The religion story behind the Pulitzer-winning photo

April 17, 2012 By

The Pulitzer Prizes came out yesterday and you can see the whole list of winners here. A few of the prizes dealt with religious themes.

The prize for breaking news photography went to Massoud Hossaini of Agence France-Presse. It’s the image seen here on the front page of the New York Times. You can see it full size here or as similar photos ran on the same day in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. A Hossaini photo also ran that day on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, but I don’t have a link to it.

On the Pulitzer site, the photo is described:

Tarana Akbari, 12, screams in fear moments after a suicide bomber detonated a bomb in a crowd at the Abul Fazel Shrine in Kabul on December 06, 2011. ‘When I could stand up, I saw that everybody was around me on the ground, really bloody. I was really, really scared,’ said the Tarana, whose name means ‘melody’ in English. Out of 17 women and children from her family who went to a riverside shrine in Kabul that day to mark the Shiite holy day of Ashura, seven died including her seven-year-old brother Shoaib. More than 70 people lost their lives in all, and at least nine other members of Tarana’s family were wounded. The blasts has prompted fears that Afghanistan could see the sort of sectarian violence that has pitched Shiite against Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Pakistan. The attack was the deadliest strike on the capital in three years. President Hamid Karzai said this was the first time insurgents had struck on such an important religious day. The Taliban condemned the attack, which some official viewed as sectarian. On the same day, a second bomber attacked in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Karzai said on December 11 that a total of 80 people were killed in both attacks. Published December 7, 2011

I couldn’t help but notice the typos in the description. The Washington Post ran an interesting piece back in December where photo editors at the papers that ran the photo on the front page described why they chose the photo they did. It’s a great look into the mind of the photo editor and makes you realize how minor differences can tell dramatically different stories.

Even better, I recommend this post from my favorite New York Times blog “Lens: Photography, Video and Visual Journalism.” The blog simply tells the story behind various photos that appeared in stories. It’s always interesting. For instance:

Mr. Hossaini was photographing young Afghan Shiites during a procession for Ashura, which marks the death of Shiite Islam’s holiest martyr. Some of those he had photographed recognized him. The 30-year-old photographer, who is Shiite himself, remembered seeing some of them smile.

Then, everything changed.

He heard a large explosion behind him. He was thrown to the ground. When he could focus, he stood up. He saw that his left hand was bleeding, but he didn’t have time to think about it. Mr. Hossaini ran — against the crowd, most of whom were running away from the smoke — and reached the scene about 10 seconds after the blast. The smoke began to clear, but he still had trouble concentrating.

He realized he was amid a circle of bodies, almost exactly at the place where the explosion had happened. He saw a few pairs of eyes moving, but body parts were scattered on the floor. His hands were shaking. Having covered Afghanistan — the place where he was born — since 2004, Mr. Hossaini has seen suicide attacks before. In 2007, he photographed an attack that killed 70 civilians. He cried then, too.

But this time was different.

“I have never experienced that before,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Kabul.

Mr. Hossaini was focused on what he was seeing and hearing: shouting voices, sounds of confusion. A few other people began to approach the circle. Some tried to pick up bodies. “I was taking pictures and I did want to help,” he said. “But I just saw that the bodies were completely destroyed and I said, ‘O.K. I can’t do anything for them, so I have to wait for whoever comes.’”

I would quote more but it gets pretty graphic pretty quickly. We also learn little details, such as that he’d noticed the subject of the photo long before the explosion and had planned to return to her to take photos. She was wearing the color that is the sign of remembrance.

The other religion-themed win went to the Associated Press coverage of the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslims. There have been many stories done in this series and I’m unsure at this point which ones contributed to the win. But you can check out all the stories here.

I analyzed some of the stories last year, in “The ethics of monitoring Muslims.” I had many kind things to say about what I’d read thus far as well as hopes for what the unfolding series might cover as it developed. I don’t believe all of those hopes have been realized, but I’ll have to revisit that issue when I have some time to read the stories. I would like to look at how religion in particular was handled during that series. My impression was that it focused much more on the NYPD and other bureaucracies than the specifics of Islam.

Either way, these Pulitzers show the importance of solid religion coverage in news rooms. Congratulations to all the winners.

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Filed Under: Announcements, Islam, Journalism, Politics, World

For BBC czar, race always trumps religion

April 1, 2012 By

It’s the question that gets asked whenever an alleged comedian on HBO goes a bit nuts on the subject of religious believers.

It’s the same question people asked when some NFL players mocked Tim Tebow’s love of public prayer.

It’s the same question conservative Catholics, and others, asked when the hierarchy at The New York Times made the decision to run a full-page anti-Catholic advertisement that urged liberal and nominal Catholics to pack up and quit their church.

It’s the question that tends to draw mocking laughter in the GetReligion comments pages whenever a reader dares to ask it.

