Duck, duck, ghost: Media miss faith angle on ‘Duck Dynasty’

March 6, 2013 By
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Do you speak duck?

Last Wednesday night, the Season 3 premiere of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty” delivered 8.6 million viewers, beating Fox’s “American Idol” and ABC’s “Modern Family” in the important 18- to 49-year-olds demographic.

In a featured titled “Faith, family and ducks,” I profiled the Robertson family for The Christian Chronicle this past fall:

WEST MONROE, La. — Hollywood, meet the real Robertsons.

A&E’s hit reality series “Duck Dynasty” has made celebrities out of Duck Commander Phil Robertson, his wife Kay and their bearded, camo-clad sons Willie, Jase and Jeptha, not to mention “Uncle Si,” Phil’s younger brother.

As the network portrays it, the series — whose Season 1 finale drew 2.6 million viewers — follows a Louisiana bayou family living the American dream as they operate a thriving duck call and decoy business while staying true to their family values.

For the Robertsons, those values relate to the grace and salvation found in Jesus.

But for the show’s producers, the family’s strong Christian faith seems to be an uncomfortable storyline — one frequently chopped in the editing room.

“They pretty much cut out most of the spiritual things,” Phil Robertson, a one-time honky-tonk operator who gave up his heathen lifestyle in the 1970s, told The Christian Chronicle. “We say them, but they just don’t run them on the show.

“Hollywood has run upon the kingdom of God, and there’s a rub there,” said the Duck Commander, a tenacious personal evangelist who has brought hundreds of souls to new life in the Ouachita River. “Well, we have to be as harmless as a dove and as shrewd as a snake in the way we deal with them.”

The entire Robertson family is active with the White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ, which meets just a few miles from the Duck Commander/Buck Commander warehouse in this northeast Louisiana town of 13,000.

In advance of last week’s season premiere, “Duck Dynasty” got some free publicity: Singer and animal rights activist Morrissey canceled an appearance on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” because the Robertsons were scheduled on the same night.

From The Associated Press:

Morrissey says he can’t perform on a show with what he called people who “amount to animal serial killers.”

Phil, Si, Willie and Jase Robertson appeared on Kimmel’s show as scheduled and joked about Morrissey’s absence. But Phil Robertson’s comments also reflected his faith.

“Whoever he is, we love him as our neighbor, hey!” Phil Robertson told Kimmel. The patriarch of the Robertson family also offered to have a Bible study with Morrissey (as you can see in the above video).

Surprisingly enough (or not), the Bible statement — unlike the animal rights issue — did not make it into the mainstream media reports that I read.

Back in October, The New York Times featured the Robertsons and hinted at their faith:

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Two items of GetReligion biz (prayers for George, please)

March 3, 2013 By

Let me share two items with readers this weekend, both of a personal nature.

The first is personal, in that one of your GetReligionistas has been missing for a few days and his readers need to know why. Father George Conger recently had some serious spinal surgery and, while it went well, this is not the kind of thing that one recovers from quickly. He faces some pretty serious rehabilitation and it may be some time before he is his usual erudite, spunky self near a keyboard and a mouse.

So, those of you who feel comfortable with the word “prayer,” please offer a few invocations on our brother’s behalf. He has enough high-church blood in him to appreciate a few requests for the heroic prayers of St. George, I would think.

We will keep you posted, but know that this is not the kind of situation that you rush. Until then, your GetReligionistas will be working shorthanded (we’ve been down one scribe after the loss of Sarah Pulliam Bailey, as it was) for a while. So expect some days when there are only two posts, especially since I will be traveling for about a week, including a visit to New York City to lead a few seminars at this year’s spring College Media Convention.

Also, thank you for those who wrote kind notes appreciating my recent rather personal post about the coverage of the death of the great pianist (and Texas Baptist) Van Cliburn, one of my classical music heroes as a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid growing up in East Texas.

Thus, I thought I would share a big chunk of reflection on the pianist, published in The Washington Post Style section. It concerns an encounter with Cliburn in the late 1950s, when the father of writer Patricia Dane Rogers was dying of cancer in the family’s New York apartment. Her parents met the pianist at their doctor’s office soon after his world-shaking victory in the international Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, which made him one of the most famous musicians in the world.

