, but just never did well in work politics. If he’d played by the rules, he’d still have his job. Bruce shared that all the news in the company had to go through particular filters: “What will Rupert think? What will the Murdoch family think? What will the corporate partners think? Is this in the business interest?” In other words, there were some specific perspectives which journalists there had to consider. Does this mean all the news from News Limited can be discarded as untrue? Not really. As most journalists will be able to tell you, having a particular perspective on an issue does not make it untrue. All people will have some sort of perspective. Nobody is entirely free of bias.

And this is something we need to consider when we hear criticism of the Bible as biased reporting of historical events. As Christians, we believe that the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit, but it was also written by people. A shepherd, a doctor, a king, a fisherman and many others. Their particular perspective does not invalidate their testimony (see Luke 1:1-4).