Nah-nah-nah-nah: Navel-gazing at ninth anniversary

February 5, 2013 By

So tmatt kicked off the GetReligion ninth anniversary celebration over the weekend.

As we contemplate the future of this site dedicated to critiquing the mass media’s coverage of religion news, we want to hand the microphone to you, kind reader.

Why do you read GetReligion?

Yes, we’re fishing for compliments. But hey, it’s our birthday, so indulge us, OK?

And if you’ll say something nice, we’ll let you offer a little constructive criticism, too.

Here are a few questions to consider:

– What kinds of posts do you enjoy most? Least?

– What could we do to increase our number of comments and foster better conversations?

– What improvements could we make in our content, approach or presentation?

The microphone is all yours.

Image via Shutterstock

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GetReligion turns nine; Newsweek sort of vanishes

February 2, 2013 By

So once again, with feeling.

Nine years ago today, the Rt. Rev. Douglas LeBlanc clicked a mouse and GetReligion went live. As I have noted before, I actually wrote the “What we do, why we do it” post on Feb. 1, 2004, but the site opened its cyber-doors the next day, on Feb. 2, 2004.

This kind of anniversary landmark tends to inspire meditations on the passage of time (and a GetReligionista or two will jump in with anniversary thoughts in the next few days). So what is on my mind this year?

Well, how about this: Newsweek, Newsweek, Newsweek, wherefore art thou Newsweek?

Let’s start with a confession or two.

I was a loyal Newsweek (and Time, as well) subscriber for several decades, until theologian-in-chief Jon Meacham openly and honestly decided to run off a million or more of his readers in order to re-brand his struggling magazine as a more elite and openly progressive advocacy operation. At the time, I observed that this mystified me. I mean, I already subscribed to The New Republic. Why would I want Newsweek to take the same approach to the news?

It was pretty obvious that issues linked to religion and faith were at the heart of this Newsweek lunge to the journalistic left. I wondered, out loud, if Newsweek was simply trying to become the World Magazine of the religious left.

Whatever. It didn’t work. Meacham left and Newsweek drifted into another brief era, one in which editor Tina Brown tried to keep the advocacy thing going, while featuring voices on the right as well as the left. The key, however, was that opinion and heat was more important than journalism, more important than reporting and clearly attributed information.

All I knew was that, with the magazine’s ties to The Daily Beast, I needed to start paying attention to Newsweek once again — because that was where I would find the religion, politics and culture reportage of one of the best journalists on the planet, Peter Boyer (best known for his years of work at The New Yorker). So I bought another subscription.

Well, that didn’t last long.

For me, the key was that Newsweek — along with most of the work published at another Meacham-DNA platform, “On Faith” at The Washington Post — came to symbolize the belief that the best way for journalists to handle religion coverage was to baptize it in emotions, feelings and opinions, as opposed to striving for a journalistic blend of history, factual material and clearly attributed quotations from qualified people on both sides of hot-button issues.

Religion, in other words, was not real.

Religion was not worthy of real journalism. Religion was interesting and powerful, but there was no need to think of it as an issue linked to real life in the real world. It was sort of, well, hazy, vague and foggy. In a GetReligion post about “On Faith” (“On Fog” — A Meditation), I noted:

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Pod people: Looking back at 2012, one more time

January 5, 2013 By

I don’t know about you folks, but to me is seems like the 2012 news cycle has been ending for the past three or four weeks. Everyone was already publishing their top stories of the year lists and then the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre turned everything upside down.

Nevertheless, the year’s first Crossroads podcast here at GetReligion (click here to cue that up) takes another look at the recent Religion Newswriters Association list of the Top 10 stories on the religion-news beat. GetReligion readers already know what I think of that list — click here for a refresher on the list — but host Todd Wilkin walked me all the way through the list and posed some interesting questions along the way.

Take this one for example: Is anyone surprised that the Episcopal Church approved trial rites to bless same-sex relationships? Really? And is the “nones” trend really all that new (hello, Sheila) or is the clever, and somewhat inaccurate, label the real news hook?

Religion-beat pros, help me out here. Hasn’t there been a liberal mainline Protestant story linked to the gay-rights era — almost always involving Episcopalians — in the RNA Top 10 lists about 15 of the past 20 years or thereabouts? It sure seems that way, sometimes.

