Trust me, I realize that the Iowa GOP caucuses are getting really complicated for journalists.

I mean, you’ve got this libertarian guy who is a hero for many pro-lifers.

You have the Mormon guy who has been trying and trying to win over his fair share of evangelical Protestants voters. Problem is, some think he’s too Mormon. Others think he isn’t Mormon enough. Sorry ‘bout that.

You have this recent convert to Catholicism who is a hero to lots of conservatives who aren’t Catholics.

You have this United Methodist guy who lots of people seem to think is a power prophecy charismatic or something.

You have this other Catholic who is so conservative, when it comes to the specifics of his Catholic faith, that some journalists keep calling him an evangelical.

‘Tis a puzzlement.

I understand the confusion. This is hard work. Still, there is absolutely no need to journalists to write paragraphs such as the following, which come from a recent touch-all-the-bases Iowa roundup in USA Today.

So here is the context. How to describe the conflicting views that evangelical voters — there are no other voters in Iowa, of course — have of Newt Gingrich, the Catholic convert, and Rick Santorum, the Catholic conservative who is now surging (we are told these days) with a slice of the state’s evangelical flock? Also, how to describe the unique scrutiny faced by Mitt Romney?

Read carefully:

There was a time when a Catholic candidate faced similar scrutiny among evangelicals. Santorum, who is Catholic but has appealed primarily to Christian voters, says he occasionally gets a comment on the trail. “I’ve had it mentioned to me a couple of times,” he says. Gingrich converted to Catholicism, the faith of his third wife, Callista, in 2009.

“The only concern I’ve heard about Gingrich’s Catholicism is evangelicals hoping he’s had a sincere, redemptive moment,” says Steve Deace, an influential Christian talk radio host in Iowa. “Back in the day, evangelicals were concerned Catholics would take orders from the pope. Now, given how many liberal Catholic politicians there are, evangelicals want a Catholic who actually does.”

Say what?

Gentle readers, what do you think the copy desk at USA Today — a skilled crew, in my experience — was thinking when the pros who work there signed off on this sequence of words?

Santorum, who is Catholic but has appealed primarily to Christian voters. …

Here are a few logical options:

* Does this mean that Santorum is Catholic, but is not appealing to Catholics, but to “Christians”? The implication is that Catholics are not Christians. Say what?

* Does this mean that, although Santorum is Catholic, he is not focusing his campaign on Catholics in particular, but on reaching voters who are “Christians,” broadly defined (presumably including Catholics and evangelical Protestants)? I sure hope that was the goal.

* Does this mean that the USA Today pros got so tired of writing about “evangelicals” that the editors just broke down and used “Christians” (as opposed to Catholics) instead of the word “evangelicals”?

Oh well. I now return you to the previously scheduled journalistic discussion about this topic: Why evangelical voters are so bigoted that most of them only plan to vote for Romney in the general election.

Or something like that.

Wednesday’s broom fight between Greek and Armenian clergy at the Church of the Nativity has come as a god-send to the editors manning the desks of news rooms this Christmas. With the year-in-review pieces done and the boss away until Tuesday, the junior editors ruling the roost have been handed a fun item with which to play.

The general outline of the story as reported by the wire services was that fist fight erupted between Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic clergy at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. A six century church built on the purported site of Christ’s birth, the Church of the Nativity is jointly administered by the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church and the Franciscan Order of the Roman Catholic Church. Each has their own portion of the building under their administration, the newspapers report, with the turf jealously guarded against encroachment.

While cleaning the building following the Catholic Christmas services on Dec 25 in preparation for the Orthodox (Jan 7) and Armenian (Jan 6) Christmas services, the dividing line between territories was breached.  This led to a shoving, swinging of brooms and fisticuffs. Palestinian Authority Police, evidently prepared for just such an outbreak of violence, quickly broke up the fight — which took place before a tourist group and was recorded on video. No injuries were reported or arrests made, the news services reported.

Several of the longer news pieces noted that brawls between rival churches over their rights and responsibilities at the Church of the Nativity had taken place for centuries. Last year the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ran a story about a dispute that led to tourists being trapped in the grotto under the church — the traditional place of Jesus’ birth — a priest took a shortcut and trespassed on Armenian space.

In 2002 Palestinian terrorists damaged the building when they seized the building, holding a number of monks and nuns hostage.

The best report on the incident I’ve seen was in the Daily Mail. It provided the facts, context and an overview of what was behind the dispute.

The Sun has had the best — meaning worst — headline so far. “Affray in a Manger”.  The New York Post comes a close second with “Brawl is mano amen-o” with the Mirror coming third with “Rival Monks in Broomstick Brawl in Bethlehem Church”.

Not given the free hand of their tabloid brethren, many of the “quality” press turned to alliteration with some form of “Clerics Clash” (Reuters, The Independent, USA Today; “Clergymen  Clash” (CBS, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Time); or “Brawl in Bethlehem” (Irish Independent, BBC).

Other outlets mined phrases from popular culture for headlines: “Monks gone wild at the Church of the Nativity” Global Post, or “Bethlehem Rings in Christmas With Annual Priestly Broom Fight” in The Atlantic.

Commentary about the fight was all over the place. One European news agency (MINA) quipped:

Nothing says Christmas as the annual fight between Armenian and Greek priests in Bethlehem. Just like in previous years, both groups continued their tradition and fought over “territory” and who has the right to be at the church which in Christianity is believed was the birthplace of Jesus.