The question, of course, is this: Would the powers that be in mass media have dared to approve x, y or z if this particular advertisement, comedy routine, cartoon, Broadway show, movie, music video or whatever had focused its attack on Muslims?

It’s a question that is not — for me — directly connected to the journalism work that we do here at GetReligion. Please hear me say that.

However, there was a headline the other day in The Daily Mail linked to this controversial topic that was just a bit too close for comfort, for me. I am referring to the one that, with its stacked sub-headlines, proclaimed:

Christianity gets less sensitive treatment than other religions admits BBC chief

* He suggested other faiths have a ‘very close identity with ethnic minorities’

* But added that religion as a whole should never receive the same ‘protection and sensitivity’ in the law as race

I don’t know about you, but I had a simple reaction when I read all of that: The head of BBC said that near an open microphone?

Here’s the top of that Mail report:

BBC director-general Mark Thompson has claimed Christianity is treated with far less sensitivity than other religions because it is “pretty broad shouldered.”

He suggested other faiths have a “very close identity with ethnic minorities,” and were therefore covered in a far more careful way by broadcasters. But he also revealed that producers had to consider the possibilities of “violent threats” instead of polite complaints if they pushed ahead with certain types of satire.

Mr. Thompson said: “Without question, ‘I complain in the strongest possible terms,’ is different from, ‘I complain in the strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write.’ This definitely raises the stakes.”

But he added that religion as a whole should never receive the same ‘protection and sensitivity’ in the law as race.

Now the minute I read that — especially all of those short, edited, punchy quotations — I immediately assumed that Thompson had been quoted out of context. What kind of journalist could say things like that, especially one who is committed to accurate journalism, free speech, religious liberty and various other values and rights that tend to be cherished in free societies?

I told my GetReligion colleagues that I really wanted to see the whole interview, or a transcript, or both. As it turns out, that information was a few clicks away on a site linked to a rather authoritative educational brand name — Oxford. Click here for the .pdf of the interview or watch the video that is attached to this post.

By all means, read it all. The give and take is rather complex, at times, but I think that the triple-decker Mail headline is accurate, if rather blunt (in the style of Fleet Street). I immediately asked my fellow GetReligionistas if we could hold off on this story long enough for me to write a Scripps Howard News Service column based on the full interview. My goal was to put some of those blunt snippets into a broader context, if I could.

So, here is a sample of what came out of that. I began with the New York Times decision to run the anti-Catholic advertisement from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but not the mirror-image anti-Muslim advertisement that was immediately cranked out by Stop Islamization of America.

Should Catholics have been shocked?

Truth be told, the offended Catholics had little reason to be shocked if members of the Times hierarchy based their decisions on convictions similar to those recently aired by the leader of the BBC, another of the world’s most influential news organizations.

For BBC director-general Mark Thompson, the key is to understand that Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews and believers in other minority religions share a “very close identity with ethnic minorities” and, thus, their beliefs deserve to be handled with special care.

Meanwhile, he said it’s acceptable to subject Christians to more criticism and satire, to treat their beliefs with less sensitivity, because Christianity is a powerful, secure, majority religion — even in an increasingly secular age.

“I think it is very different to talk about Christianity in the United Kingdom: a very broadly, literally established, but also metaphorically established, part of our kind of culturally built landscape,” said Thompson, in an interview recorded for the FreeSpeechDebate.com project produced by St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

Christianity, he argued, is a “broad-shouldered religion, compared to religions which in the UK have a very close identity with ethnic minorities, where, you know, it’s not as if as it were Islam is randomly spread across the UK population. It’s almost entirely a religion practiced by people who may already feel in other ways isolated, prejudiced against, and where they may well regard an attack on their religion as racism by other means.”

The bottom line, said the BBC leader, is that Muslims tend to be literalists on matter of faith and they are much more likely to be offended by criticism or satire of Muhammad than most Christians are of similar media products about Jesus. At least, that is what Thompson thinks, as a self-identified moderate, practicing Catholic. Thus, he said:

“For a Muslim, a depiction — particularly a comical or demeaning depiction of the prophet Muhammad — might have the force, the emotional force, of a piece of a grotesque child pornography. One of the mistakes seculars make is, I think, not to understand the character of what blasphemy feels like to someone who is a realist in their religious belief.”

And that stunning AK47 quote?

Here’s the context. You will not be surprised to know that it follows a reference to Salman Rushdie, his “The Satanic Verses” novel and a global fatwa calling for his death.

Historian Timothy Garton Ash, who conducted the Oxford interview, said this threat of violence is a “rather nasty ace” that can be played by those who are willing to say, “I feel so strongly about that; if you say it or broadcast it, I will kill you.”