Meanwhile, in the podcast I took another shot at explaining why I thought — looking ahead to 2013, with health care and gay marriage cases looming — that the U.S. Supreme Court’s stunning 9-0 decision on the Hosanna-Tabor “ministerial exception” case was one of the most important stories of 2012, even though it wasn’t voted into the RNA Top 10 (it was, however, included on the longer RNA ballot).

I thought that case, when combined with the fine print in the high court’s first decision linked to Obamacare, offered a hint what some members of the court might — repeat MIGHT — be thinking on matters of religious liberty. It’s clear that the court’s left wing tried to send the U.S. Justice Department a signal with that 9-0 verdict.

Then there is the quote that I keep mentioning from Justice Ruth Ginsburg, which made it into an online Washington Post essay, but was MIA in the overwhelming majority of mainstream news reports.

OK, one more time:

Mark Rienzi, another Becket [Fund] attorney, said in a phone conference call that the ruling today only spoke to whether Congress had the right to pass the act – not on the details of how it’s implemented.

“It seems to me the administration has won one legal challenge and there are 23 others waiting in the wings,” he said.

The attorneys honed in on two parts of Thursday’s ruling. One, from the majority opinion, said: “Even if the taxing power enables Congress to impose a tax on not obtaining health insurance, any tax must still comply with other requirements in the Constitution.”

The second, from Justice Ruth Ginsburg, said “A mandate to purchase a particular product would be unconstitutional if, for example, the edict impermissibly abridged the freedom of speech, interfered with the free exercise of religion, or infringed on a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause.”

I have always thought that one way reporters can spot hot stories is to pay attention to interviews or speeches in which liberals say things that please conservatives or conservatives say things that please liberals. In this case, the Ginsburg quote is an example of a liberal saying something that pleases old-fashioned First Amendment liberals, but today this point of view is losing support on what, for lack of a better term, could be called the postmodern left.

So enjoy the podcast, then let me know why you think the Ginsburg’s quote received so little mainstream press attention, even in this time of intense strife about religious liberty. Also, do you think the Hosanna-Tabor case should have been in the RNA Top 10? What 2012 story made the list, but probably didn’t deserve to?

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Got news? That other 2012 Supreme Court case

January 2, 2013 By

Does anyone out there in GetReligion reader land remember that narrow U.S. Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for arguments to continue about the Obama administration’s health-care law? On one level, that decision was about money and taxes, but buried down in one of the opinions written on the winning side was a highly significant, yet mostly overlooked, quote linked to the religious-liberty battles that dominated the religion-news beat in 2012.

At the time, I wrote a GetReligion post that pointed readers toward that important material buried deep inside the blog world at The Washington Post:

“I think the court’s decision makes clear Obama is still subject to legal challenges and that the Supreme Court is willing to entertain that the HHS regulations violate the rights of religious freedom,” said Hanna Smith, senior counsel at the Becket Fund, a D.C. firm involved in some of the 23 pending lawsuits against the White House. The lawsuits all focus on opposing a mandate announced by the Department of Health and Human Services after the law was passed.

Mark Rienzi, another Becket attorney, said in a phone conference call that the ruling today only spoke to whether Congress had the right to pass the act — not on the details of how it’s implemented. …

The attorneys honed in on two parts of Thursday’s ruling. One, from the majority opinion, said: “Even if the taxing power enables Congress to impose a tax on not obtaining health insurance, any tax must still comply with other requirements in the Constitution.”

The second, from Justice Ruth Ginsberg, (sic) said “A mandate to purchase a particular product would be unconstitutional if, for example, the edict impermissibly abridged the freedom of speech, interfered with the free exercise of religion, or infringed on a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause.”

The key is the Ginsburg quote, especially since it came from one of the most important voices on the court’s left wing.

In my mind, I coupled that quote with another Supreme Court decision that received some attention. However, to my surprise, this other decision didn’t make it into the list of the year’s Top 10 stories produced by the Godbeat pros voting in the poll posted by the Religion Newswriters Association.