Months later, when it was obvious that her father’s illness was terminal, Cliburn offered to come over and play for him.

Did they have a piano?

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Way to go, Joe! Colorado civil-unions story hits the mark

March 1, 2013 By

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that Joe Hight, the relatively new editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette, is a longtime friend and mentor of mine.

Twenty years ago, Joe hired me to work at The Oklahoman, then a statewide newspaper with a Sunday circulation of about 350,000. During my nine years with the Oklahoma City newspaper, Joe provided regular guidance and encouragement as an eager young reporter — sometimes too combustible and other times too naive about newsroom politics — gained valuable real-world experience.

Together, we and other Oklahoman reporters and editors tackled two of the biggest stories of our careers: the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing and the May 3, 1999, Oklahoma tornadoes.

While in Colorado Springs on a reporting assignment in January, I enjoyed catching up with Joe over dinner. He took me on a tour of the Gazette newsroom and excitedly showed off his new digs. As we talked, he discussed his desire to see the Colorado Springs newspaper focus on fair, aggressive news coverage. In an era when so many mainstream media outlets seem inclined to take sides, I offered my hearty endorsement of that approach.

All of the above serves as a prelude to my critique of a front-page report in today’s Gazette. I have no idea whether Joe had any direct involvement in the story or the approach taken. But the report on Catholic Charities’ concerns about a proposed civil-unions law in Colorado exemplifies the kind of old-fashioned, straight-news reporting that characterizes the best daily journalism. (I have written about the religious exemptions issue for Christianity Today.)

Let’s start at the top of the Gazette story:

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Filed Under: Catholicism, First Person, Journalism, Politics, Same-sex marriage, Social Issues Tagged With: , , ,

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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BBC misses religious-liberty ghost in St. Francisville, La.

January 21, 2013 By
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Through the years, your GetReligionistas have gone out of our way to note that it’s a good thing, every now and then, for journalists to end up on the other side of a reporter’s notebook or camera lens.

This can be a sobering experience, in large part because it helps us realize the kinds of decisions that journalists get to make when editing the statements and information offered by other people. It is hard for working journalists to realize what it is like to be, using that crucial Poynter.org term, the “stakeholders” whose lives have to some degree been changed by the publication of a story.

There are, of course, sins of commission committed against stakeholders. Journalists may get facts wrong, mangle quotes or pull a person’s words completely out of context in a way that changes their meaning.

Then there are the more frequent sins of omission. One of the most common is when a journalist interviews someone for an hour or so and, in the end, uses one or two sentences from an interview without any consideration for whether those remarks have anything to do with the central argument being made by the person being interviewed.

Recently, a BBC crew came to visit Rod “friend of this blog” Dreher at his home in St. Francisville, La., for a piece that focused on the degree to which Americans out in flyover territory, out in the red zip codes (click here, please, for an amazing graphic), feel disconnected from the values and agenda of their national government.

The video piece itself appears at the top of this post. The short note that accompanied the feature states, in part:

Rod Dreher lives 1,000 miles – and a world away — from the partisan politics that have paralyzed Washington DC in recent years. After living in big US cities for several years, the writer and editor for the American Conservative magazine moved back with his wife and children to the small Louisiana town where his family had lived for five generations.

In St Francisville, his family sought — and found — the support that comes from living in a tight-knit community. The desire of local people to come together to talk and solve problems, he says, is in stark contrast to the behaviour of politicians at the national level.

Dreher says America is making the same mistakes that led to the end of the Roman Empire: the capital is too far removed from the real needs of the people in the provinces who feel ever more alienated from their rulers.

And what is the ultimate point of the video, which is to say what was the ultimate point of the Dreher interview?

I cut off that part of the BBC explanatory note. View the piece for yourself and ask this basic question: “What is the thesis statement of this piece, especially it’s thesis about what needs to happen in American politics?”

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Scared ‘journalist’ hides in a church, lives to write about it

January 18, 2013 By

A few weeks ago, a Twitter post from Tim Townsend, the award-winning religion writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, caught my attention.