Thompson responded: “Well, clearly it’s a very notable move in the game, I mean without question. ‘I complain in the strongest possible terms’ is different from ‘I complain in the strongest possible terms and I’m loading my AK47 as I write.’ This definitely raises the stakes.”

So there you go. How does this Thompson proclamation apply to the work of journalists who want to do accurate, balanced reporting on religion-news stories linked to blasphemy, heresy and sacrilege?

It seems to me that, much like that advocacy journalism sermon delivered last October by former New York Times editor Bill Keller, the BBC leader is essentially saying that there is one set of rules for news and then there is a different set of rules for religion news. In the end, race trumps religion.

And one more thing: Did Thompson actually say that it doesn’t matter if Christianity is no longer, on a typical weekend, the majority religion in England in comparison with Islam? It still deserves harsher treatment?

Read it all. Please.

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Filed Under: Announcements, Catholicism, Islam, Journalism, Radio & TV, World, World Religions

Memory eternal: Diane Connolly, who learned to get religion

March 23, 2012 By

It is impossible to cover sports without, somehow, studying sports. It’s impossible to cover business without — formally or informally — studying business. Ditto for politics, the arts, science, etc., etc.

Needless to say, it’s impossible to do a serious, professional job of covering religion news without studying the stunningly picky and complex world of religion.

There are reporters who study religion before they reach the religion beat (the great Russell Chandler of The Los Angeles Times leaps to mind) and then they keep studying religion. These pros never stop.

Then there are solid, professional journalists who when — for a variety of reasons — find themselves assigned to the religion beat, they immediately dive into either formal or informal studies of all of the subjects that one runs into day after day, year after year, on the so-called Godbeat.

One of the best ever in this latter category was Diane Connolly, best known for her work with The Dallas Morning News and with the Religion Newswriters Association and its ReligionLink project. People who care about serious coverage of the religion beat in the mainstream press will be grieved to read the following news from Dr. Debra Mason of the RNA and the University of Missouri School of Journalism:

Eleven years ago, Diane Connolly called me to say she wanted to quit her post as religion page editor for the Dallas Morning News in order to help Religion Newswriters Association launch a new resource for journalists called ReligionLink. Although stunned, I knew RNA’s search for ReligionLink’s founding editor was over.

Diane, who died Tuesday morning, left her job at the Dallas Morning News in 2001, when the newspaper’s award-winning religion section was at its peak. At that time, Diane directed a staff of eight journalists who each week gave readers a stellar religion section that routinely won First Place in contests across the nation.

Diane walked away from a religion reporter’s dream job for an important reason: to spend more time with her daughters Catherine, now 17, and Erin, 14. ReligionLink gave her flexibility and removed the pressure of daily newspaper deadlines.

The essence of ReligionLink a decade after its launch remains in large part Diane’s vision of the perfect resource. Her insistence on excellence helped build its reputation and value.

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the rise and fall of the Dallas Morning News religion section.

I myself was an occasional critic of some aspects of that project (it was kind of a National Council of Churches section in America’s hottest National Association of Evangelicals town), but let me stress that it is impossible to talk about serious religion writing at the end of the 20th century without discussing that project. It began for all of the right reasons. It ended, I am convinced, because there are still way too many editors who cannot or will not grasp that one cannot understand the facts of daily life in a place like Texas without taking religion seriously. (Click here for a GetReligion post about the pulling of the final religion-beat plug in Dallas. In DALLAS.)

The most important journalistic point to stress, in the wake of Connolly’s death, is the essential nature of the contributions that she made to helping professionals learn the religion beat and then to keep learning how to cover it. Here is a long piece of a 2005 essay for Poynter.org that captures what this pro was all about:

I was, at best, an oddball choice to be editor of the most award-winning newspaper religion section in the nation.

I didn’t have any special knowledge of religion, beyond that of a regular churchgoer. I had never covered religion. I was a mainline Protestant raised among Roman Catholics and Jews in my suburban Cleveland hometown, but I was living in Dallas, land of Baptists. I hadn’t read much of the Bible, beyond what I had heard in church. And at the time, I was deputy arts editor, covering television, which, let’s say, involves a different set of morals and values.

A month after being named religion editor at The Dallas Morning News, a veteran religion reporter asked, “How does it feel to inherit the 500-pound gorilla?” It turned out to be a good wrestling match, one that taught me that the religion beat requires, first, our best journalistic skills and passions. In an industry confronting stiff challenges, covering religion well is about much more than hiring people with experience and expertise.

I am proud to be among the many “novices” to the beat who have “blossomed,” as Julia Duin wrote.

What did she look for, as an editor? Here’s a big chunk of her list of essentials:

Immense curiosity about religion and a willingness to learn — and keep learning — about it.

Recognition that religion is a potent force that unites and divides people in powerful ways that affect everything from military conflicts to government policy to everyday actions in ordinary people’s lives.

