Reader Per Smith got a little worked up over my analysis:
The article says clearly that members of the tribe go on vision quests and you wonder if these people are members of a native American faith. If it had informed us that they took pilgrimages to Mecca would you lambaste the NYT for not stating that they were Muslim in those words?
The Old Bill chimed in to defend me:
Per Smith, I think you’re being a bit hard on Bobby. Native American beliefs are not all the same. There are many, many Christians and a good deal of syncretism. (Geronimo died a Christian, but retained an Apache framework.) Going on vision quests does not explain what is sacred and why.
My concern was the extremely vague nature of the religion angle in the Times report. I wanted to understand how and why many tribal members see the land in question as “sacred.” The story proved a disappointment in that regard, as I opined in the original post.
My reason for revisiting the subject is that a reader sent us a link to an Associated Press story concerning Sioux tribes upset over the possible sale of a sacred site in South Dakota. The top of that story:
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — It’s advertised as a one-of-a-kind deal: Nearly 2,000 acres of prime real estate nestled in the Black Hills of South Dakota for sale to the highest bidder.
But the offer to sell the land near Mount Rushmore and historic Deadwood has distressed Native American tribes who consider it a sacred site. Although the land has been privately owned, members of the Great Sioux Nation — known as Lakota, Dakota and Nakota — have been allowed to gather there each year to perform ceremonial rituals they believe are necessary for harmony, health and well-being.
Members now fear that if the property they call Pe’ Sla is sold, it will be developed and they will lose access. The South Dakota Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration are studying the possibility of paving one of the main roads that divides the land, a fact mentioned in the advertisement touting its development potential.
The tribes have banded together to try to raise money to buy back as much of the land as they can. But with a week to go until the Aug. 25 auction, they have only about $110,000 committed for property they believe will sell for $6 million to $10 million.
Can anybody guess my question? Why do the tribes consider the site sacred?
Does AP deliver the crucial details? To my utter delight, yes!:
The tribes believe the Sioux people were created from the Black Hills, and part of their spiritual tradition says Pe’ Sla is where the Morning Star fell to earth, killing seven beings that killed seven women. The Morning Star placed the souls of the women into the night sky as “The Seven Sisters,” also known as the Pleiades constellation.
As you would imagine, I have received a few notes seeking my take, as a journalist and as an Orthodox Christian, on the events involving that crudely named feminist band in Russia. You know, the one that drew this headline the other day in The New York Times: “Anti-Putin Stunt Earns Punk Band Two Years in Jail.”
What? The band’s actual name didn’t rate large type?
Before I address the journalism issues related to this, I would like to note that, from my point of view, this matter has at least three layers and it has been easy for folks to go rather bonkers (Hello, Madonna, and you too, Sir Paul) without really separating out the layers. So, before people get confused about where my loyalties are in all of this, let’s walk through a few specifics.
So, raise your hand if:
* You think Vladimir V. Putin is a corrupt political thug who continues to feed on Russian nationalism.
Mine is up.
* You think that, in the complex post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church, there exists troubling corruption, mixed with flashes of courage and truly radical faith. In other words, this is a complex matter (please click here for a flashback).
Mine is up.
* You support the free speech rights of the members of P***y Riot and think that, while what these protesters said and did was foul, they had every right to demonstrate in public places in Russia.
Mine is up.
* You think that the government overreacted and, while crimes were in this case committed under Russian law (ironically, laws hailed by some on the left because of their intent to prevent offenses against Islam, Judaism, etc., as well as to majority Orthodoxy), the sentence was too harsh. The Orthodox hierarchy seems to feel the same way.
Mine is up.
* You think that crimes of some kind were committed in this case and that they should be enforced if and when when vandals invade and threaten religious sanctuaries, such as, just thinking out loud:
— Aryan Nations thugs invading Holocaust-era synagogues in Germany.
— Anti-Muslim extremists of left or right attacking mosques (say the Dome of the Rock) in order to shout profanities against the faith and the Prophet Mohammad.
— Conservative Anglicans (I am making this one up) losing their minds and attacking the altar of the liberal Cathedral of St. John the Divine during a pantheistic Gaia Mass.
Mine is up.
* You think it was bad, unbalanced and inaccurate journalism for the mainstream American press, in story after story, to essentially ignore the details of what the protesters said and did and where they did it. Thus, these stories were painfully flawed and millions of readers have no idea what actually happened.
Yes, mine is way up.
