Journalism

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Listen! Eric Metaxas gives GetReligion a shoutout in interview of David Gregory

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As we noted earlier this month, David Gregory, former moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," has written a new book titled "How's Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey."

On his national radio show, Eric Metaxas just interviewed Gregory about his new book.

Here's one cool thing about the interview: Metaxas gives a nice shoutout to GetReligion and our illustrious leader, tmatt.

Metaxas suggests that GetReligion "isn't snarky at all but just wonderful reporting on how the press doesn't get religion." Actually, we are snarky occasionally, but on our best days, we try to be nice and informative.

By all means,  listen to Metaxas' conversation with Gregory. (The part with the former NBC newsman starts about the 10:30 mark.) 

For a little more insight on Gregory and his faith, check out Religion News Service senior national correspondent Cathy Grossman's recent feature.


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Pope Francis press watch: @JamesMartinSJ kicks off the week with #PapalGoofs

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If you are interested in (a) the Jesuits, (b) old-school Catholic liberalism, (c) humor, (d) religion news or (e) all of the above, then you really need to be following Father James Martin on Twitter -- @JamesMartinSJ. You are really going to want to jump on board this week to get his take on the @Pontifex visit to America's elite media corridor between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Father Martin is well known for his popular books (such as "Between Heaven and Mirth" and "Jesus: A Pilgrimage"), for his analysis work at America magazine and as the official chaplain of the old "Colbert Report" on Comedy Central. He is also, as you would expect, a skilled observer of religion-beat work in the American press.

This weekend, he got an early jump on the papal-coverage tsunami by starting a lively hashtag noting some early mistakes made by print and broadcast journalists in their coverage of the Pope Francis stop in Cuba -- #PapalGoofs. He was very gentle in this series of corrections, providing no URLs pointing directly to examples of these media mistakes. Surely some of these helpful tips were offered as preemptive strikes? 

Obviously, #PapalGoofs refers to goofs that journalists may or may not make while covering the pope, as opposed to goofs that observers believe have been made by the pope. Francis critics will need to start their own hashtag.

We will jump into those tweets in a moment -- Bobby Ross, Jr., style -- but first I want to note that many, or even most, of the mistakes illustrated in the first (let's hope he continues) #PapalGoofs stream are addressed in the online stylebook of the Religion Newswriters Association. You may want to bookmark that right here at ReligionStylebook.com. 

Now, here we go. And the last shall be first:


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Here come your think pieces on Pope Francis: Media want a 'pope of our own making?'

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While working on Anglican matters earlier this week -- as in Canterbury's call for a crucial, but rather unofficial global gathering about the future of the Anglican Communion -- I bumped into a rather interesting commentary by a Canadian Anglican about the mainstream press and, you guessed it, Pope Francis.

Needless to say, I expect that we will be running quite a few posts this week about mainstream coverage of the pope's visit to the Acela media zone in the urban American Northeast. I will probably include several "think pieces" about religion-news issues in that mix, even though we normally only point readers toward essays of that kind on weekends. 

This piece by Father Tim Perry of Ontario -- "Francis: A Pope of Our Own Making?" -- was actually written fairly early in the Francis media storm, but it still makes timeless points worth pondering right now. He starts off with the immediate assumption that the CONTENT of the Francis era will be quite different from that of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

Let us attend.

While it is certainly the case that Francis is, and will be, different, I notice in these claims a curious pattern which has little to do with the three Popes, and much more to do with their coverage in the Western media. In short, the media quickly (subconsciously, I expect) decide on the “papal narrative,” and then over-report the stuff that fits and under-report the stuff that doesn’t.

Note the stress on underreporting the parts of the work of Pope Francis that do not fit the chosen media narrative -- such as this pope's remarkably consistent discussions of Confession, the work of Satan in the modern world and the centrality of family life in God's creation.


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New York Times writes evocative feature on who will meet Pope Francis in America

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When Pope Francis visits the United States next week, he will visit not only the high and mighty but the low and humble. Other mainstream media have often made that point. The New York Times proves it in its advance feature that ran yesterday -- with old-school enterprise reporting.

Fast-reading despite its nearly 1,600 words, the Times story offers both an overview and specifics. And it weaves them into prose that can be sweeping without getting flowery:

A papal visit is always an occasion of high ceremony and high-level politics. When Francis comes to the East Coast next week, he will, like his predecessors, visit the president and address the United Nations. He will pray with bishops. He will celebrate Mass before enormous crowds.
But to an unparalleled degree, this pope is making a point of spending time with people on the bottom rungs of American society: day laborers, refugees, the homeless, underprivileged schoolchildren and prisoners.
Like no pope before him, Francis is using the grand stage of his trip to the United States to demonstrate that the church exists to serve the poor and marginalized, and that this is the responsibility of all Catholics — whether pontiff or parishioner.

