Functionally, Modern Media are Priests, Preachers, & Shamans

My main interest is seeing what insights religion and religious dynamics can provide to moderately moral systems and institutions. Education is obviously moderately moral. Since the mid 90's, politics has become increasingly moralized. It had a major inflection point during the end of the Bush years when "everything is political" became widely accepted and operationalized as "and anything political is moral" as soon as it affects the right kind of minority.

The inflection point to "the political becoming moral" exposed interesting media dynamics. Exposure occurred due to a confluence of Trump's triggering of the media, twitter's transparency, and digital media's click-bait trap.

Rather than just dealing with something superficial like "fake news", I think the deeper question now hitting us is,  is the media now functioning as a priestly class within society?

I think the answer is yes, but let's see.

PRIESTLY CLASSES: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSES

Google scholar doesn't come up with many articles on the functional roles of priestly classes. The easiest reference is Encyclopedia Britannica's

The function of the priest as the mediator and maintainer of the equilibrium between the sacred and the profane in human society, and as the stabilizer of the social structures and the cultic organizations, determines the various criteria for holding the priestly office.

That's not too big a worry. Most intelligent, well read people not biased by new atheistic evangelism will probably come up with something similar to this.  Western priestly class societal roles include:

• communication of moral norms
• norm boundary maintenance
• norm adjustments to direct costly commitment increases so as to expose free-loaders and heighten in-group out-group distinctions
• the embodiment of and perceived control of existential concerns
• societal coherers 
• via maintenance of institutions which enable interaction,
• pro-social preaching,
• facilitation of common experiences via rituals and common meta-narratives
• communicating norms in explicit terms
• authority figure heads
• rule of law for less than quasi-criminal offences (i.e. judgement & mediation of social offences)
• maintenance of slow cultural change rates (via cultural conservatism and maintenance of moral code books & meta-narratives)

These ideas generally come from Scott Atran's In God's We Trust and my own readings over the years and life-experiences.

To generalize, it seems like you end up with the following major roles

1. Norm maintenance (especially making norms easy to understand and policing them)
2. Costly commitment display direction
3. Existential concern expression / embodiment (shamanism)
4. Public square hosting
5. Common experience & common narrative facilitation
6. Social change rate guardian

TEST

Now let's test how a couple of different institutional roles perform these functions. The hope is that they'll be some major distinctions between different institutional players.

	Police	Politician	Education	Old new media	Modern news media
Norm maintenance	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Costly commitment display direction		rarely (war)	sometimes	sometimes (war, heroes)	yes
Existential concerns			sometimes		yes
Public square		yes	yes	some what	yes
Common experiences & narratives		often	yes	some what	yes
Social change rate guardian		yes	yes	not since the 50's	yes

Yikes!!!

Let's look at the difference between the old media institution and modern media.

	Old news media	Modern news media	Change degree
Norm maintenance	yes Often concerned with patriotism and national cohesion.  Less concerned with correctly steering discourse and more concerned with providing information needed for discourse.	yes Much more concerned about directing things to social justice issues and "proper" political policies. Concerned about being on the "right side of history".  Less concerned with national cohesion and more concerned about social justice issues (which over time ensure cohesion - at least in a utopian way)	large
Costly commitment display direction	sometimes Mainly directed costly commitments during times of crises like war. But also steered costly commitments by highlighting heroic behaviour.	yes Very concerned about highlighting heroic behaviour. News is often presented in terms of heroes and villains.	large
Existential concerns		yes Concerned about Orange-man-bad hysteria, climate change hysteria, life-coaching info, etc. The difference is the level of hysteria and the embodiment of sensationalistic fears which are minimally rational (in the conventional sense) see this post	huge
Public square	some what Used to share info on public events, but was not interactive and could only show a sample of ppl	yes Twitter and social media enable interaction between people.	huge
Common experiences & narratives	some what Used to maintain general discourses about national narratives and judeo-christian heritages. Minorities were often left out (melting pot promulgation)	yes Very active in pushing certain narratives. However narratives are generally polarizing. Similarly many pushed experiences (the resistance, 2nd A etc) are tribal in nature. Even those which are common (voting) are presenting in polarized terms (vote for the right side)	moderate
Social change rate guardian	not since the 50's Old media used to guard social change rates. The 60's split news media a bit. But, generally up through the 80's news was "conservative".	yes Social change rate is seen as inhumanely slow. There is no question modern news media is pushing for huge rates of change here. Some modern media are, of course, conservative. But, the news media and journalism is generally very progressive.	large

CONCLUSION

It seems hard not to conclude that modern news media and journalists are potentially fulfilling a societal role akin to that of older priest classes. This certainly doesn't mean that they are leveraging supernaturalness.  Rather, it means they have fallen into a natural cultural-evolutionary landscape-well.  These wells have certain, reasonably well understood, religious like group dynamics, and certain caste-like roles.

Usually priestly classes were positioned somewhere between merchant classes and nobility. They tended to have very distinct behavioural differentiators.  One thing that strikes me about news media is their hubris. They act like the preppy popular kids from high school. As an entity, their politics certainly is not representative of Canada or America as a whole. I've seen estimates that their political orientations are monocultural at the 90%+ level.

The Washington beltway strikes me as class diverse as a 19th century seminary. They also strike me as equally ecumenical and bubble-oriented.

I have no estimates about the extent to which journalists tend to associate with elites versus commoners. But, one thing that does strike me as relevant is their interest in being connected to sources of power in order to get news.  The term "ladder climber" comes to mind - sell out a lower class connection for a higher class one.  Religion tends to temper these tendencies. But that is probably because religion promotion tends to occur by way of norm adherence. Journalism is much more meritous. And yet, here we see an interesting turn. Merit (good journalism) is no longer provides much of a reward. It is increasingly replaced by activism and, what religious folk tend to call "priest craft", which basically means the concentration of moral messaging to that which is popular and results in the elevation/popularization  of the messenger.

So what I think we see is the development of journalists who now leverage the power of moral activism for the growth of their own popularity. While this is probably nothing to be overly concerned about, the landscape of new news media has now changed in ways that are highly resonate with old priest class functional roles.  This creates some very interesting superpositions.  To me, the most interesting one is the shamanistic role.

ADDENDUM

One of the other big signals that modern news media are tending to priest class functions is aspirant elite dynamics.

If you wanted to move from a position of little power into one of great power you've got a couple of options
-getting really rich
-become a politician
-becomes a narrative shaping journalist

Peter Turchin really focusses on the role of aspiring elites.  During elite over-population (such as we now have) elites either get forced down into commoner status due to an inability to field increasingly high consumption costs. Similarly, the fitness advantages of moving out from the commoners become s increasingly significant (commoner exploitation grows exponentially during phases of elite over-production).  Of the three options above, becoming a narrative shaping journalist strikes me as the easiest thing to do.

A benefit of activist journalism as a path into aspirant elites is that the process provides a religious-like sense of having helped out.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press.

Dawson, L. L. (Ed.). (2003). Cults and new religious movements: a reader (p. 297). Oxford: Blackwell.

Hunt, S. J. (2017). Alternative religions: A sociological introduction. Routledge.

Lee, W. E. (2005). The Priestly Class: Reflections on a Journalist's Privilege. Cardozo Arts & Ent. LJ, 23, 635.

Singh, M. (2018). The cultural evolution of shamanism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41.

Smith, J. E. (1994). Humanism as a quasi-religion. In Quasi-Religions (pp. 15-44). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Taylor, V. E. (2008). Para/Inquiry: Postmodern religion and culture. Routledge.

Wilson, D. (2010). Darwin's cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society. University of Chicago press.