I’m talking about that 9-0 decision in which the court defended the “ministerial exception” that allows churches and religious organizations to take doctrine into account when hiring and firing employees. Yes, the U.S. Justice Department actually argued against religious groups on that issue. Yes, the court then voted 9-0 against the White House on that religious-liberty issue.

Yes, I still think that was one of the most important religion-news stories of the year. I ranked it No. 2 on my RNA ballot.

Bobby has served up scores of interesting links and viewpoints wrapping up Godbeat 2012, but I thought I would show GetReligion readers my whole ballot — in the form of last week’s column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

I started with a blast from a prominent pulpit in Dallas:

‘Twas the Sunday night before the election and the Rev. Robert Jeffress was offering a message that, from his point of view, was both shocking and rather nuanced.

His bottom line: If Barack Obama won a second White House term, this would be another sign that the reign of the Antichrist is near.

Inquiring minds wanted to know: Was the leader of the highly symbolic First Baptist Church of Dallas suggesting the president was truly You Know Anti-who?

“I am not saying that President Obama is the Antichrist, I am not saying that at all,” said Jeffress, who previously made headlines during a national rally of conservative politicos by calling Mormonism a “theological cult.”

“What I am saying is this: the course he is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist.”

That’s some pretty strong rhetoric, until one considers how hot things got on the religion beat in 2012. After all, one Gallup poll found that an amazing 44 percent of Americans surveyed responded “don’t know” when asked to name the president’s faith. The good news was that a mere 11 percent said Obama is a Muslim — down from 18 percent in a Pew Research Center poll in 2010.

Could church-state affairs get any hotter? Amazingly the answer was “yes,” with a White House order requiring most religious institutions to offer health-care plans covering sterilizations and all FDA-approved forms of contraception, including “morning-after pills.” The key: The Health and Human Services mandate only recognizes the conscience rights of a nonprofit group if it has the “inculcation of religious values as its purpose,” primarily employs “persons who share its religious tenets” and primarily “serves persons who share its religious tenets.”

America’s Catholic bishops and other traditional religious leaders cried “foul,” claiming that the Obama team was separating mere “freedom of worship” from the First Amendment’s sweeping “free exercise of religion.” In a year packed with church-state fireworks, the members of Religion Newswriters Association selected this religious-liberty clash as the year’s top religion-news story. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, the point man for Catholic opposition to the mandate, was selected as the year’s top religion newsmaker – with Obama not included on the ballot.

The story I ranked No. 2 didn’t make the Top 10 list. I was convinced that the 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming a Missouri Synod Lutheran church’s right to hire and fire employees based on doctrine could be crucial in the years — or even months — ahead.

So let’s move on to the rest of my version of the RNA Top 10 list, after the HHS mandate conflict.

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WWROD: When reporters fail to get religion ….

December 31, 2012 By

A quick online confession: Yes, I am “Terry in D.C.”

You see, while I am not in D.C. at the moment, I was inside the only Beltway that really matters at the time that I fired off a quick question to veteran religion-beat writer Richard Ostling at his weblog, Religion Q&A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy answers your questions” (for more info click here).

In his format, readers send him basic religion questions and, well, he gives brief, journalism-driven responses. As you would expect, issues linked to religion news and events are going to be common and, once a week, we’ll be pointing readers over to his site for material with strong GetReligion-esque content.

I this case, I rather blatantly primed the pump for Ostling:

TERRY IN D.C. ASKS:

What are the five mistakes that mainstream reporters make most often when covering religion? Let’s assume these reporters are NOT religion-beat specialists.

And the Ridgewood Religion Guy answered:

Good one, especially when a secular milieu in many newsrooms (and classrooms) can foster slant and error. Some Journalism 101 pointers:

Mistake 1 is to suspect religious believers in general tend to be stupid or at least ill-informed (particularly a problem if the reporter has no close friends who are devout).

Mistake 2 is to assume this reporter could not possibly be so ill-informed as to misunderstand the belief or believers being written about. Even those of us who’ve spent decades covering this field know religious topics are usually quite complex. Always check with experts if you’re unclear or uncertain about something.

Mistake 3 is the related tendency to over-simplify. (Do all American Evangelicals subscribe to the colorful End Times scenario in those “Left Behind” novels? Are they all Tea Party enthusiasts?)