Folks, we are living in a sad age in which it is, at times, easier to find out what actually happened in major news events by watching YouTube than it is by reading the world’s major newspapers. What was this event all about for the Times team? It was politics, pure and simple — with only one layer that deserved informed coverage. The source of the strong global reaction, saith the Times:
This was partly because of the sympathetic appearance of the defendants — two are mothers of young children — and partly because their group uses music to carry its message. But it also set them in a David-and-Goliath struggle against a formidable power structure: the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Trust me that I know that elements of the Church are close to Putin and the state, while others, frankly, are not. The Orthodox Church has — think invasion of Georgia — stood up to the state in public, and in other cases, behind the scene. But to say that Putin and the Orthodox hierarchy represent — on all issues — a singular, united “power structure” is radically simplistic. At the very least this is a statement that should have been reported and debated, not simply stated as secular gospel.
So what actually happened here? It is a long way into the story before readers are given any details:
… The Russian Orthodox Church issued a statement that referred to Nazi aggression and the militant atheism of the Soviet era, and said, “What happened is blasphemy and sacrilege, the conscious and deliberate insult to the sanctuary and a manifestation of hostility to millions of people.”
The case began in February when the women infiltrated the Cathedral of Christ the Savior wearing colorful balaclavas, and pranced around in front of the golden Holy Doors leading to the altar, dancing, chanting and lip-syncing for what would later become a music video of a profane song in which they beseeched the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Mr. Putin.
Security guards quickly stripped them of their guitars, but the video was completed with splices of footage from another church.
I have yet to see a mainstream story (please inform me if I am wrong) that offers more details about what the women did and said. Did anyone actually go inside the icon screen? It is clear that the “dancing” itself took place inside the rail of the altar area and, thus, in an area reserved for clergy and those who serve the church. It’s crucial, in terms of accusations that these performance desecrated the cathedral, to know what they actually did. Once again, these are details that journalists should report in any similar case involving a synagogue, mosque, cathedral, etc. God is literally in the details.
We also live in an age in which some governments have passed laws (which I have consistently opposed, as a First Amendment absolutist) to crack down on all acts that can be seen as attacks on major faiths. These laws are, for example, often promoted as a way to prevent acts of Islamophobia.
How is this reflected in the story?
… Judge Syrova, delivering her decision, said that the political comments were spliced into the video later, and that the action in the church was therefore motivated by religious hatred. … In Washington, where Obama administration officials followed the trial closely, seeing it as a measure of Mr. Putin’s new presidency and its own troubled relations with Russia, the White House and the State Department each criticized the verdict. The State Department all but called on Russia’s higher courts to overturn the conviction and “ensure that the right to freedom of expression is upheld.”
It appears that, for the judge, this case was about the anti-religious content of this act and, literally, its sacred location — not simply a matter of freedom of expression. It appears that this judge thought that a Moscow cathedral should be protected in some way, rather like the laws that police enforce to protect American shopping malls. (Let me stress once again that I think the sentence here was way too high, yet it is clear that the judge was enforcing laws that were, in fact, violated.)
How would American police respond to the anti-Muslim equivalent of the following being screamed in, oh, a mosque on Manhattan?
St. Maria, Virgin, become a feminist
Become a feminist, Become a feminist …
Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin
Bitch, you better believe in God
Belt of the Virgin is no substitute for mass-meetings
In protest of our Ever-Virgin Mary!
Other major newspapers took an almost identical approach on this story. The Washington Post, however, did include this reference:
The judge’s recitation Friday dwelled on what sounded like an offense to the church rather than the state. She quoted at length witnesses who said they were believers deeply offended by the one-minute performance.
One witness said that the young women violated the Cathedral of Christ the Savior dress code with their short dresses and that women were expected to behave modestly in church. Another said public prayers were not permitted in the cathedral without the presence of a priest. If that wasn’t bad enough, one witness said, the performance occurred just before Lent.
OK, that’s simply a joke, a form of journalistic mockery. I have not doubt that some worshipers said that. However, anyone who has seen the video knows that the concerns mentioned by the Post were very minor, in contrast to what the protesters actually said and did. Did the judge list serious offenses? Did her remarks include actual details of what happened inside the altar area? How would we know?
The Los Angeles Times report was even worse. It seems that no one involved in the story was the least bit interested in the religion element of this story. What we have here is politics and more politics. Nothing more.