The tweet linked to a Gawker.com piece titled “Journalism is not narcissism.”  The enlightening essay concludes:

The extent to which we train a generation of young writers to become robotic insta-memoirists is the extent to which a generation of stories from the wider world does not get told. The real tragedy of journalism-as-narcissism is not the general pettiness of the stories it produces; it is the other, better stories that never get produced as a result.

I was reminded of that piece this week when I came across a Religion Dispatches post headlined “A Journalist in Church, Hiding in Plain Sight.”  I forwarded a link to the article to my fellow GetReligionistas with a one-word subject line: “Weird.” (And yes, I acknowledge the irony of writing a first-person blog post related to this.)

My boss replied to my e-mail with this note:

A great example of a non-hard news item that we should write about.

It’s linked to the religion beat, period.

So here I am, assigned to make sense of this “journalist” who hides in a church and lives to write about it.

Let’s start at the top:

I’ve often wondered why I hid from them that day. It was two years ago and a rousing Sunday service was winding down at the Portuguese Language Missionary Pentecostal Church in Queens. The pastor, a fiery sermonizer who looked the part of an insurance salesman in his oversized metallic gray suit, had just asked the congregation’s baptized members to approach the front of the church and form a tunnel, through which the unconverted (não crentes, as Brazilians call them) could walk and feel the power of the church’s faith.

As the first of several women approached the gauntlet of cheery Christians, their heads downcast in perhaps shame or contemplation, I double-timed it down the church’s back hallway to the shoddy bathroom. For several tense minutes I waited, until it was safe to once again hide in the back row.

While cowering in the bathroom, and later in my seat, I rationalized my disappearing act on purely journalistic grounds: I was only there to observe. Yet my rapid heartbeat hinted at something else: fear. Fear of being found out, of being asked straight out if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior—I had not and still have not.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but wouldn’t the better journalistic approach be to carry a notepad, introduce yourself as a reporter and ask if it’s OK to hang out in the back and see what the church is all about? Isn’t that what journalists do? 

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On immigration reform, ‘many’ evangelicals all think alike

January 15, 2013 By

On a chilly morning last January, I got up before the sun rose and joined a Chicago-area preacher in his church van.

We drove to a regional deportation center where volunteers minister to illegal immigrants’ relatives before their shackled loved ones are taken to O’Hare International Airport for flights to the U.S. border.

I described the scene this way in a Christian Chronicle story:

CHICAGO — On a dark street, a mother weeps.

At 4:45 a.m., she stands outside a two-story brick building surrounded by razor wire, her sobs drowning out the drum of machinery at a nearby factory.

The Spanish-speaking woman just said goodbye — through a glass panel at a federal deportation center west of Chicago — to her son Miguel, an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

A minister wearing a beige overcoat and a black knit cap rushes to comfort the mother and pray with her distraught family.

“This is why I come,” says the minister, Bobby Lawson, who pulled a white church van out of the Park Forest Church of Christ parking lot in Matteson, Ill., at 2:53 a.m. that Friday. “These families are getting ripped apart.”

My reporting experience that day enlightened my understanding of the immigration issue — and the real human faces involved. As a result, I identified with the dramatic picture painted this week in a 1,500-word CNN report:

Washington (CNN) – When the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez talks about immigration, it is as someone who has witnessed the way a religious community is affected when a family is torn apart by deportation.

“It is personal for me,” Rodriguez said, describing deported friends and congregants as “lovely people. These are wonderful, God-fearing, family-loving people.”

Rodriguez, the head of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, has a naturally boisterous voice that booms with authority. When he speaks about immigration, passion oozes out of every syllable. But his voice softens as he speaks of those close to him who have been deported: an associate pastor’s wife, a friend from Sacramento, California, a well-known congregant — the list seems committed to memory.

Even as he relives the heartache, the pastor seems hopeful, if not optimistic.

I thought the CNN reporter did a remarkable job of setting the scene for a meaty exploration of a contentious topic.

Unfortunately, the story quickly fell into the “many” trap already addressed by tmatt this week (boldface emphasis mine):

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