Sensitivity to nuances of all kinds.

A commitment to covering all kinds of diversity — of faith, both within Christianity and outside of it; and of ethnicity, gender, economic status, and geography.

Willingness to spend time with all different sorts of people in the places where they live, gather, and worship. Willingness to work through language and cultural challenges.

Strong news skills, because religion includes much more than feature stories.

An abiding sense of fairness and balance, and an understanding that there are often more than two sides to a story.

The ability to accurately and fairly describe very different beliefs, even if the journalist personally disagrees with them or if a news report raises questions about them. …

There are other pieces of her work that remain essential reading, such as the 2006 booklet called “Reporting on Religion: A Primer on Journalism’s Best Beat” (requires .pdf). Then, in 2007, she steered the next volume, “Reporting on Religion 2: A Stylebook on Journalism’s Best Beat.”

For those who want to share Connolly tributes and memories, there is a Facebook memorial page here. Please visit.

Also, Mason’s RNA tribute ended with this more than appropriate educational note:

Diane’s husband Tim asked me how Diane’s friends and family could create a permanent memorial to our treasured colleague. He agreed that a scholarship fund in Diane’s name was both fitting and appropriate. So we’re pleased that those of us who wish can donate to the Diane Connolly Scholarship Fund at Religion Newswriters Foundation. The scholarship fund will assure that Diane’s legacy of excellence continues into the future.

If you care about the religion beat, let me urge you to follow some of these links. Read and remember.

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Filed Under: Announcements, Godbeat, Journalism, People

Pod people: Bono as a young believer

March 1, 2012 By

To tell you the truth, I have always thought that it is very easy for first-person journalism — especially arts and entertainment criticism — to slip into vague, self-centered mush.

Thus, when offered the chance to write a weekly rock music column for The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette (while working as on the copy desk) back in the late 1970s, I made a vow that I would only write pieces focusing on news and trends in the local music scene (which was a lively one in those days). I didn’t write a single review in four years.

As you would expect, I was also interested in writing music columns that contained religion hooks. My long-term goal, after all, was to become one of the nation’s relatively few religion-beat professionals.

So, what would you think if you were standing in the Record Service store in the campustown area next to the University of Illinois in the winter of 1982 and you heard the following lyrics blasting out of the speakers located all around that famous and funky co-op?

I try to sing this song
I, I try to stand up, but I can’t find my feet
I, I try to speak up, but only in you I’m complete
Gloria, in te domine
Gloria, exultate

My friends behind the front desk (I was a fanatically loyal customer) knew enough about my interests in rock and religion to think that I might have heard something about this mysterious Irish band that was about to hit town for a concert in the old, wonderful auditorium on the UI quad.

What did I think of these lyrics? And why bring it up now?

This leads me to my Scripps Howard column for this week and this week’s Crossroads podcast.

The chorus for the song “Gloria” was, of course, in Latin. I set out to report a news column about it and the rumors surrounding this young, but rising, band.

A Newman Center priest told me that the first phrase, perhaps a Mass fragment or drawn from chant, meant, “Glory in you, Lord.” The next meant, “Exalt Him.” Then again, it was hard to hear the second Latin phrase.

The priest apologized and said he wasn’t used to parsing rock lyrics.

Yes, the band 30 years ago was U2 and its mysterious second album was called “October.” Both were surrounded by clouds of rumors, which I explored in a News-Gazette column on Feb. 19, 1982. What I needed to do was meet the band before its Feb. 23 concert in Champaign-Urbana.

Luckily, the 20-year-old Bono was willing to discuss “Gloria” and “October.” … That column ran on March 5 and it apparently was the first mainstream news piece in which Bono and company discussed their faith. I immediately pitched the story to Rolling Stone, where editors decided that U2 wasn’t all that important or that it was bizarre for a guy like Bono to talk about God — or both.

All of that changed — quickly.

Thirty years down the road, what is striking about that interview is the fact that the issues that drove Bono then still dominate his life today.

Bono and The Edge were willing to talk about their Christian faith, but they stressed over and over that U2 was not a “Christian band” and never would be. Bono said he thought it was horrible to think that a struggling believer such as himself could be associated with a product bearing a “Christian” label.

Listening to my cassette recording of the main Bono interview from my 1982 encounters with the band for the first time in about 15-plus years, I was also surprised to hear that — during the prep work for “October” — Bono said he had been listening to Gregorian chant and “Greek Orthodox music” to broaden his tastes.

Wow, I missed that Orthodoxy reference 30 years ago, back in my “moderate” Southern Baptist deacon days.

It was also interesting to note that the singer — at age 20 — was already intensely interested in issues of world hunger. During another conversation, either before or after the band’s Bible study after the concert, he also talked about poverty in Africa.