A Moscow court convicted three young punk rockers, members of the provocatively named group Pussy Riot, of “premeditated hooliganism” and sentenced them to two years in prison. The crime: a February “punk prayer” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral in which the balaclava-clad, mini-skirted rockers appealed for the downfall of President Vladimir Putin. …
Friday’s verdict followed a brief trial last week in which the rockers were accused of sacrilege and insulting the mores of Russian Orthodox believers.
Can readers read this and then understand the reactions of the judge and many, certainly not all, Russians? Can readers understand without knowing what was said and where it was done? Would it also help to know a bit about the history of this cathedral, which was imploded by the Communists and then rebuilt after the fall of the Soviets?
For those who want to comment, please focus, focus, focus on the content of the journalism stories themselves — or the lack of content. Links to additional info about the crimes that were committed would be appreciated. Again, do not bug me with the politics of this story. I trust that it is possible to oppose the desecration of sacred places without automatically being a supporter of Putin or an opponent of basic human rights. Right? Carefully read the top third of this post, again.
Stick to journalism, folks. Did the mainstream coverage include the crucial information readers needed to know?
As all loyal GetReligion readers know, sometimes we see things make it into news print that are simply too good, too strange, too funny, to make up.
When this happens, the best course of action is simply to share the love and laughter.
In this case, here is what we need.
I’m calling out Jettboy (who provided the tip) and company. We need our Mormon readers to join us in, uh, consuming this delightful little Associated Press story about Mormonism and cold caffeine.
We will NOT get into a discussion of Mormons and their potentially sinful addiction to ice cream (which is another part of life in which they have a lot in common with Southern Baptists). Anyone who has ever been to urban Utah knows that, where New York City has world-class coffee shops and bars, the streets of Salt Lake City — at least as I remember them from the 1980s — offer a stunning number of fine ice cream shops.
With no further ado, dig into this sweet little number:
NANTUCKET, Mass. (AP) — Mitt Romney joins other observant Mormons in shunning alcohol and coffee. He apparently draws the line at ice cream.
The Republican presidential candidate ordered coffee ice cream at Millie’s restaurant in Nantucket Saturday when he bought treats for his staff and mingled with diners. His aides selected flavors including vanilla, rocky road, butter pecan and birthday cake ice cream.
It’s not clear that Romney took more than a bite or two as he shook hands and posed for pictures in the crowded and buzzing vacation eatery. Mormons traditionally avoid alcohol and caffeine.
Romney aides shrugged off the selection, saying the candidate can have whatever kind of ice cream he likes.
Where to begin when tackling this complex doctrinal issue? How about a quick insight on this Mormon-menu topic from Dummies.com?
Like many aspects of the LDS religion, the duty to maintain good health has its roots in revelation, in this case a section of the Doctrine and Covenants that Mormons call the Word of Wisdom. The legend surrounding its origin is that Joseph Smith and other early LDS leaders used to chew tobacco during Church meetings, spitting juices on the floor. Joseph’s wife, Emma Hale Smith, was disgusted by this act, and her complaints led the Prophet to ask God whether tobacco use was really appropriate for Latter-day Saints.
The Lord’s response, contained in D&C section 89, covered far more than just tobacco; it also restricted the consumption of wine, liquor, meat, and hot drinks (today interpreted to mean tea and coffee of any temperature). Although many Mormons understand this scripture as suggesting that all caffeine is bad and should be avoided, this idea isn’t official Church doctrine; the Church allows members to decide that issue for themselves, and some members choose to drink cola.
So is coffee-flavored ice cream simply coffee at another temperature?
Take a moment and peruse this fascinating New York Times report about disputed oil drilling on a Montana Indian reservation. Tell me what kind of story it is:
A.Business story
B.Environmental story
C.Religion story
D.All of the above
Here’s the colorful lede:
BLACKFEET INDIAN RESERVATION, Mont. — The mountains along the eastern edge of Glacier National Park rise from the prairie like dinosaur teeth, their silvery ridges and teardrop fields of snow forming the doorway to one of America’s most pristine places.
Yes, there is beauty here on the Blackfeet reservation, but there is also oil, locked away in the tight shale thousands of feet underground. And tribal leaders have decided to tap their land’s buried wealth. The move has divided the tribe while igniting a debate over the promise and perils of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in a place where grizzlies roam into backyards and many residents see the land as something living and sacred.
The obvious right answer is D, which means that in a perfect world the story would encompass all three of those elements (A, B and C).