Both groups attempted to clean the Church, to signify the birth of Jesus when a scuffle erupted. Although the place was crawling with police, they still didn’t manage to prevent the annual priest fight, which hopefully Spike TV will air later tonight.

This is perhaps what’s wrong with priests in general, unlike shaolin monks who can actually fight. Our hats off to Greek and Armenian priests… true believers should always fight each other … in Church.

The National Review and the Guardian drew very different lessons from the fracas (imagine that!)

David Pryce-Jones notes that:

Rivalry between Christians was one reason why the Holy Land of the Crusaders was lost to Islam. The bigotry remains as primitive and destructive as the Sunni–Shia divide is to Islam, and when there are no more Christians in any Muslim country it will be too late for regrets.

The fealty given by Christian Arabs to their Muslim rulers will do them no good, Pryce-Jones argues.

Bethlehem used to be at least three-quarters Christian, but that figure is down to about a quarter as its inhabitants emigrate to escape the PLO. Christmas is of course the high point of the town’s calendar. Victor Batarseh, the mayor, is a distinguished medical specialist, aged 76, and Roman Catholic.  He marked this Christmas with a speech calling for a complete boycott of Israel. This would be suicide. The day the Christians are at the exclusive mercy of the PLO, and never mind their Hamas compatriots, is when this church would become a mosque. An omen: Ayia Sofia, once the Byzantine cathedral of Istanbul, was converted into a mosque, then a museum, and under rising Islamism is now a mosque again.

Giles Fraser — the Church of England clergyman whose invitation to the Occupy LSX movement led to the on-going mess at St Paul’s Cathedral — noted that the Nativity brawl was a sign for some people that the church had lost its way.

Church buildings have become a fetish, admired by secular aesthetes and those who want an impressive stage set in which to celebrate life’s big events, but a drain on the resources and moral imagination of the church. What we need is another dose of healthy iconoclasm to remind us that the message of the gospel is not to be confused with bricks and mortar.

While he had sympathy with this view, he believed that:

Christianity is not some esoteric philosophy. It is rooted in time and place. It begins on the streets before it points to the stars. And church buildings are an expression of the rootedness of the incarnation. Where it all goes wrong is when those who are so caught up in the running of church buildings forget about the purpose for which the place was built, and come to believe that the stones matter in and of themselves. When that happens Christianity becomes petty and narrow, all about who cleans a few metres of floor, rather than a means of imagining human life from the context of all eternity.

A few news outlets managed to mangle the story. CNN appeared not to have read tmatt’s recent post and referred to the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic Churches as “sects”. Wrong word, of course. tmatt explains why.

And the Washington Post has over egged the pudding.

At one of oldest churches in the world, built over the cave that tradition marks as the place Jesus was born, Franciscan, Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests have brawled annually around Christmas Day for more than a century.

This year was no different.

This year was different in that they did brawl. They do not brawl every year.

They have, of course brawled frequently. Karl Marx, writing in the New York Herald-Tribune on 15 April 1854 took the churches to task for their unedifying conduct.

… the common worship of the Christians at the Holy Places resolves itself into a continuance of desperate Irish rows between the diverse sections of the faithful; [however] these sacred rows merely conceal a profane battle, not only of nations but of races …

Marx did note the appointment of an Anglican bishop in Jerusalem was “the first and only cause of a union between all the religions at Jerusalem” who were united in their common dislike of the Church of England. Reading Israeli press  reports shows that little has changed.

This year has produced no shortage of Mormonism coverage with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman in the presidential race. If you want a continual source for Mormon news, be sure to follow the work of Peggy Fletcher Stack, a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, located in Mormon central.

Earlier this year, the Tribune launched a religion blog called Following Faith, where Stack regularly updates national and local stories often related to Mormonism in the news. But Stack’s reporting goes much further back than the blog. Stack, who studied at the University of Utah and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., has been writing for Tribune’s award-winning Faith section for more than two decades.

She spent four days following the Dalai Lama around Salt Lake City, two weeks following the late LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley around Africa, and about a half hour interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu during the 2002 Winter Olympics. We asked Stack to talk about her interest in religion’s conflicts and cohesion for GetReligion’s 5Q+1.

How do you think your job differs from a religion reporter at another newspaper, maybe one in Florida or one in Massachusetts?

Because most Utahns belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I end up writing many more stories about that church, its teachings, programs and developments than about any other faith. While reporters in other regions such as the Bible Belt may spend the bulk of their time writing about the dominant faith in their area, this is also LDS Church headquarters and home to its hierarchy where all institutional decisions are made. Think Rhode Island’s Catholic majority but with the Vatican in the state capital and priests as legislators. We are also the only secular paper that writes extensively about Mormonism, which means readers across the globe are looking to us for a knowledgeable, even-handed approach to LDS news.

Has the nation’s increased interest in Mormonism changed your reporting or the stories you pursue?