Wait a minute (I hear many readers thinking), what about plain old laziness? That has to be in the list somewhere!

By all means, click on over to the Ostling site for the for rest of that post. And please leave some religion-beat questions of your own for the master of the house to answer.

PHOTO: The cover of a rather obvious book related to all of this, which you can buy (hint, hint) with a click right here.

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WWROD: What the heck is a ‘denomination’ anyway?

December 14, 2012 By

As I mentioned the other day, one of the best religion-beat professionals ever — that would be Richard Ostling of Time and the Associated Press — has opened up a weblog here in the Patheos online universe.

The name of the blog is “Religion Q&A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy answers your questions” and the goal is, quite simply, for Ostling to field questions from readers and then to try to answer them in a simple, journalism-driven fashion.

After years of trying to get Ostling to consider writing for GetReligion from time to time, I was overjoyed to hear him commit throwing his hat into the cyber-ring. I also promised him that your GetReligionistas would point our readers toward at least one of his posts a week that we think would be especially interesting to journalists interested in religion and to readers who are interested in the kinds of issues that make the religion-news beat so fascinating and, at times, prickly.

With Ostling handling this, I would imagine that there are weeks we might pass along more than one.

Anyway, one of the scribe’s readers just asked this question about life in what many call post-denominational America:

What do you think is the future of denominations? Do you see any trends in history that may be indicators? And what do you think is the purpose (if any) of denominational affiliation?

And “The Guy” begins his response this way:

The oddities surrounding religious denominations bring to mind that incomparably sinister American clergyman Jim Jones, who in 1978 lured 909 Peoples Temple followers at his Guyana compound into an orgy of murder and suicide, a third of whom were children. More on him below.

The United States invented the “free exercise of religion” and has never had a dominant or “established” church like those in Europe. Even the big Catholic Church is merely one “denomination” among many. The term applies essentially to hundreds of Christian bodies in the freewheeling U.S. religious market, though American Jews also speak of their several denominations or branches.

The American tendency toward individualism and localism produces increasing numbers of “non-denominational” congregations. When 1960s disruptions fostered general suspicion toward authority, tradition, and institutions, the chief religious victims turned out to be the older and relatively liberal “Mainline” Protestant denominations. Meanwhile, notable expansion continues among unaffiliated congregations of Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Pentecostal and Charismatic persuasion.

Since World War Two especially, much dynamism in Protestant outreach has come from Evangelical entrepreneurs and their “parachurch” organizations instead of denominational agencies. This is sometimes a mixed blessing.

There’s more, of course. So click right here and get over there and finish the article.

Feel free to leave journalistic comments here. However, I would assume that Ostling would like to hear from our readers on his own site. And leave him a few journalistic questions that bug you. I can’t think of anyone I would prefer to take them on in a constructive manner.

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Richard Ostling — finally! — sets up an online camp

November 29, 2012 By

Anyone who has followed GetReligion for very long knows what the letters WWROD stand for. I mean, the first reference of this kind showed up only a few weeks into the blog’s existence, way back in 2004.

WWROD? We’re asking, What Would Richard Ostling Do?

Ostling, of course, is the former religion-beat pro at Time, back in the days when that weekly magazine was a force in hard news, and then with the Associated Press. For those of us who arrived on the Godbeat in last quarter of the 20th Century, it would be hard to name someone we respected more or whose work carried more professional authority (with Russ Chandler of the great Los Angeles Times religion team joining him in the top ranks).

Thus, I am happy to pass along the following email from Ostling, which followed several chats on this topic during the recent Religion Newswriters Association meetings here in Beltway territory:

Forsaking lazy retirement mode I am about to launch a new “Religion Q and A” blog for patheos.com, probably the most important interfaith site on the Internet.

Most features on Patheos are opinionated, faith-specific (Buddhist, Catholic, Pagan) … whereas mine will be non-partisan and journalistic in approach and cover wide-ranging topics.

We’ll be asking folks in cyberspace to send in questions regarding any and all faiths, any Scriptures, current church-state and religion-politics issues, moral quandaries and other such puzzlements and curiosities. If I’m able, I’ll post an answer with others then welcome others to add comments.

