Opinion

Editor’s Note: Jason Rushton is the newest addition to the LifeSiteNews team. A recent journalism graduate, he offered to become the Australian correspondent for LifeSiteNews which, considering the high quality of the work he submitted, we gladly accepted.

SYDNEY, March 28, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Throughout the course of my journalism degree, which I completed last November, I battled a nagging cynicism about the very place of journalism in modern society.

Nobody can afford to do investigative journalism anymore; prominent newspapers make basic spelling mistakes on a daily basis; and most information we can find out from social media or other online sources anyway, so why do we need journalists to act as middle-men? 

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At the same time, I was also surprised to experience from the university establishment a constant assumption against Christianity, realist philosophy, and the dignity of human life.

At the start of my university career I was a pro-choice agnostic. I would say that half of what got me to where I am today – an unashamedly pro-life Catholic – was a reaction against the boredom, emptiness and stuffiness of this worldview which is so propagandised in Australian universities.

It was depressing for me to realise that Australian media shared much of this same bias. Prima facie, it is a good thing that our media exposes the mistreatment of cattle in neighbouring countries. However, if it simultaneously remains totally silent about the far worse treatment of our unborn children in the very middle of our cities and suburbs, around the places where we go to school and go to work – something is seriously wrong. The media is simply not doing its job.

It was against this background that I finished university thinking that I would probably never work in journalism: the role of journalism is redundant in the modern world of social-media, and anyway, if partial-birth abortion doesn’t rate a mention as a newsworthy issue, why would I want to be a part of this industry?

That’s when I suddenly realised I might be able to write for LifeSiteNews.com rather than just read it.

Hand on my heart, I personally believe that purely in terms of journalistic standards, LifeSiteNews.com must be one of the best news websites in the entire world today. It is certainly one of the few that actually inspires me. Nobody else breaks the stories they do; not only that, but with such factual accuracy and clear expression. But when you combine that theoretical factor with the moral factor of their abiding, persistent convictions about the most precious treasures and grave threats of the modern world: why would a young journo knock back a job offer?

I became aware of LSN midway through my journalism degree, about the same time I was learning about what the adjective ‘pro-choice’ really meant. 

The headlines I read on this website knocked me for six! (That’s a cricket reference – it means I was totally blown away.)
Newborn Saved from Dumpster by Man who Later Finds Out He’s the Father
Dutch journalist threatened with torture, death following letter condemning abortion?
No jail time for woman who strangled newborn because Canada accepts abortion, says judge?
Performing abortions is ‘extremely gratifying’ – leading UK abortionist?
 
Are you serious? Do these things actually happen? Yet all of the above questions are actually headlines from LSN.

I was also heart-struck by some of the inspiring stories by modern day heroes who live the Gospel of Life at great personal cost to themselves. “Young mother with cancer sacrifices life for unborn child”, or “Friend of jailed pro-life heroine Linda Gibbons asks supporters to send her Christmas cards.” I was really unaware that there were people who spent great stretches of time in jail because of their opposition to abortion.

Compared to their heroism, writing articles from the safety of home is really nothing to boast about.

Nonetheless, it is truly one of the great honours of my life to have been counted as a contributor to a website that our grandchildren will remember as not only an oasis of life in a culture of death, but an oasis of journalism in a culture of relativism.