Many such articles would continue pretty much that same tone throughout -- that know-it-all, omniscient tone about this "people's pope." The Times doesn't; in this story, it fans out and talks to some of the 900 people who expect to meet the pope.

And it doesn't just say that Francis will visit inmates, for instance. It gives specifics on the offenses -- that Amanda Cortes, the subject of the lede, "worked for years as a phone-sex operator" and has been "awaiting trial in Philadelphia on charges that she brutally murdered her infant son." The article also doesn't just say that Francis will meet a refugee from Central America. It says the refugee "fled Honduras alone at age 14 and made his way through Guatemala and Mexico dodging armed gangs and riding atop freight trains."


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From Washington Post story on #IStandWithAhmed, three words that don't belong in a news story

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The arrest of a Muslim student in Texas for, um, bringing a clock to school has made headlines this week.

The Dallas Morning News has this overview:

On Monday afternoon, Ahmed Mohamed was the 14-year-old with a homemade clock, wearing a NASA T-shirt and a scowl as the police snapped handcuffs on his skinny wrists and led him from his high school.
By Tuesday, Ahmed was the kid stuck home from school, told not to return until police decided whether to charge him for what they called a hoax bomb. He wandered barefoot through his house then, garnering barely a glance from the three generations of Sudanese immigrants who are his family.
But Ahmed woke up Wednesday as #IStandWithAhmed — a viral symbol of government authoritarianism or out-of-control Islamophobia, depending which of his tens of thousands of Twitter followers you ask.
By the end of the day, in reports across the world, Ahmed was a hero and the officials who called his clock a fake bomb were a joke. President Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg were among the world’s most powerful people lined up to know Ahmed better. And police said they wouldn’t pursue charges.
The joke to his big sisters, Ayisha and Eyman, is that Ahmed was invisible on social media before an outcry over his arrest made him an online sensation. Their tech whiz of a brother had no Twitter account, no Facebook, no Instagram or Snapchat.
So the sisters set him up on Twitter as @IStandWithAhmed — a slogan that the world had given the boy as his story spread overnight. The young women stared at their phones Wednesday morning, stunned as the phrase became one of the most popular memes of the day.

Over at the Washington Post, journalists went Googling and produced a story — aggregation mostly — on what the click-bait headline describes as "The history of anti-Islam controversy in Ahmed Mohamed’s Texas city."

In this age of aggregation too often posing as journalism, of course, it's all about the clicks. Still, I found myself wondering if any of the Post journalists actually picked up a telephone and talked to anyone for this story.


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Covering the new female Buddhist monks, which reminds AP of Catholic scandals

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When journalism professors discuss about the traditional American Model of the press, with its emphasis on accuracy, balance and a lack of editorializing, we often talk about how this model is demonstrated in the work of wire services.

In fact, in recent decades advocates of edgier, trendier news styles have often gone out of their way to contrast their "new journalism" philosophies with "mere" wire-service writing. You know, that old-school journalism with its emphasis on inverted-pyramid hard-news stories and a neutral, balanced approach to reporting that is supposed to serve the needs of readers in news sources across America and around the world?

But clearly, someone has been putting something in the water some folks are drinking in AP land, especially when it comes to coverage of religious and moral issues.

Consider this recent AP feature on the rise of female monastics or "bhikkhunis" in modern Buddhism. On the surface, the key journalistic issue here is whether AP editors will allow any voices in traditional Buddhism to speak in defense of their beliefs. Surprise! The answer is no. Only the advocates of women being allowed to serve as monks are interviewed. 

Then there is something else interesting going on in this story. Read carefully:

NAKHON PATHOM, Thailand (AP) -- On a rural road just after daybreak, villagers young and old kneel reverently before a single file of ochre-robed women, filling their bowls with rice, curries, fruits and sweets. In this country, it's a rare sight.
Thailand's top Buddhist authority bars women from becoming monks. They can only become white-cloaked nuns, who are routinely treated as domestic servants. Many here believe women are inferior beings who had better perform plenty of good deeds to ensure they will be reborn as men in their future lives.
Yet with the religion beset by lurid scandals, female monastics or "bhikkhunis" are emerging as a force for reform, not unlike activists in the Christian world seeking gender equality including ordination of women as priests in the Catholic Church.


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Papal riddle: How does Washington Post cover Pope Francis without quoting people?

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Here we go again.

