Faith & Spirit Quote by Sydney Schanberg

A working journalist admitting that the job clashes with his religion is less a confession of faith than a declaration of method. Sydney Schanberg isn’t claiming reporters are atheists; he’s pointing at journalism’s built-in heresies: doubt, confrontation, and the stubborn habit of asking for proof. Religion, at least in its institutional form, often asks for assent, ritual, loyalty. Journalism asks for receipts, contradictions, and names spelled correctly. Put those together and you get a life lived in permanent apostasy from certainty.

The line also carries the weary humor of someone who has watched “belief” become a tool of power. Schanberg’s career, especially his reporting on Cambodia and the moral catastrophe surrounding it, taught him what happens when authority goes unchallenged and suffering gets smoothed into policy language. In that context, journalism isn’t merely compatible with ethics; it is an ethics. But it’s an ethics that can’t promise comfort. It offers exposure, not salvation.

The subtext is an indictment of any system that discourages scrutiny, including the press itself when it turns into a club with its own dogmas. Schanberg’s phrasing - “I think” - matters: he leaves room for uncertainty even in his own critique. That’s the point. Journalism, at its best, is a discipline of restless conscience. It keeps trying to replace belief with investigation, and it never quite lets anyone - reader, source, or reporter - off the hook.