Since this is GetReligion — not GetBusiness or GetEnvironmental — I’ll focus on the religion angle. After reading the lede, I wanted to understand how and why many residents see the land as “sacred.” The story proved a disappointment in that regard.
Instead, the Times skirts at the edges of those crucial questions:
To find the opposing view, one needs only to drive five miles west from Browning, past the casino, heading straight toward the mountains, and pull off at the red gate on the right. There, on a recent summer afternoon, over mugs of horsemint tea, Pauline Matt and a handful of Blackfeet women were trying to find a way to persuade the tribal leaders to stop the drilling.
“It threatens everything we are as Blackfeet,” she said.
What exactly does that “everything” encompass? Does it relate to these tribal members’ view of their Creator and place in this world? The story provides no real insight, although readers do learn that the tribal members pray:
Ms. Matt and the women who oppose the fracking speak about the streams and meadows and mountains as if they were family members. They go on vision quests in the mountains. They braid native sweetgrass to burn in prayers and collect berries and herbs for food, medicine and ceremonies.
Left unanswered: Any inkling of the tribal members’ religious beliefs. Do they adhere to a Native American faith? Are they Christians? Again, the Times does not deem such questions relevant.
And near the end of the story, there’s this strange reference to Jesus Christ:
Ron Crossguns, who works for the Blackfeet tribe’s oil and gas division, has oil leases on his land, a 10-foot cross in his yard, and little patience for that kind of pastoral veneration. He called it “movie Indian” claptrap, divorced from modern realities. Mountains, he said, are just mountains.
“They’re just big rocks, nothing more,” Mr. Crossguns said. “Don’t try to make them into nothing holy. Jesus Christ put them there for animals to feed on, and for people to hunt on.”
What kind of story is this? How about we add another possible answer:
You know that you have moved into true Bible Belt territory when the locals start asking you — literally while the moving van is in your drive way — blunt questions that sound something like this: “Hey, do you folks know where you’re gonna go church yet?”
Now, I would imagine that this question is not asked nearly as often when people move into New York City. I think that’s a pretty safe piece of speculation.
However, I would argue that this is a question that someone with the Associated Press SHOULD have asked that Tim Tebow fellow the other day when an AP reporter sat him down for an interview that, in The Wall Street Journal, ran under the headline, “Tebow balancing faith, fame and football with Jets.” I think readers that care about issues linked to Tebow’s faith would like to know what he said, when asked that question, even if his answer is something like, “I have found a local church and it’s a good one, but I’d rather keep that private.”
You see, this story treats religious faith as a totally personal, private thing — totally devoid of details linked to, well, churches and other bodies of believers. Tebow’s out there on his own, almost all alone, and there’s no need to ask practical, specific journalistic questions (think “follow the money”) that would allow readers to connect this man’s faith claims with some factual details. That’s right, the goal is connect faith to facts, or something like that.
What we end up with is good and, at times, interesting. But it’s sort of like knowing that George W. Bush claimed that he prayed a lot in the Oval Office (ditto for Barack Obama, by the way) and it was impossible to know whether anyone in his family was practicing the Christian faith in any traditional sense of the word. Instead, readers get:
CORTLAND, N.Y. (AP) — The most important call of Tim Tebow’s day comes far away from the huddle.
It’s usually sometime at night, when football is the furthest thing on the New York Jets backup quarterback’s mind. That’s a rare moment these days for Tebow, particularly during training camp. But one of his closest friends — an “accountability partner,” as he describes him — is always a phone call away to keep his priorities in order.
For No. 15, that means God is No. 1.
Family comes second.
Football is a distant third.
“He’s someone I pray with,” Tebow said in a recent sit-down with The Associated Press, preferring to keep his friend’s identity private. “He’ll ask me: ‘Hey, did you get in the Word today? Were you praying today?’ I have him because I need someone who is always investing in me, you know? You don’t ever want to become complacent. That’s very easy to do because life gets in the way.”
Great stuff, on one level.
And later on, of course, AP has to ask how America’s most famous saving-myself-for-marriage young believer (and t-shirt model) is getting along when it comes to dating and a social life. After all, New York City is New York City.
There are constant questions and rumors about his sex life and who he’s dating, and people trying to play matchmaker. Going out in public is also a challenge, where having a quiet meal is preceded by scouting missions to find a restaurant with seating that’s more private than most.
He doesn’t complain about it. He accepts who he is, and what everyone expects him to be.