I did not know, at the time, that this interview represented a new door into the band’s life and work. This early tour, of course, came shortly after the band’s decision to stay together — despite pressure for Christian friends who claimed that it was impossible to mix mainstream rock and Christian faith.

For years, I thought that my interview might have been the first in the North American mainstream press to include material in which Bono and The Edge openly discussed their faith. However, it now appears that it might have been the first mainstream news interview on the topic — period.

The massive reference book called “U2: A Diary” contains this entry:

University of Illinois Auditorium …

After tonight’s show, U2 are interviewed by Terry Mattingly for CCM, a Christian music magazine. Although the band have gone out of their way to avoid talking about their faith up to this point, they speak candidly now. “It’s time to talk about it,” Edge says. One of the revelations in the article, which appears in the magazine’s August issue, is Edge, Larry and Bono use Bible study and prayer to help them “wind down” after concerts. Bono says U2 doesn’t want to be stereotyped as a “religious band,” but is confident that most fans understand the messages in many U2 songs.”

When I first saw this item a few years ago, I was really ticked.

You see the problem, of course. I did not interview the band for CCM. I interviewed Bono and The Edge for the local daily newspaper. I was able to get a short clip from my second piece into the arts pages at Esquire, of all places, and I tried to get Rolling Stone to take the story. CCM was the only outlet that was interested in a relatively full version of the piece.

Does anyone know how one goes about getting a correction in A BOOK?

Oh well, there is so much more I could say about those two days back in 1982. For starters, I need to find my photo slides from the concert and get them into digital format somehow.

Enjoy the podcast. Meanwhile, here is the final chunk of the new Scripps Howard column for U2 fans to ponder:

… (Bono) expressed disappointment that so many people — artists in particular — attempt to avoid the ultimate questions that haunt life. The doubts, fears, joys and grace of religious faith are a part of life that “we like to sweep under the carpet,” he concluded.

“Deep down, everyone is aware. You know, when somebody dies, when somebody in their family dies. … Things that happen around us, they shock people into a realization of what is going down,” he told me.

“I mean, when you look at the starvation, when you think that a third of the population of this earth is starving, is crying out in hunger, I don’t think that you can sort of smile and say, ‘Well, I know. We’re the jolly human race, you know. We’re all very nice, REALLY. I mean, we’re not, are we?”

Amen to that.

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Filed Under: Announcements, First Person, Interviews, Music, People, Podcasts

No. 7,000: Please define “evangelical” — again

February 24, 2012 By

So, this post represents the 7,000th GetReligion offering that is still stashed on our server. That’s a landmark, of some sort or another, especially since this comes so soon after our 8th birthday party the other day.

There have, by the way, been quite a few GetReligion posts that were deleted along the way, primarily at the time when we made the jump to the WordPress software after about two years of publishing. You see, we once had a sidebar feature that offered shorter posts that kind of resembled the whole “aggregation” trend that is so hot these days on many news websites. I think we lost all of those in the software switch.

Cyberspace giveth, cyberspace taketh away. So be it.

When we started out it was just me and The Rt. Rev. Douglas LeBlanc who were doing the writing and the goal was to get up one or two posts a day. These days, with 5.5 scribes (give or take a Hemingway), we strive for three and sometimes four — depending on what’s going on in our real jobs and the state of religion coverage on any given day. Then there’s jet planes that take us to speaking gigs, conferences, other duties, family life, etc.

Still, 7,000 articles — at roughly 700 words or so (Wait! Father George averages about 1,400 words a post!) — is just under 5,000,000 words in seven years. That’s a lot of digital ink.

So, on what should I focus this post — No. 7,000? The topic needs to be somewhat symbolic, don’t you think?

I considered having the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway do a WomenPriests post of some kind. Did you know that if you Google “GetReligion” and “Womenpriests” you get about 24,000 hits? I have no idea what that means.

No, why don’t we throw another harpoon at one of those great-white-whale topics that we’ve been studying from the get-go? So that’s ask, once again: What in the world does the oft-abused term “evangelical” mean?

Godbeat veteran Peggy Fletcher Stack of The Salt Lake City Tribune addressed that topic the other day and gave GetReligion a tip of the hat. Click here to read the version of this Religion News Service piece that ran in USA Today. Here is how that opens:

Evangelicals have been in the news a lot lately, from the Denver Broncos’ Tim Tebow and his take-a-knee prayers to the Texas pastor and his wife who spent 24 hours in bed preaching the virtues of sex in Christian marriages.

Mitt Romney is struggling to gain evangelical support for his presidential bid, and Rick Santorum — a Catholic — won the blessing of more than 100 evangelical pastors gathered at a Texas ranch.

So who are these Christians? What do they have in common and how are they different from other believers? Even famed preacher Billy Graham wasn’t sure of the answer.