Sure, it has put more pressure on us to be the first, the best and the most definitive source of Mormon issues. For example, the paper sent me to the opening night of previews for “The Book of Mormon” musical. I quoted a Mormon who went with me as saying the show was “surprisingly sweet.” I saw that quote and perspective repeated endlessly, even by playwrights Trey Parker and Matt Stone themselves. It humbled me to realize yet again that other reporters – and LDS members and critics worldwide – were watching what we do on Mormon issues, taking their cue from us. Obviously, we have made missteps in our coverage—which GetReligion is quick to point out—and each time we do, we go through rounds of self-analysis at what went wrong. But we remain committed to the ideal of fairness and balance. Now that there seems to be a bottomless appetite for reporting on Mormons, both for members themselves and curious outsiders, we feel it is important to be leaders in the field. At the same time, many of the stories other media are now exploring topics we have already printed and with which are readers are already fully familiar.

How do you balance coverage of other religions with high percentage of Mormons in your demographic?

Even though much of our reporting is on the LDS Church, I enjoy covering all faiths and feel a desire and responsibility to educate our readers on the religious diversity in Utah. We work hard to highlight events, issues and developments in smaller Utah faiths, despite their percentage of the whole. I think even our Mormon readers appreciate learning about other groups and spiritual journeys.

Are there specific challenges to covering Mormonism that you might not find when covering other religions?

Mormonism is such a closely knit community and all-encompassing experience for so many that it has spawned intense feelings of loyalty in believers and hostility among outsiders or former believers. It is tricky to maintain a reasoned approach, without tipping too far to one side or the other. I’ve been accused of being a Mormon church puppet on the one hand and the anti-Christ on the other, so I feel I am doing OK. About the only analogue I can conjure is Jerusalem, with its pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions, each looking for signs that a reporter is prejudiced against them. Too many readers know a lot about the LDS faith and practice and are ready to pounce if they think I got some detail wrong, while others know little or nothing. So I am always struggling to ensure my writing is thorough enough for insiders but not too detailed for everyone else. It can be exhausting. Sometimes I yearn for a good Jewish holiday story or a dicey exploration of ethics as a nice break from all the Mormon-created tension.

What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media are having a hard time grasping?

Though lots of reporters have written about the theological differences between Mormonism and historic Christianity — some thoughtful, others superficial — few really understand the broader differences and similarities in culture and community. That goes to my problem with coverage of other faiths, too. Many reporters treat groups like Mormons, Muslims, and Buddhists as monolithic, describing a simple set of beliefs and practices that they presume all follow. There is often little context, nuance or texture in that kind of religion reporting. In a word, Mormons may all be in the same faith family, but they can be as different as brothers, sisters, step-siblings and adoptees.

What’s the story you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

I expect I’ll be writing much more about Mitt Romney and his faith as the next year unfolds. I will also continue to follow the impact of such national attention on the LDS Church itself. Will it be just a fleeting moment, somewhat like the spotlight shown on the Utah-based church by the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, or will it bring about lasting awareness or shifts in perspective? How many times will I have to explain to a French television crew that the LDS Church abandoned polgamy a century ago? How will the relationship between Mormons and evangelicals change, if at all? What elements of Mormon history and doctrine will capture the journalistic fancy and be studied – and written – to death?

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

When I read a story about any religion, I closely observe what sources the reporter chose to quote. I realize it is tough to find authoritative Mormon sources, because LDS full-time officials rarely agree to interviews and a random leader in the local lay clergy may know little or nothing about the issue at hand. Mormonism doesn’t have theologians, per se, who can explain the faith in terms outsiders can grasp. Even finding Mormons wearing the title, “president,” (as in Elders’ Quorum president or Relief Society president), doesn’t mean their perspective is in any sense representative. I do feel that more investigative work on churches, particularly on money issues, would benefit the reading public. I don’t think religions should be either critiqued for their teachings and practices or exempt from close scrutiny. I also would like to see more exploration of ethical issues as they relate to business, social services and religion stories.

Many of you have sent in articles about a dramatic religious dispute going on in Israel. And there have been many stories to look at. And if you read them all, you may begin to understand the situation. Here’s the beginning of the New York Times story datelined Beit Shemesh:

The latest battleground in Israel’s struggle over religious extremism covers little more than a square mile of this Jewish city situated between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and it has the unexpected public face of a blond, bespectacled second-grade girl.

She is Naama Margolese, 8, the daughter of American immigrants who are observant modern Orthodox Jews. An Israeli weekend television program told the story of how Naama had become terrified of walking to her elementary school here after ultra-Orthodox men spit on her, insulted her and called her a prostitute because her modest dress did not adhere exactly to their more rigorous dress code.

The country was outraged. Naama’s picture has appeared on the front pages of all the major Israeli newspapers. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Sunday that “Israel is a democratic, Western, liberal state” and pledged that “the public sphere in Israel will be open and safe for all,” there have been days of confrontation at focal points of friction here.

Ultra-Orthodox men and boys from the most stringent sects have hurled rocks and eggs at the police and journalists, shouting “Nazis” at the security forces and assailing female reporters with epithets like “shikse,” a derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman or girl, and “whore.” Jews of varying degrees of orthodoxy and secularity headed to Beit Shemesh on Tuesday evening to join local residents in a protest numbering in the thousands against religious violence and fanaticism.

For many Israelis, this is not a fight over one little girl’s walk to school. It is a struggle that could shape the future character and soul of the country, against ultra-Orthodox zealots who have been increasingly encroaching on the public sphere with their strict interpretation of modesty rules, enforcing gender segregation and the exclusion of women.