“It definitely can be tough, but at the same time, I don’t want to let the media or the world affect how I live,” he said. “I really feel like it hasn’t to this point, and I don’t want to let it start.”
That’s a logical question and it needed to be asked.
However, here’s the interesting thing. New York City is also in the midst of an amazing sea change at the level of church growth and involvement, especially among Asians and Latinos, and Tebow is a globally minded Christian. There are vital and alive churches in and around the city in every form of traditional Christianity.
In short, New York City is an exciting place for a young man to hunt for a church.
So, if this is a story about Tebow’s diligence at practicing his faith, it would have been totally logical to ask him what churches he has visited and whether he has found a church home. It’s a serious question, for serious believers, and there is every indication that this Tebow guy is a serious believer.
Was it asked? It appears that the AP took a pass on that one.
When a Neo-Nazi gunman killed and wounded worshipers at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, we looked at a few problems with the coverage. Some readers suggested additional problems. See here and here, for instance. I actually thought much of the coverage was good. This New York Times story (“For Victim in Sikh Temple Shooting, a Life of Separation“) was a keeper and the general coverage at CNN and its Belief Blog have been extensive and thoughtful.
But more than anything, what strikes me is the lack of coverage. This was a major shooting at a house of worship in the Midwest and while the media seemed interested at first, it just kind of dropped off.
A reader sent in this media analysis that ran in the New Yorker. I thought it worth discussion. Written by Naunihal Singh, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, he begins:
The media has treated the shootings in Oak Creek very differently from those that happened just two weeks earlier in Aurora. Only one network sent an anchor to report live from Oak Creek, and none of the networks gave the murders in Wisconsin the kind of extensive coverage that the Colorado shootings received. The print media also quickly lost interest, with the story slipping from the front page of the New York Times after Tuesday. If you get all your news from “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” you would have had no idea that anything had even happened on August 5th at all.
Because of the way the media and political elites handled their reaction to the shooting, Singh writes, the massacre has been viewed as a tragedy for Sikhs rather than a tragedy for all Americans. He continues:
The two incidents were obviously different in important ways: Holmes shot more people, did so at the opening of a blockbuster film, and was captured alive. There were also the Olympics. However, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Oak Creek would have similarly dominated the news cycle if the shooter had been Muslim and the victims had been white churchgoers. Both the quantity and content of the coverage has been clearly shaped by the identities of the shooter and his victims.
I’m not sure. I really am confused about the general lack of coverage of the Sikh shooting. I think the media reaction to the shooting at a socially conservative non-profit group this week is also interesting. Some have covered, some haven’t. CNN apparently took three hours to even mention it. Say what you will about their Oak Creek coverage but at the very least they were on it much more quickly. And on a Sunday no less. Why do some stories generate so much interest and others don’t? What confuses me about the Sikh shooting in particular is that it had all the elements of a story that could be pursued for a long time. Or, as Singh writes:
The murders took place at a house of worship on a Sunday. There was the heroic president of the congregation who, even though he was sixty-two, battled an armed attacker, sacrificing his own life. There were the children who sounded the alarm and joined fourteen women huddled in a tiny pantry for hours, listening to the agony of the wounded outside. There were the relatives at home, receiving texts and phone calls from loved ones. There were heroic police officers, a shootout, and the attacker’s death by self-inflicted gunshot.
Exactly! Think of how many stories we could get out of this? So why aren’t we seeing those? After the Colorado shooting, local media outlets and national media outlets were able to dig down and tell some very compelling stories about the shooting and the lives affected. Some took weeks to tell and are still being told. And obviously there are still news and features being written about Oak Creek, but the quantity of the coverage is not enough.
I wonder if this is a problem of journalists not being interested and, if so, why. But I also wonder if this is a problem of readers and viewers not being interested and, if so, why. Normally I like to have some point I’m arguing for here, but I honestly don’t understand why we haven’t seen more coverage — particularly when some news outlets have done so well with it. Any wisdom to impart?
One of the most powerful ways we receive and process information is visually. And we don’t get too much of a chance to discuss how coverage of religion news is shaped by visual images that accompany copy. But someone sent me a link to a story and told me I had to check out the picture that accompanied it. It got me thinking.
The picture in question can be found here. It accompanies a story about the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Taken by an Associated Press photographer, this was the picture I saw in most local or regional coverage of the LCWR annual meeting in St. Louis last week. The caption is “Sister Anne Nasimiyu of Kenya, right, and Sister Lucy Marindany of Milwaukee, Wisc., join other members of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The largest U.S. group for Roman Catholic nuns met to decide how they should respond to a Vatican rebuke and order for reform.”
