It’s been quite a time in America — arguably unprecedented — with massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupting across the nation following the death in police custody of George Floyd. And all of it in the midst of a killer pandemic, economic upheaval and a frightening, and for many psychologically debilitating, uncertainty over what will happen next.

Importantly, the BLM protests have also popped up in many smaller cities in America’s hinterlands, communities not generally thought of as activist hot spots. Click here for a sampling of the coverage of how widespread this has been, care of USA Today, or here for The Washington Post.

There are many offshoots to this monumental story, the core of which is the state of race relations, policing injustices and the Donald Trump administration’s response to this national reckoning.

One sidebar (from The Washington Post, again) is the absurdly hypocritical response of some authoritarian nations — perhaps China above all — to America’s turmoil.

That’s the nature of international political maneuvering, isn’t it? Never miss an opportunity to blame your adversaries when they display problems — no matter how unequal the comparison —that they’ve pestered you about for years.

I’m reminded of the quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with — that is when he picks up a boomerang.”

I will pick on China — you would not be wrong to think, “What, again?” — because of its Hong Kong problem that has, understandably, largely been absent from American press coverage of late.

Why understandably? Because, as should be obvious, the first responsibility of American mainstream journalism is to cover important domestic stories. Moreover, I’d wager that few Americans currently give a hoot about Hong Kong’s concern, given what’s going on in their own lives and streets.

So even normally well-read GetReligion readers may have fallen behind on the crucial human-rights angles in the Hong Kong story.

Some empathy, please, as New York Times Jerusalem chief bids adieu

About a month ago I wrote a post on the buzz developing around the changing of the guard at the Jerusalem bureau of The New York Times. I noted then that Times coverage of the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about as closely watched -- and unsparingly critiqued -- as is any produced by American journalism.

For the bureau chief, the job is a near guaranteed ulcer-producer. Still, the position is coveted by the Times' most ambitious, most skilled and toughest reporters. In the context of that super-competitive newsroom, that's saying something.

My early December post was pegged to the departure of Jodi Rudoren, who is leaving Jerusalem after four years. No replacement has been officially named as of this writing, but check out my earlier post if you're interest in the scuttlebutt about who that may be.

My return to the subject is prompted by a exit interview Rudoren gave to The Jerusalem Post, Israel's leading right-of-center and oldest English-language newspaper. Click here to read the entire exit interview published in the newspaper's weekend magazine.

It's well-worth your time as a primer on what it takes to cover a highly complex, super-important international conflict while under a microscope.

How does one prepares for such an assignment? How do you deal, just about daily, with angry, highly partisan readers who feel their side has been wronged? How do time and space constraints work against properly contextualizing daily events when one has decades of bloody conflict from which to draw?