Whether it's a flight of editorial fancy, as I think of it, or the increasingly popular "omniscient anonymous voice," as tmatt complains, the Washington Post has just spun out another sweeping, opinion-laced advance on Pope Francis' scheduled U.S. visit.

Francis is "often dubbed the coolest-ever leader of the Roman Catholic Church," the Post says. He's brought a "dose of magical realism" to the pontificate. He wants to be "something akin to a global Jiminy Cricket, a voice of conscience whether you believe in God or not." Who is speaking? Good question.

But wait, there’s more:

Francis has turned out to be a natural global leader. But he has also been a surprise to the cardinals who thought they were putting a cautious moderate on Saint Peter’s throne.
To the chagrin of conservatives, he has evolved into a sort of pontifical version of Reagan-appointed Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose judicial decisions have upended his supporters’ expectations. After two popes who concentrated on doctrine and traditional families, Francis is clearly in a different mold.

Whew. Any wonder that this story goes way over 2,400 words?

The main point is that Francis is a "riddle," a puzzling blend of opposites. He is innovative in tone and manner, welcoming gays and easing the return of Catholics who have divorced and remarried. He is liberal in social issues, calling for better care of the poor and the environment. Yet he is a moral traditionalist who opposes same-sex marriage and transgenderism. In terms if on-the-page content, in other words, he sounds rather like St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

Externally, Francis "has become a formidable diplomat, interjecting the Vatican into everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to U.S.-Cuba relations," the Post says. Internally, he is a strong pope, who fired his secretary of state and two top officials of the Vatican Bank.


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About UFOs, Trump and that poll showing lots of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim

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So, President Barack Obama's faith is back in the news.

Precisely, the headlines concern a new poll showing a surprising (or not?) number of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim.

USA Today boils down the latest news this way:

Despite a Hawaii birth certificate and repeated professions of his Christian faith, fairly large numbers of Americans still believe President Obama is a Muslim born outside of the United States.

Over at the Washington Post, Godbeat pro Sarah Pulliam Bailey offers this rundown of the poll numbers:

Even though President Obama nods to his Christian faith regularly in both serious and light-hearted settings, a large number of Americans still believe he is a Muslim. According to a new CNN/ORC poll, 29 percent of Americans say they think that Obama is a Muslim, including 43 percent of Republicans.
Sixty-one percent of Democrats say Obama is a Protestant, compared with 28 percent of Republicans and 32 percent of independents. Also, according to CNN, 54 percent of those who support Donald Trump say they believe Obama is a Muslim.
Education comes into play: 63 percent of college graduates believe Obama is a Protestant compared with just 28 percent of those who do not have college degrees.
Among all adults, 39 percent say they believe Obama is a Protestant or another kind of Christian, another 11 percent say he’s not religious, and 14 percent that they just don’t know. Of those who took the survey, 4 percent believe he is Catholic, 2 percent think he is Mormon, 1 percent believe he is Jewish, and 1 percent think he is something else.
The number of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim appears to have jumped since polls from earlier years of his presidency.

Keep reading, and former GetReligionista Bailey does a really nice job of providing insight and background related to Obama's faith and what he has said about it.

But here's my question: Are these poll numbers related to the number of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim really "surprising" or "startling," as news reports described them?

 


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Does the Godbeat sometimes fill you with despair? Well, you're far from alone

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Does the Godbeat sometimes fill you with despair? Well, you're far from alone

My colleague Bobby Ross Jr. posted a piece last week keyed to a comment made by Laurie Goodstein, the veteran, award-winning New York Times religion reporter, who recently pulled down another big Religion Newswriters Association prize.

Here's what she said, as reported by Religion News Service, which was the source of Bobby's lede:

"There are days when I feel despair about the news and the place of religion in it,” said Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times, named first-place winner for excellence in religion reporting at the Religion Newswriters Association’s 66th annual awards ceremony over the [Aug. 27-30] weekend in Philadelphia.
“This work is getting harder,” added Goodstein, in what she said were unprepared remarks. She won in the large newspapers and wire services category for stories published in 2014.

Neither the RNS story or Bobby' post explained further what Goodstein meant. But Bobby did ask others to react to the question of on-the-beat despair. So here's my response.

On-the-job despair? Sure. Perhaps not of the order experienced by William Lobdell (younger readers should click here to understand this older-demographic God-beat reference), but despair nonetheless.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone -- religion journalist or not, person of faith or no faith -- cannot feel despair from time to time if they are at all aware of the vast world that exists outside themselves and they do not seriously numb their sensitivities via escapist self-indulgence (which, I hope it is clear, I am not endorsing).

It's a bloody mess out there, with much of the absurdity, depravity and pain brought to us in the name of religion.


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