“Actually, that’s a question, I’d like to ask somebody, too,” Graham told religion reporter Terry Mattingly in a 1987 interview. “The lines (have) become blurred. … You go all the way from the extreme fundamentalists to the extreme liberals and, somewhere in between, there are the evangelicals.”

So there is one of the keys. If one knows what the word “fundamentalist” means — the Associate Press Stylebook is pretty clear on that, even if journalists keep ignoring its wise advice — then the key is to draw a line between the “evangelicals” and the “fundamentalists.”

Good luck with that.

You really need to read the whole piece to see how Stack addresses that, with the help of a whole bunch of folks, including Notre Dame historian Mark Noll, author of “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” and other relevant tomes.

So here is a final bite to ponder, as she chases a definition that all will embrace:

Mattingly, director of the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, expands the definition further, saying “evangelicals have always been a cultural niche/commercial product kind of thing. No set doctrines.” …

Noll: The serious answer is the ‘eye of the beholder.’ I believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ, which makes me a fundamentalist in the eyes of some people, but I take an occasional glass of wine and don’t worry about evolution, which means that, for many people, I can’t be a fundamentalist.

Anyway, your GetReligionistas will carry on for, we hope, thousands of other posts — including more on this topic, I am sure. As you know, words really matter when you’re walking the religion beat.

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Filed Under: Announcements, Creeping Fundamentalism, Evangelicals, First Person, Godbeat, Religion, Web/Tech

Eight GetReligion comments after eight years

February 2, 2012 By

Eight years ago, the Rt. Rev. Douglas LeBlanc clicked a button with his mouse and GetReligion went live. I wrote the first post on Feb. 1, 2004, but the site actually kicked into gear the next day.

That opening post talked about religion “ghosts” in many mainstream news stories. If you have never read that post, then by all means click here. That top of that what-we-are-doing-here manifesto looks like this:

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don’t get to see them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Of course, we do more than stalk ghosts.

We also try to spotlight errors in coverage and we strive to praise solid reporting on the beat. We came up with the “Got news?” concept when we kept seeing incredibly interesting stories in blogs and specialty websites that never seem to make it into the mainstream. The 5Q+1 series lets readers hear, every now and then, from interesting professionals who work on the religion-news beat or whose journalism work on other topics often veers into religion news (we’d love to do more of the latter, frankly).

One of the quotes I keep in mind, when looking for material for the site, is that oft-quoted (certainly around here) line from Bill Moyers, the one about the fact that far too many mainstream journalists are “tone deaf” when it comes to hearing the music of faith in public issues. They, yes, just don’t “get religion.” They suffer from a lack of information, or interest, or imagination.

So, this is GetReligion’s eighth birthday. What should we do in order to celebrate, in the midst of another crazy working week?

OK, here are eight observations from moi about what I have learned in eight years of work here. There are many more that could be made. I am trying to stick to basics. I do hope the other GetReligionistas chime in.

* GetReligion is not a blog about religion news. It’s a blog about how the mainstream press struggles to cover religion news. We have roughly 89,000 comments on this site and we would have at least twice that if we allowed readers to shout at each other about the content of religious ISSUES in the news, instead of attempting to steer comments toward discussions about media coverage of those issues.

* Lots of people hate religion and lots of religious people hate journalism (especially when journalists print information that they dislike). GetReligion has tried to stay focused on basic, accurate, balanced mainstream coverage of religion. Yes, there are skilled, experienced professionals out there who sincerely attempt to do that job and they do it well. Yes, there are plenty of examples of train wrecks in mainstream religion coverage. They are too common. But they are not the whole story.

* What we are dealing with is a Blind Spot with two sides. In other words, the two halves of the First Amendment do not get along very well. Plenty of journalists do not seem to respect the powerful and essential role that religious faith plays in this land. Plenty of religious people do not seem to respect the powerful and essential role that a free press plays in this land.

* The bottom line: The state of American journalism will be improved by people who love journalism, not by those who hate it. Get with the program.

* No one knows what the word “evangelical” means, including evangelical leaders. It’s like defining fog. At the same time, this is a word that describes a movement of religious believers, not a movement of registered GOP voters. It’s time to stop treating it like a political term. Meanwhile, the word “fundamentalist” has a meaning and it can be found in an accurate reference in the Associated Press Stylebook. Many journalists still need to look that up.

* When in doubt, reporters should accurately quote people — rather than continuing to slap vague and often inaccurate labels on their foreheads.

* When specific flocks of religious believers keep saying, year after year, that journalists are printing inaccurate information about what they believe, journalists should (a) take that seriously and then (b) tell these believers to come down to the local newsroom with stacks of on-the-record reference materials that explain the basics. Then everyone exchanges business cards and promises to return phone calls. It’s journalism, folks.

