Terry MattinglyDay 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).
But first let me introduce myself. My name is Terry Mattingly and I
am journalist who covers religion news. For the past 15 years I have
written the national “On Religion”
column each week for the Scripps Howard
News Service in Washington, D.C. I also teach at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Palm
Beach County, Fla., where my title is Associate Professor of Mass Media
& Religion. (Some of my writings on this topic can be found under
TMatt’s Links.)
I will be writing for this blog pretty much every day. The actual
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 out there in the
blogosphere.
Here’s that example I was going to tell you about from a few months
ago.
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, latter, 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
Doug LeBlanc and myself and, we hope, our 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 clearning house of
information and opinion on this topic. This is what blogs do best.
So this is why Doug and I are starting 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.
Let’s begin.
— Prof. Terry Mattingly
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