These sisters are attired in traditional clothing.
I know what you’re saying: What’s the big deal? What could possibly be more expected for these stories than pictures of sisters in habits?
And yes, it’s almost a cliche.
If you were at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, wouldn’t you expect to see hundreds of sisters in habits?
You might expect that. But would you be right to? Many stories about the conference explained that most sisters were not attired in habits but, rather, casual clothing. We don’t need to get into the theological difference between wearing habits and casual clothing but suffice to say they exist and actually fuel heated debate. What’s more, these differences in attire relate to much larger discussions about tradition and the roles of women religious.
If, generally speaking, these sisters were not wearing habits, should the sole picture accompanying the article indicate that they were?
My colleagues and I had an internal discussion about how impossible it is to find images of sisters wearing informal attire. They just don’t exist, whether you’re looking for stock photos or file photos. It’s amazingly difficult.
That led to a further discussion about how photographers are probably thinking they’re doing the right thing, upon being assigned to an annual LCWR meeting, to seek out those habit-wearing nuns and snap some photos. What photographer would think they were supposed to take pictures of sisters in polyester pants when there’s a visually compelling habited nun sitting next to her? They would need to be prepped with some background about the significance of attire if they were to get visually interesting shots of those sisters who were less formally dressed.
But I want to end this by showing how it can be done. I noticed that the St. Louis Archdiocese newspaper had a slideshow of great shots of the conference. There were a few shots of sisters in habits, but most of the pictures showed the sisters dressed casually — just as the news reports indicated was the case. But what’s great about this slideshow is that the pictures are quite compelling. Some of them are stunning, in fact. I would love to show them to you but because of copyright restrictions, you’ll have to click through on your own. Then let me know what you think.
Perhaps it was because she had more insight into the background of the LCWR, but photographer Lisa Johnston captured some great shots.
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.
I want to show you an an example — a case study, if you will — of what I am talking about, a ghost in a set of stories that is related to this blog that you are visiting (and we hope you come back often).
I will be writing for this blog pretty much every day. The founding editor of the site is my colleague Douglas LeBlanc, another veteran journalist who has covered religion in the mainstream and religious press. In recent years, he has been best known as an associate editor of the respected evangelical news magazine Christianity Today.
Between the two of us, we have been covering religion news in secular and sacred media — or trying to convince editors to pay us to do so — for almost 50 years. We write religion stories and we read religion stories. Lots of them. That’s how we start our days and often that’s how we finish them.
We see all kinds of things and so do our many friends in academia, think tanks and the blogosphere. In this project, we are working with the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life and a philanthropist who — with the bylineRoberta Green — is herself a journalist with solid, national-level experience on the religion beat in mainstream newspapers. Click here to read a speech in which she discusses her own motivations for continuing to work on issues of education, mass media, journalism and culture.
But back to the “ghost” issue. Here’s that example I was going to tell you about.
Like many people who live far from New York City, my morning email includes the digital newletter version of The New York Times. So I was scrolling along and ran into this:
November 12, 2003
Survivors of Riyadh Bombing Pick Up Pieces
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 11 They were neighbors and newlyweds, and late on Saturday night they bumped into each other by chance outside the obstetrician’s office.
That is how Dany Ibrahim and Houry Haytayan found out that the blushing couple who lived next door were also expecting their first child.
It was your basic, solid symbolic person story, a snapshot from the age of terror. I was especially interested in finding out who the authorities thought planned and executed this bombing and why.
The details were, of course, sketchy. But the newspaper of record had to find the pattern that would help readers make sense of this.
Of the 17 dead, 13 have been identified. A Saudi police investigator at the scene on Tuesday said one of the four unidentified bodies might have been that of a suicide bomber inside the sport utility vehicle.
Mr. Ibrahim, the young Lebanese husband, lived in Beirut through the 1970’s and 1980’s when it was racked by civil war. Somehow this is different. He specifically picked this compound to move into six months ago, after the suicide bombings in May against Western compounds, because he thought it would be safer to live in a place that was almost entirely Arab and Muslim.
It was safer to live in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Arab and Muslim. But it was not safe.
Arab and Muslim.
This is one of those strange combinations of words. Not all Arabs are Muslims and many Muslims are not Arabs. This strange combination of ethnic and religious identifications puzzled me.