* At some point in the future, there’s going to be a story that involves Episcopalians, same-sex marriage, Mormons, post-Vatican II liturgical rites and vampires and the server that hosts this blog is going to blow up.

And, one more time, did anyone out there really listen to what Bill Keller said the other day in Austin? I am still depressed.

Onward into year No. 9.

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Open thread on 2011 religion news

January 3, 2012 By

How long have I been away from my desk, out on the nation’s highways visiting various encampments of family members?

Well, so long that I have not had a chance to seek the comments of GetReligion readers on the results of the Religion Newswriters Association poll to determine the top 10 events and trends on the religion beat in 2011 (click here for the full press release).

Comment No. 1: Is it just me, or did anyone else think that the poll results received less ink (digital or analog) this time around? Less coverage than normal?

At the same time, this was clearly a year when there was one event that drew the most mainstream news coverage and the biggest headlines. However, this was also an event that was so important that many editors probably didn’t think of it as a religion-beat story, in and of itself.

In other words, this news story was too important to be a religion-news story. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

You can sense this paradox in the CNN Belief Blog analysis of the poll results. Here’s the top of that essay:

Washington (CNN) – The killing of Osama bin Laden was voted the top story of the year by the Religion Newswriters Association, beating out Rep. Peter King’s hearing on the radicalization of U.S. Muslims and Catholic Bishop Robert Finn’s failure to report the suspected abuse of a child.

Though on face bin Laden’s death is not a religion story, it created conversation on a number of faith topics, the RNA said.

“Faith-based groups reacted to the terrorist leader’s death with renewed sympathy for victims’ families, scriptural citations justifying the demise of evil, and hopeful prayers for peace among the nations,” stated the RNA release.

In other words, the killing of the world’s most famous Islamist radical was not really a religion story, just as bin Laden’s career was not really rooted in his religious worldview and his interpretation of Islam?

Also, this year’s poll results were, for me, a clear, but painful, illustration of harsh reality in the news biz. Some events are big stories because they are big stories. Other stories are not as important to editors because they are not as important to readers, even if the consequences of these stories may be greater in the long run.

That’s how I felt about bin Laden’s death. I mean, everyone knew that U.S. officials were going to find him sooner or later. It’s also easy to argue that his real power, his power to shape world events, had already declined sharply during his years in hiding.

Meanwhile, other bloody events were taking place in Pakistan during 2011 that I was convinced offered sharp, clear insights into the confused state of affairs in that tense, confused and potentially deadly land.

Thus, I focused my Scripps Howard News Service column on a pair of events that didn’t even make it into the RNA top 10 list. Instead, they drifted all the way down to the No. 16 slot. Thus, while opening with bin Laden’s death, I quickly offered this summary of these other religion-news events that I am convinced were the year’s most poignant and, perhaps, significant:

… (When) I think about religion news events in 2011, another image from Pakistan flashes through my mind — a shower of rose petals.

I am referring to the jubilant throngs of lawyers and demonstrators that greeted 26-year-old Malik Mumtaz Qadri with cheers, rose petals and flowers as he arrived at an Islamabad courtroom to be charged with terrorism and murder. Witnesses said Qadri fired 20 rounds into Salman Taseer’s back, while members of the security team that was supposed to guard the Punjab governor stood watching.

Moderate Muslim leaders, fearing for their lives, refused to condemn the shooting and many of the troubled nation’s secular political leaders — including President Asif Ali Zardari, a friend and ally of Taseer — declined to attend the funeral. Many Muslim clerics, including many usually identified as “moderates,” even praised the act of the assassin.

Calling himself a “slave of the Prophet,” Qadri cheerfully surrendered. He noted that he had killed the moderate Muslim official because of Taseer’s role in a campaign to overturn Pakistan’s blasphemy laws that order death for those who insult Islam, especially those who convert from Islam to another religion.

A few weeks later, Pakistan’s minister of minority affairs — the only Christian in the national cabinet — died in another hail of bullets in Islamabad. Looking ahead, Shahbaz Bhatti had recorded a video testimony (see video with this post) to be played on Al-Jazeera in the likely event that he, too, was assassinated.

”When I’m leading this campaign against the Sharia laws, for the abolishment of blasphemy law, and speaking for the oppressed and marginalized — persecuted Christian and other minorities — these Taliban threaten me,” said Bhatti, who was immediately hailed as a martyr by Catholic bishops in Pakistan. “I’m living for my community and suffering people and I will die to defend their rights.”

Meanwhile, the gunmen tossed pamphlets near Bhatti’s bullet-riddled car that threatened him by name and stated, in part: “From the Mujahideen of Islam, this fitting lesson for the world of infidelity, the crusaders, the Jews and their aides … especially the leader of the infidel government of Pakistan, Zardari. … In the Islamic Sharia, the ruling for one who insults the Prophet is nothing but death.”