Stateside reader complaints include the complete failure to talk to any of the ultra-Orthodox men “from the most stringent sects,” as well as an overuse of the term “ultra-Orthodox” to describe factions in dispute with each other. This New York Times story, which was better than anything else I read, was dinged for referring to bus segregation as a “kosher” edict. Israelis complained that a tiny fraction of a relatively small group was being presented as so large. In truth, I didn’t see any report that explained how powerful extremists in the community are, much less how many of them exist.

There’s a way to overcomplicate this story and it’s almost impossible to tell it accurately in just a few hundred words but I actually think that the New York Times did an admirable job of getting into the history and complexity of Israel’s relationship with its haredi.

This is a story about modesty rules and gender segregation but it’s even more about local politics. I spent some time looking at videos of these men taunting girls for not being modest. What’s interesting is how in some of the videos, grown women who are not dressed modestly (according to ultra-Orthodox standards) are left alone while tiny little girls who have their legs and arms covered are yelled at for immodesty. Why is that?

Well, Beit Shemesh has a conflict between its modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox populations. A new school was built to serve modern Orthodox girls and some in the ultra-Orthodox population view this as an unfair encroachment on their turf. (CBS mentioned this angle prominently.) Some of these people eschew working within the legal or political framework set up to resolve such disputes, relying instead on aggressive public statements and peer pressure.

Alone among the major dailies, the New York Times actually touched on this background in their report. Another interesting angle they covered was that while many in greater Israel have problems with the Orthodox gender separation, it’s not actually what’s driving the dispute within Beit Shemesh. In fact, the group that hired a media consultant and obtained coverage for the plight of Naama Margolese is itself ultra-Orthodox.

All of these details make for a much more fleshed out story.

One reader noted the bias in the stories about this mob of men is going after little girls. Indeed, there is certainly a bias on display. For instance, here’s a line from the New York Times:

Religious extremism is hardly new to Israel, but the Sicarii and their bullying ilk push with a bold vigor that has yet to be fully explained. Certainly, Israel’s coalition politics have allowed the ultra-Orthodox parties to wield disproportionate power beyond the roughly 10 percent of the population they currently represent.

I suppose that could have been explained a bit more — in order to build any coalition, you have to work with the ultra-Orthodox parties. What they get out of that coalition is continued protections and benefits specific to them. Such as an easier time avoiding service in the IDF and not having to work well into adulthood while religious studies are subsidized. This may have been one of the most common complaints I heard when I was in Israel in March.

Anyway, much of the lack of balance could have been fixed with quotes from members of the group yelling at the little girls. It is certainly difficult to write impartially after watching some of these videos but if we can do it for other extremists, we can aspire to balance here, too, I guess. I don’t, however, have a problem with the strong language used to describe the bullying from some men in Beit Shemesh. How else to call it?

One story I found particularly weak was the Washington Post story. It mentions nothing about the local dispute and while it finds room to quote a Reform rabbi, no ultra-Orthodox men are quoted explaining their behavior. I’d love to hear their defense, particularly since so many stories quote Orthodox and even ultra-Orthodox claiming that these extreme figures don’t have religion on their side.

For good background on the local political angle, this piece in Israel Hayom might be helpful.

Russell Powell — late of the ABC and now head of media relations for the Anglican Diocese of Sydney — suggested I take a look at the coverage given by the BBC to the Queen’s Christmas message.

In the pages of this blog I have been critical of the BBC’s coverage of religion. I have argued the corporation has at times displayed bias or disdain for religion and the faith component of news stories. My initial response to Russell’s suggestion was one of glee. Here was an opportunity to write a quick post that conformed to the narrative I had established in my previous posts.

Then I read the BBC article and found my assumptions were unfounded. The article entitled “Queen speaks of hope in 2011 Christmas Day message” was a workman-like piece of reporting that displayed none of the cant to which I had objected in other reports. Nevertheless I found the story to be off. I re-read the queen’s message, watched the video again, and attempted to shed my skin – hearing the queen’s words from a perspective outside my own worldview.

I have come to believe this report is unfaithful to the meaning of Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas message. To quote the Captain played by Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here is (a) failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach.”

What the Queen was saying about God appears not to have been understood by the BBC. Hence the Christian element of this profoundly Christian message was buried at the back of the story.

The British monarch has spoken to her subjects each Christmas since 1932. Wikipedia has a good summary of the practice, noting that the first message read by George V was written by Rudyard Kipling. This year’s message was written by Queen Elizabeth and taped on 9 Dec 2011.  The Duke of Edinburgh was hospitalized over Christmas with heart trouble and his brush with illness is not touched upon.

This year’s message speaks to the value of family in times of adversity – and begins with a discussion of the queen’s family. She then broadens the concept of family through the successive paragraphs of the speech, expanding the discussion to Britain, the Commonwealth and to the family of man. She then pulls back the focus on the family, recounting the marriage of two of her grandchildren and the sadness of those British families who have sons and daughters serving in Afghanistan.

So far, so good … a standard Christmas greeting that touches upon the highpoints of the year …  a royal version of the newsletter some stuff into their Christmas cards. But then the speech takes a turn.

the world is going through difficult times. All this will affect our celebration of this great Christian festival.

Finding hope in adversity is one of the themes of Christmas. Jesus was born into a world full of fear. The angels came to frightened shepherds with hope in their voices: ‘Fear not’, they urged, ‘we bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

‘For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.’

Although we are capable of great acts of kindness, history teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves - from our recklessness or our greed.

God sent into the world a unique person - neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.

Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God’s love.