After all, the terrorists themselves keep saying that these bombings target “infidels.” There are, in fact, “infidels” who are Arab. There are even “infidels” who are Muslims. What exactly were we dealing with in this case? Who are the “infidels” and where are they in this story?
So I kept reading and, later, I found this.
Christian Arabs possible attack targets
By ESTANISLAO OZIEWICZ
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 5:40 AM EST Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2003
Nina Jibran had everything to live for. The Lebanese school teacher was recently married, pregnant and living in a comfortable compound in Riyadh.
There was even talk of her moving to Canada with her husband, an engineer who worked for a multinational advertising agency.
But then, shortly after the couple returned home from an obstetrician’s appointment last Saturday, a suicide bomber ripped through the gates of their residential area, shredding their lives and sparking outrage in Saudi Arabia. Ms. Jibran was among the 17 dead, and her husband, Eliyas, among the more than 120 injured.
Scanning down, I found this newspaper’s version of the crucial, defining paragraphs:
As details emerge about the victims of last weekend’s bombing, many observers believe their profile made them targets for the suspected al-Qaeda attack. Ms. Jibran, like her husband whom she married in July of 2002, was Christian. According to Arabic-language news reports, they had also received documentation to move to Canada.
Elias Bijjani, a Toronto-based member of the Lebanese Canadian Coordinating Council, said many of the couple’s neighbours were also Lebanese Christians. He speculated al-Qaeda was targeting Christian Arabs, rather than Muslims.
In fact, the evidence seemed to be that the victims were Arabs, but they were Arab Christians.
The wording in the New York Times story did not eliminate that possibility, but it also did not provide that specific information. In fact, it would turn out that it was hard to explain the location of the attack in any terms other than an attempt to kill a specific form of “infidels” — Arab Christians.
Why was that information missing? What was the origin of this ghost?
I immediately did what I do several times a day. I sent pieces of these stories and the URLs around to a circle of friends — journalists, human rights activists, politicos, etc. You know, the usual cyberspace circles. We all have these private circles, right? Mine just happen to care a great deal about religion and the news.
Before long, an interesting thing happened. One of these cyber-colleagues — Dr. Paul Marshall of Freedom House, which studies religious liberty issues — took an interest in these two stories. Then he took this case study to another level.
The result was this essay for The Weekly Standard:
Misunderstanding al Qaeda
What you weren’t told about their targets in Saudi Arabia.
by Paul Marshall
12/01/2003, Volume 009, Issue 12
AMERICAN REACTIONS to the recent bombing of a foreign workers’ compound in Riyadh reveal multiple misreadings of the Arab world and — more dangerously — of both al Qaeda and the Saudis.
The media seem to equate Arab with Muslim and, along with some in the administration, think that al Qaeda’s war is against Americans and Westerners per se, rather than against all “infidels,” a group al Qaeda defines idiosyncratically and expansively as anyone who is not a strictly observant Muslim. Both mistakes are compounded by reliance on the Saudis’ distorted account of the attack.
The November 8 bombing took place in a Lebanese Christian neighborhood of Riyadh, and of the seven publicly identified Lebanese victims, six were Christian. Lebanon’s newspapers are replete with photographs of Maronite Catholic and Greek Orthodox victims. Daleel al Mojahid, an al Qaeda-linked webpage, praised the killing of “non-Muslims.” The Middle East Media Research Institute quotes Abu Salma al Hijazi, reputed to be an al Qaeda commander, as saying that Saudi characterizations of the victims as Muslims were “merely media deceit.”
If so, the media fell for it.
Marshall and I had seen the same ghost. He chased it down and captured it in print.
And that is what we hope to do with this blog. It is an experiment by LeBlanc and myself and, we hope, our journalist friends and new readers. We want to slow down and try to pinpoint and name some of these ghosts.
But I don’t want to sound like we see this as a strictly negative operation. There are many fine writers out there — some believe the number is rising — who are doing an amazing job of taking religion news into the mainstream pages of news, entertainment, business and even sports. We want to highlight the good as well as raise some questions about coverage that we believe has some holes in it.
Most of all, we want to try to create a clearing house of information and opinion on this topic. This is what blogs do best.
So this is why Doug and I started this experimental blog. We hope it grows. We hope it forms links with other sites that are digging into the same issues, each with their unique viewpoints and resources. We will point some of those out as well and include them in our links page.
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