To get this thing launched I need savvy folks to start providing some interesting questions for me to try to answer. If willing, would you, and contacts in your circle of friends who’d be interested in this, send in questions that I’ll consider for the first postings on the site? Simply go to http://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionqanda/

On the right-hand side type in your question and click “Send” which transmits it to me to consider for a posted answer.

The name, in other words, is “Religion Q and A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy Answers Your Questions.” I had lobbied hard for “The Religion Answer Man.” Whatever. This is great news no matter what it’s called. I’ve been bugging this man for years about getting involved in a blog, whether writing for GetReligion every now and then or pursuing some other online option.

Once this is up and running, Ostling will be in the Patheos “News and Politics” channel, which is also the home of GetReligion. Obviously, Ostling expects to get his share of questions about the role of religion in the news and public life and, thus, GetReligion plans to feature at least one of his posts each week. It’s the kind of cooperation we hope to see more of around these cyber-parts (hint, hint former GetReligionista Jeremy Lott and Deacon Greg Kandra, the former CBS News scribe).

Those seeking a quick introduction to Ostling, via audio, can check out this interview conducted at the Calvin Institute of Worship.

For a sample of Ostling’s print work — one that is highly relevant to his new blogging format — click here for a 2005 GetReligion post focusing on a short Associated Press analysis piece in which he tried to explain the unexplainable, as in the very divergent schools of sexual ethics found in the global Anglican Communion. That full AP report can be found stashed away right here.

Here’s a large chunk of that AP text, focusing on the four camps that Ostling calls “dismissal, perplexity, renovation and traditionalism.”

Dismissal is the left-fringe attitude personified by Bishop John Shelby Spong, former head of the Newark, N.J., diocese. In “The Sins of Scripture” (HarperSanFrancisco), he says calling the Bible “the Word of God” (a belief he himself affirmed at ordination) is “perhaps the strangest claim ever made” for a document. Spong finds the Old Testament’s homosexual prohibitions ignorant and “morally incompetent” expressions of “popular prejudices.” With the New Testament, he disdains Paul’s condemnations as “ill-informed” ravings from a zealot who, he hypothesizes, was a “deeply repressed, self-loathing” homosexual.

“The contending positions are mutually exclusive,” he concludes, and “there can be no compromise.” He dismisses conservative views as “frail, fragile and pitiful.”

The other three approaches were displayed at a … hearing before the international Anglican Consultative Council. …

Perplexity was the outlook of Anglican Church of Canada representatives. Their denomination affirmed the “integrity and sanctity” of homosexual relationships and tolerated a diocese’s blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples. The Canadians said they are “seeking discernment” but face “deep divisions” and lack consensus.

Renovation was the policy of the U.S. Episcopal Church in its report “To Set Our Hope on Christ,” written by seven theologians. It was the denomination’s first official rationale for recognition of the unhindered same-sex blessings in its ranks and for toleration of openly gay clergy, including a bishop.

Traditionalists answered that argument with “A True Hearing,” a paper by writers from nine nations that the Anglican Mainstream group gave to delegates to explain the stance endorsed in 1998 by 82 percent of the world’s Anglican bishops.

And so forth and so on. In other words, Ostling is going to help point readers and, I would imagine, some journalists toward information and resources on complex religion-news questions. I would be hard-pressed to name a better scribe to take on that task.

Stay tuned.

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About GetReligion: In a few words or less

November 3, 2012 By

For years, journalists took one of two different approaches when labeling the two sides in America’s legal wars over abortion.

On one side, there where the people who — in keeping with the long-standing tradition that movements are allowed to name themselves — called the people who opposed abortion the “pro-life” camp and those in favor of legalized abortion the “pro-choice” camp. The quotation marks, in this case, meant that these were labels used by the activists themselves.

Meanwhile, most journalists went with another set of labels, calling those who opposed abortion the “anti-abortion” camp, while calling those who backed legalized abortion, yes, the “pro-choice” camp. In other words, the cultural left was granted its label of choice, while the cultural right was stuck with a label that it hated, a label that its leaders argued missed the larger point of their cause.

Also, what was the object of the word “choice” in that “pro-choice” mantra? Why state one side of the argument in terms of a positive choice and the competing side in strictly negative terms? Americans tend to favor the positive statements of causes, not the negative. Also, opponents of abortion, with good cause, wondered if this linguistic slight to the cultural right was linked to all of those survey numbers showing that 80 to 90 percent of America’s journalists, especially in elite newsrooms, backed abortion rights.