In the last verse of this beautiful carol, O Little Town Of Bethlehem, there’s a prayer: O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in. Be born in us today.

It is my prayer that on this Christmas day we might all find room in our lives for the message of the angels and for the love of God through Christ our Lord.

I wish you all a very happy Christmas.

At little less than 750-words, the queen’s message offers a solid statement on Christian belief and hope. I find it outshines the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Christmas homily and is clear, concise and powerful. A pedestrian Christmas greeting with commonplace sentiments becomes a lovely statement of Queen Elizabeth’s Christian faith.

What does the BBC do with this? It reports the speech in linear form, working through each section in turn and starts off with:

The Queen has used her annual Christmas Day broadcast to speak of courage and hope in adversity. … The Queen also spoke of “the importance of family”, and called the Commonwealth a family “in the truest sense”.

In her message, recorded on 9 December, the Queen said the Royal Family had been inspired by the courage shown in Britain, the Commonwealth and around the world.

She noted the resilience of communities in New Zealand after earthquakes, Australia after flooding and Wales after the mining disaster at Gleision Colliery.

The article notes Prince Phillip’s illness and her Christmas Day activities, offers quotes from the first half of the message on family, friends and communities, and then discusses the Queen’s dress, Royal Family news and related tattle.

The Queen’s Christian mediation comes at the close of the story, and is encapsulated in these phrases:

“Finding hope in adversity is one of the themes of Christmas,” she said.

“Jesus was born into a world full of fear. The angels came to frightened shepherds with hope in their voices: ‘Fear not’, they urged, ‘we bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people’.”

The monarch also said: “Although we are capable of great acts of kindness, history teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves - from our recklessness or our greed.”

I cannot fault the BBC for omitting anything from their account of the Christmas message. But I do believe  it is a mistake to lead with the friends and family motif over against the power of her statement that Jesus Christ is not merely a wise man or moral exemplar, but God.  And it is through this God that we the families, communities and nations that are suffering can be reconciled and find peace.

In the ears of a Christian, the queen offers a meditation of God’s purpose in having his son become incarnate. In the ears of the BBC the Queen offers a Rodney King-speech — “Why can’t we just get along” – with a touch of Bill Cosby-like family sentiment.

Now is this fair on my part? Could it not be argued that in addressing a post-Christian audience, the BBC must use tropes that its listeners will understand? Would leading with platitudes and cliches familiar to its audience opens the door for mention of faith?

Or, as I have argued, leading with the principle statement of the message — faith in Christ is the way towards establishing peace on earth — is the better way to report this story. Even if such a message will seem foreign to many of its listeners.

There was no ambiguity in the queen’s speech. No half statements or hedged bets. These faults are found in the coverage.

What say you GetReligion readers? Am I being too hard?

A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the widely circulated error that William Butler Yeats was the author of Hebrews. The New York Times messed it up. So did the Associated Press. The BBC, too. All in a story about the death of George Whitman, a Paris bookstore owner.

Commenter George Harper wrote:

Yesterday I emailed the Times to request a correction. As of today I’ve received no acknowledgment and there’s been no correction.

Well, I’m happy to report that while it took a week, a correction was obtained:

Correction: December 21, 2011

An obituary on Thursday about George Whitman, the longtime owner of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, referred incorrectly to a quotation written on a wall of his store. The words “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise” are a variation on a passage from the Bible; although Mr. Whitman himself attributed them to the poet W.B. Yeats, they were not written by Yeats.

I don’t believe other outlets have gotten around to correcting their error. I’d still like to know why Whitman thought this was attributable to Yeats. It’s a poetic line and Yeats certainly knew his Scripture. Perhaps it was contained or referenced in something he wrote and the allusion was lost on Whitman? I’m unsure. Do let us know if you’ve heard.

In any case, Eric Metaxas — author of this year’s hit Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy — was the first person I saw complaining about the error and he wrote something about it headlined “Does Anyone in the Media Ever Read the Bible?”

Don’t answer that. Just kidding, but here’s a snippet of his jeremiad:

[T]his obit must have been written years before, as such obits usually are, waiting quietly in the files for their elderly subjects to pass on. It would have been dusted off every few years and updated and — presumably — rechecked.

So when I read the Yeats supergoof, I wondered: where were the fact-checkers? Is the secular bias at the Times so pervasive that it has affected not just the writers but the fact-checkers too? Or has being out of touch with middle America so hurt the Times’s subscription base that they cannot afford fact-checkers anymore?

When I first wrote about this on my Facebook page I was excoriated by an acquaintance who writes for the Times. He thought I was simply being too harsh. Perhaps I was. After all, as Sammy Davis, Jr. once remarked, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

But to get serious, if I had one wish for American in 2012, I wish that we would get to know the Bible better. Even if you aren’t a believer there are incredible stories in the “good book” that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is — and by the way, Shakespeare’s plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.

Of course, ignorance about Scripture is not limited to members of the media. I’m surprised at how many of my irreligious friends are ignorant about how many literary works allude to the Scriptures. When one of my friends became Christian, he kept being surprised at how things he thought were from Shakespeare were actually from the Psalms or other parts of Scripture.

Maybe the folks at the New York Times should just read their own paper. Here’s the first line of Marilynne Robinson’s interesting look last week at great works that engage Biblical questions:

The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.

It is funny, though, to have the paper that wants to issue a religious litmus test to political candidates fail the entrance exam on Biblical literacy.