So, GetReligion readers, do you have any comments on the RNA poll? Did you see any other coverage of the year’s top religion-news events that you want to share, via URLs in our comments pages? Tee off.

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Back to the ‘Is the Times liberal?’ debate

October 14, 2011 By

There he goes again.

Former New York Times editor Bill Keller is alive and well and is continuing to address a question that should be of great interest to all news consumers: Has the world’s most powerful newspaper evolved into a partisan, advocacy news organization?

His answer is “no” — sort of.

The newspaper is not an advocacy publication, except for a few strategic subjects. This is GetReligion territory for a simple reason, but we’ll get to that shortly.

On Oct. 6th, Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith conducted an interview with the current Times columnist and gadfly during an event at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum called, logically enough, “An Evening With Bill Keller.”

To understand Keller’s remarks in Austin — the subject of a report in The Huffington Post – it helps to back up to a Times essay the then editor wrote in March, under the headline, “Traditional News Outlets — Living Among the Guerrillas.” At one point, Keller flashes back to an earlier national debate about the status of the Times and its commitment to journalistic balance, fairness, accuracy, etc. Keller writes:

Back in 2004, Daniel Okrent, the first ombudsman at The Times, wrote a column under the headline, “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” The sly first sentence of his essay was: “Of course it is.” Nobody seems to remember what came after. Okrent went on to explain that The Times’s outlook, steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city, tends to be culturally liberal: open-minded, skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan. We publish news of gay unions on the wedding pages. We have a science section that does not feel obliged to give equal time to creationists when it writes about evolution. Okrent rightly scolded us for sometimes seeming to look down our urban noses at the churchgoing, the gun-owning and the unlettered. Respect is a prerequisite for understanding. But he did not mean that we subscribe to any political doctrine or are foot soldiers in any cause. (Anyone who thinks we go easy on liberals should ask Eliot Spitzer or David Paterson or Charles Rangel or. …)

Note that, when challenged on how the Times deals with issues of religion and culture, Keller notes that his newspaper has, at times, been tough on political liberals.

After the 2004 Okrent column, I noted that he quickly backtracked to say that the Times is not always liberal, although it is consistently liberal on certain kinds of subjects. He said the newspaper is:

… merely liberal on “certain issues, social issues. … It is a product of its place and of its people, and I think it’s really important for the paper to recognize that and recognize how it is perceived.”

In other words, the New York Times is only liberal on issues such as sex, salvation, abortion, Hollywood, euthanasia, gay rights, public education, cloning and loads of other issues linked to faith and public life.

That’s all. But that’s enough.

In Austin, Keller walked the same path. Once again, he backed Okrent’s approach, saying that the paper is liberal on social and moral issues and, well, that’s just fine.

Keller essentially agreed with this. He said, “we are liberal in the sense that we are open-minded, tolerant, urban. Our wedding page includes — and did even before New York had a gay marriage law — included gay unions. So we’re liberal in that sense. Socially liberal.”

For me, this leads to a simple question. Is the former Times editor essentially saying that his newspaper is committed to doing fair, accurate, critically balanced coverage of all kinds of issues — except for those that are touched by the uniquely dangerous, judgmental and irrational reality that is religious faith and practice? In other words, it is acceptable for Times journalists to produce advocacy journalism on a list of approved religious, moral, cultural and social issues. So there.

That’s really bad news for people, like me, who keep trying to defend the New York Times. This would certainly, for example, clash with GetReligion’s conviction that — whether journalists are believers or nonbelievers, we don’t care — they need to realize that it’s impossible to understand how real events occur in the real world without understanding that religion is often a real and powerful force in human affairs.

Also note that, once again, Keller’s words clash with his own promises at the end of his famous “Assuring Our Credibility (.pdf)” essay in 2005, in response to a report addressing many of his newspaper’s struggles and failures. in that essay, Keller stressed that that it was crucial for Times staff to make:

… a concerted effort … to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation. … This is important to us not because we want to appease believers or pander to conservatives, but because good journalism entails understanding more than just the neighborhood you grew up in.

Which Keller is the real Keller? Which man speaks for the Times, when it comes to covering hot-button religious, moral and cultural issues?

Meanwhile, the newspaper’s new executive editor has offered her own point of view on this overarching subject. In a recent interview with Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane, executive editor Jill Abramson noted:

I sometimes try not only to remind myself but my colleagues that the way we view an issue in New York is not necessarily the way it is viewed in the rest of America. And I am pretty scrupulous about when we apply our investigative firepower to politicians that we not do it in a way that favors one way of thinking or one party over the other. I think the mandate is to keep the paper straight. …

Once again, note the emphasis on balance and fairness when covering politicians. You know — real people who work in the real world. As opposed to, well, you know.

Stay tuned.

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