During my tenure on the religion-beat in Denver, I had a pivotal conversation with a Rocky Mountain News metro editor on this subject.

I was willing to accept continued use of the “anti-abortion” label for the cultural right, since it was, in the end, accurate in a blunt, literal way. But was it fair, I asked, to keep using that “pro-choice” label for those who backed abortion as a legal option in our society? Why not strive for some kind of literal label that pointed, once again, to the real issue at hand. I suggested the bulky, but accurate, “pro-abortion-rights” label. Today, this is the label used in many newsrooms.

The bottom line, I said, was that his is an issue that has divided our nation almost right down the middle and, thus, it was our responsibility to be as fair and accurate as possible to both sides. If the nation was divided 50-50 or close to it, then it was in our interests to be as balanced as possible.

The editor’s response was blunt: My argument was rooted, she said, in my pro-life bias. One statement hit me so hard that I went back to my desk and wrote it down. The “vehemence” with which I argued for 50-50 coverage, she said, was “evidence of my pro-life bias.” Yes, she actually used the “pro-life” label.

I thought of that exchange the other day when I reader noted, in a highly blunt and personal comment linked to one of the Divine Mrs. MZ’s post about coverage linked to abortion:

It is pretty clear that mollie’s “media criticam” (which she likes to insist is the only point of this blog) is nowhere near objective or fair. These blog post are no less biased than the media articles they are critiquing.

For example, it is clear that mollie is extremely sympathetic to the pro-life position. If this was truly an article only meant to help the media “get religion” and was not political than it should be impossible for one to read what the author’s position is. So, despite mollie’s pretensions, this post is nowhere near apolitical.

Actually, this is a commentary blog and no one who writes for it has ever tried to hide their traditional Christian beliefs when we are looking at mainstream-media coverage of hot-button religious issues in American public life, such as abortion. As I have said many times, and as many of my newsroom colleagues knew through the years, I am a pro-life Democrat and, as a journalist, I always felt much more comfortable applying the pro-life label to Mother Teresa (who I was blessed to interview while in Denver) than to politicians such as, to name one major politico I covered while in Charlotte, U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. I am sure that was just my bias as an old-fashioned Southern Democrat.

What’s my point? MZ makes no attempt, in her commentary work here, to hide her pro-life convictions. However, she is just as fierce in her defense of old-school, balanced, accurate journalism. Your GetReligionistas are not hiding our views on the big issues. However, the point of this weblog is to fight for the “American model of the press” and we think that, the hotter the religion issue in the news, the more journalists should strive for 50-50 coverage that allows articulate and passionate voices on both (or multiple) sides to be heard.

That is our ultimate bias, in journalistic terms. If you find us advocating coverage that slants to the cultural right, please send us the URL to that post. We will respond.

Here’s why I bring all this up.

Since our move to the Patheos universe, I have been spiking roughly 50 percent of the comments made on my posts (I cannot speak for everyone else), especially when the comments (a) try to pontificate for or against a particular religious point of view or (b) have nothing to say about the journalism issues raised in our posts. I spike just as many comments by loud, press-bashing conservatives as by loud liberals.

Many people simply do not understand what we are trying to do here. Thus, the Patheos elders recently asked us to produce a short, simple “About GetReligion” statement, as opposed to the original “What We Do, Why We Do It” essay published the day we opened for business.

Here is what we came up with:

At GetReligion, we don’t report religion news or debate doctrines. Instead, we critique the good and the bad in mainstream press coverage of religion.

This journalism website — started by Terry Mattingly and Douglas LeBlanc in 2004 — is built on the conviction that mainstream journalists can’t accurately cover real events and trends in the real world without working to understand the role that religion plays in the real lives of real people.

Our commentaries tackle stories about economics, politics, sports, academia, culture, entertainment and other topics often haunted by religious subjects and themes missed by reporters, producers and editors. Thus, the journalists who write here strive to spot what we call “religion ghosts” hidden in mainstream news.

The bottom line: This is a pro-journalism blog.

We will keep trying to do what we do.

Just saying.

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