Bible picture via Shutterstock.

The other day I openly confessed that, as a kid and throughout my life, I have always been a choir fanatic. What I hinted at in that piece I will now state openly: I was the kind of choir fanatic who was only interested in singing classical music, especially when dealing with sacred issues and texts.

In other words, I wasn’t the kind of singer who welcomed the chance to sing come-to-Jesus pop songs in four-part harmony, accompanied by either (a) a cassette tape purchased at the local Bible book store or (b) the church pianist trying to sound hip, perhaps joined by a teen-aged drummer and someone playing a cheap guitar that was supposed to look like a Fender Stratocaster.

So sue me, because I have never been into suburban megachurch music. I grew up singing the sacred music of Palestrina, Victoria, Anton Bruckner (thanks be to God) and other serious composers.

However, as a preacher’s kid I was exposed to all of the other traditional Southern Baptist forms of choir music, including semi-classical Christmas cantatas, hymns elaborately arranged for choirs that would fit in the Mormon Tabernacle and anthems with soprano descants that would break windows.

But let’s be clear about one thing. I have never, ever been sentenced to take part in a singing Christmas tree.

What, many of you will ask, is a singing Christmas tree?

If you really want to know, the Slate.com team has published a story that will tell you all about this modern phenomenon. The story ran under a sprawling headline that lays out the agenda in language almost, but not quite, as snarky as my overture to this post:

The Rise of the Singing Christmas Tree

Hundreds of people! Thousands of lights! Flying angels! Fireworks! Sequins! The megachurch extravaganzas explained.

Here’s the opening of this pre-Christmas Day piece that defines the necessary terms:

Across the country, churches will soon be groaning at full capacity as millions of Americans, from the deeply devout to the twice-a-year attendees, pack their local congregations to participate in a Christmas Eve service. But this month, some of those churches will also present what has become a tradition in the modern evangelical megachurch: the Singing Christmas Tree. In these productions, church choirs perform a musical celebration while standing inside an enormous Christmas tree platform that reaches to the ceiling, often accompanied by extravagant light shows, dancing church members, and sometimes even fireworks. Displaying all the kitsch and some of the camp of your favorite Broadway musical, Singing Christmas Tree pageants represent the quintessence of the modern megachurch experience: oversized, ostentatious, and a strange blend of the sacred and the secular.

Now here’s the shocker, especially in the context of Slate.com and its often-hostile stance toward evangelical Protestantism. The fact of the matter is that reporter Neil J. Young did his homework and took this subject seriously, even adding layers of cultural background that trace this spectacle back into the first half of the 20th Century.

The key to this entire subject, of course, is the conviction among church leaders — especially Baptists — that if church members invite their friends and neighbors to see the show, there is a chance to hook outsiders with the Gospel.

So while it may appear that these choirs are, well, merely preaching to the choir, the clergy behind the scenes are convinced otherwise. Almost any activity — no matter how tacky or theatrical — can be justified in the name of evangelism.

Thus, Young writes:

How did the productions get so grandiose? The 1970s and ‘80s were exciting times for conservative Protestantism. Millions of Americans got saved and filled the pews of rapidly expanding evangelical congregations. Armed with enviable budgets and crowded with many first-time church members, these congregations rethought some of their traditional offerings and also their strategies for reaching potential converts. …

With the rise of megachurches in the 1980s, Singing Christmas Tree pageants expanded in scale. Ensconced in arena-sized “worship centers,” evangelical megachurches required a Christmas pageant that could play to the last row of the multitiered balcony. The Christmas tree platforms grew larger, in many churches reaching more than four stories in the air with a high soprano perched alone at the tree’s peak just short of the rafters. The trees also became flashier, festooned with thousands of lights that often twinkled and flared in time with the music. And the staid and traditional Nativity play now shared center stage with elaborate costume dramas usually depicting the plight of a wayward soul who had forgotten — or turned from — the true meaning of Christmas.

So what’s the ultimate question?

In the end, Young has to wrestle with Bible Belt claims that thousands upon thousands of souls have been saved through these productions — shows that in some cases have led churches to experiment with other forms of pop culture. Is there a natural bridge between gigantic singing Christmas trees and movie ministries pitching born-again soap operas to the Fox Faith movie demographic?

Read it all. This is a pretty serious news feature about a subject that, well, is easier to joke about than to write about.

What could be more adorable at Christmastime than the precious smile of a baby?

Granted, the photo that ran with a front-page Cincinnati Enquirer story this week wasn’t as compelling as the one accompanying this post. That’s mainly because the mother featured in the article declined to let her daughter’s face be photographed.

Still, the writer paints a warm-and-fuzzy picture of the little one way up high:

WITHAMSVILLE — Sitting on her mom’s lap, the 10-month-old toothless girl with twinkling blue eyes and chubby cheeks sports a wide smile as she gums a jingle bell Christmas tree ornament.

Ahhhhhhh, how sweet!

How, one might wonder, could such a cuddly subject inspire a reader who shared the link with GetReligion to declare it “a seriously loaded” piece of journalism?

Well, keep reading, and the “loaded” part arrives quickly enough:

The infant is Christa Dias’ greatest gift – and the reason she was fired from teaching jobs at two Cincinnati Catholic schools.

“I’ve always wanted to have a baby,” said Dias as she held her wish-come-true in her arms in their Withamsville home. “I’ve always known that. That’s why I became a teacher, because I love kids.

“I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

But it was for her employers, Holy Family and St. Lawrence schools in East Price Hill, who fired Dias in October 2010 because the single woman was 5½ months pregnant and wanted to discuss maternity leave. She is still unemployed.

So, it seems, the story has two sides: The loving mother and the villainous Catholic school officials.

The piece — part of a year-end series by the Enquirer revisiting local newsmakers of 2011 — recounts that the teacher was fired for being pregnant not by premarital sex, but as a result of artificial insemination.

Interestingly enough given the tone of the article itself — and to the newspaper’s credit —  these sidebar notes appeared on Page A1 beside the opening paragraphs:

CONTRACT CLAUSE DIAS AGREED TO WHEN HIRED

The teacher will “comply with and act consistently in accordance with the stated philosophy and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the policies and directives of the School and the Archdiocese.”

CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, SECTION 2376 

“The gift of a child”

“Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple – donation of a sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus – are gravely immoral. These techniques – heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization – infringe the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ ‘right to become a father and a mother only through each other.’ ”

Case closed? Apparently not.

The story notes that the discrimination lawsuit the teacher filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati is on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considers a similar case. However, the paper fails to provide any background at all on that case. I’m assuming it’s the one involving a Lutheran school teacher that Mollie highlighted back in October.

Some background on the Supreme Court case would have improved the Enquirer story. Analysis by third-party legal experts on the key issues — both in the local case and the one before the high court — would have helped even more. Instead, the story quotes only the parties involved.

Meanwhile, readers learn:

Dias, 32, a Michigan native, isn’t Catholic but is Christian and attended Notre Dame College, a Catholic school in South Euclid, Ohio, on a volleyball scholarship.

Dias is Christian.

Unfortunately, that’s the full extent of the background given on her faith. Would anyone besides me like to know what kind of Christian she is? Does she attend church? If so, where? What does she believe concerning artificial insemination? Was she aware of the Catholic Church’s position before deciding to get pregnant?

Late in the story, the Enquirer abruptly introduces past allegations against the priest who fired the teacher:

Dias was fired by the Rev. James Kiffmeyer, who was suspended in 2002 after being accused of sexual misconduct with two male students at Fenwick High School, where Kiffmeyer was a teacher.

There was no criminal investigation because the men were 18 and adults at the time of the incidents in 1986 and 1990. The Archdiocese made a financial settlement with one accuser. The Vatican reviewed the cases but handed down no discipline.

Kiffmeyer, who denied the allegations, was reinstated in 2006 and then became pastor at Holy Family church.

“I would think Father Kiffmeyer would be more empathetic because of the judgment that he’s received from his past,” Dias said.

Is that background on Kiffmeyer relevant in this particular story? My first reaction is that it is not. It seems out of place and unrelated to the employment question in this story. But maybe I’m missing something.

The story, of course, ends the way it begins — warm and fuzzy:

Despite the fight, Dias is convinced she made the right decision.

“She’s such a gift,” Dias said of her daughter. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I am very happy. She’s an amazing gift from God. She’s amazing and wonderful. I would do it all over again for her.”

Baby photo via Shutterstock

As reporters often focus on brand new information, follow-up stories sometimes get left by the wayside. Tracking down a source or checking in on the end result of something might not lead to anything worth reporting. It’s nice to see NPR do some digging around on a story that was begging to be shared across the Internet.

Remember when Harold Camping’s prediction that the faithful would be raptured was all the rage for about a week in May? There were plenty of stories about end of the world predictions and what happened to people who believed such predictions. As we noted, NPR was one of the first to highlight the struggles families faced as the date drew nearer.

What happens, though, when media outlets report on a seemingly silly business, one that preys on people’s beliefs? Looks like Bart Centre made out with at least $35,000 by promising to care for people’s pets if the owners were raptured in the next 10 years. Of course, some people wanted a refund, which Centre declined.

Even with a few dissatisfied customers, he took on about 260 clients who promised to pay $135 for the first pet and $20 for additional pets. What was feeding his business? Here’s his take:

There might not have been much fallout to Centre’s business from the rapture not happening, but there was some fallout, in the form of complaints, when NPR first told Centre’s story. Many criticized him and said that he was taking advantage of people, but Centre says that’s not the case.

“I do not advertise my business. My business is advertised by the media and by word of mouth,” Centre says. “I don’t threaten people with the rapture coming; I outright tell them I do not believe in the rapture.”

Surely the business won’t end with Camping’s false prediction.

Centre says business has been a little slow and he’s added only a few clients since May. But he expects that around October 2012, close to when the Mayan calendar ends and what many people believe signifies the coming rapture, business might just pick up again.

It’s nice to see a follow-up story, tracking down whatever happened with the original story. Could the story use a balancing view of some sort, perhaps a scholar who looks at faith and business? Are people more likely to spend money on a service if something is tied to their belief, for instance? What do end of the world predictions cost families? Simply reporting on this one particular business with no other voices seems to legitimize it in some way.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Unbeknown to me, George was working on something for GetReligion that was a big picture look about how the New York Times handles the Arab-Israeli conflict. He did an admirable job and I heartily recommend reading that piece.

However, I’m going to hit that same issue again just a few days later.

When a major world leader singles out a major American news organ and blasts its coverage of his country, that’s a significant development. Even odder, this incident prompted relatively little discussion or notice — especially in media critic circles.

There are some obvious reasons why this is the case. It’s probably not surprising that the liberal editors of The New York Times don’t think much of the right-wing government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Still, when the Times asked Bibi to pen an op-ed for the paper he could have respectfully declined. Instead, Netanyahu, who’s not known for his subtlety, fired off a response blasting the paper for asking him to do so, given what he sees as the newspaper’s bias. Then, turning up the heat even more, he leaked his broadside to the Jerusalem Post:

[Senior Netanyahu adiser Ron] Dermer made clear that this had much to do with the fact that 19 of the paper’s 20 op-ed pieces on Israel since September were negative.

Ironically, the one positive piece was written by Richard Goldstone — chairman of the UN’s Goldstone Commission Report — defending Israel against charges of apartheid.

“We wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘Bibiwashing’ the op-ed page of The New York Times,” Dermer said, in reference to a piece called “Israel and Pinkwashing” from November. In that piece, a City University of New York humanities professor lambasted Israel for, as Dermer wrote, “having the temerity to champion its record on gay rights.”

That piece, he wrote, “set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future.”

Interestingly enough, Dermer also lodged this criticism against another specific op-ed:

Dermer also took the paper to task for running an op-ed piece by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in May that asserted that shortly after the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in November 1947, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.”

Those lines, Dermer wrote, “effectively turn on its head an event within living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan accepted by the Jews, and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it past the most rudimentary fact-checking.”

That it did find its way into the op-ed pages of the “paper of record,” he wrote, showed the degree to which the paper had not internalized former senator Daniel Moynihan’s admonition that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but … no one is entitled to their own facts.”

OK, now I know what many of you are thinking.

GetReligion doesn’t generally concern itself with op-eds or editorial stances. However, I think that these journalistic critiques offered by the Netanyahu government raise a couple of relevant issues of interest to readers of this blog. Yes, there is expected to be a strict wall of separation between news and editorial — I once worked at a paper where they moved the editorial writers’ desks for fear that the proximity to the newsroom would encourage editorial writers and news reporters to have conversations with each other. But that doesn’t mean expected journalistic standards for news coverage stop at the door of the editorial department, allowing opinions to reign supreme.

Now it’s one thing to accept that someone doesn’t agree with you, but people are less inclined to let disagreements slide when they feel that the arguments being used against you are dishonest. Netanyahu’s government is trying to establish that the New York Times’ Israel coverage is unfair, not because of honest disagreement but because the Times is using editorial license to distort the factual record.

That’s a pretty serious accusation. Netanyahu was hardly alone in thinking that “pinkwashing” piece was disconnected from factual reality. However, the dispute here isn’t about the specifics of the piece, so much as it is asserting that the entire premise is broadly untrue. This argument against the piece pits American cultural politics against perceptions about how religious tolerance is actually practiced in Israel, a very diverse society. Even if you think one side in this debate is more wrong than the other on balance, there are lots of specific circumstances that could be cited to challenge assumptions all around.

Because the disputes over Israel are largely driven by acrimony between two religions, it seems like the tendency is to try and argue every dispute as black and white where one side is morally superior. Along these lines, I certainly see why Dermer was annoyed that the paper let Abbas elide over the inconvenient details regarding how the Arab states rejected the U.N. plan and launched and offensive war. But, and I say this as someone who’s spent a great deal of time recently excoriating the media for passing opinions off as facts, I’m not sure Abbas’ statement can be seen as anything other than interpretative.

Perhaps you can argue that the sins of omission in Abbas’ statement are discrediting, but there’s a very fine line between that and saying the paper should have rejected his version of events as a matter of “fact-checking.” Everyone likes to use “the facts” as a cudgel, but in the process of pummeling their opponents, people are far too willing to pretend something is an objective truth when it’s not.

I don’t know what the New York Times’ current policy on this is, or whether a more stringent attitude toward fact-checking would have resulted in Netanyahu being more pleased with the paper’s coverage of Israel.

However, I will say that  one of journalism’s dirty little secrets is that almost no columns or op-eds are fact-checked before they go to print. (USA TODAY is one of the few outlets I’m aware of where they make a point of running op-eds through a separate fact check in addition to the typical editing routine where they may or may not catch any errors.) The attitude seems to be that since it’s labeled opinion, the byline will suffer more damage to its reputation than the outlet where it was published.

One can debate whether or not the Times is entitled to let its editorial freak flag fly here or is so biased against Israel it’s willing to let the facts be distorted. But I do think instituting a higher standard of factual rigor on op-ed pages would be helpful — particularly on religious issues — which are often the most complex and divisive issues addressed by columnists. How more factual rigor would be instituted, I’m not sure.

Would you be more inclined to read certain columns or op-ed pages if you knew they’d been through a fact-checking process before publication? And I also wonder if, despite the “wall of separation” between news and editorial staffers, does there come a point where a disproportionate and egregious editorial opining starts to affect your perception of the paper’s credibility and news coverage on particular topic?

I think we know where Netanyahu comes down on these questions and it’s pretty absolutist. For his part, Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the Times, has essentially argued that the Times is unbiased on politics, but not culture, morals and religion. Unfortunately for Keller, Israel is a Gordian Knot comprised of all of those aforementioned ideological strands. So I’m curious to know what factual standards you think opinion pages should adhere to to preserve their credibility.