Journalism

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In a town called Faith, voters offers clues on who exactly supports Donald Trump

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After chasing stories all over the United States, I found Faith — a town in South Dakota with a population of 421.

It turns out I'm not the only newspaper reporter drawn to Faith.

Tim Funk, award-winning religion writer for the Charlotte Observer, ventured there — to the Faith in North Carolina — for a front-page report over the weekend.

Funk's Faith story tackles questions perplexing many this election season: Who are the people supporting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? And why? (In all fairness, the exact same questions could be — and should be — raised concerning those on Democrat Hillary Clinton's bandwagon.)

Here's what I like about the Charlotte Observer's story (and regular GetReligion readers will note that I'm praising a newspaper I've criticized in the past): The reporter goes to a Republican-leaning town, paints a vivid portrait of it and actually listens to the people he meets.

Of course, I've always enjoyed these kind of small-town takeouts. In my Associated Press days, I recall writing one from Daingerfield, Texas, and another from Crawford, Texas.

But back to the Charlotte Observer piece: Funk's lede nicely sets the scene:


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Halloween church show: Washington Post peeks at the trend without passing 'judgment'

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I don’t usually jump into a story without an intro, but the Washington Post's lede on Judgement House is pretty vivid:

SOUDERTON, Pa. — She stepped into the pitch-dark room, illuminated only by eerie flames, as the sound of moans and shrieks rose over the ominous music. A hooded figure, dressed in black, leapt from the darkness to hiss in her ear.
Shadeilyz Castro burst into tears.
When the shaken 10-year-old left the room, clinging to her aunt, she was not talking about witches or goblins — she was talking about the Bible. "I have to read it more," Shadeilyz said. "With my brother. I have to talk to him. He doesn’t read it much."
Judgement House did its job.

The Post, in turn, does a more-than-decent job of telling the literally torturous story of Judgement House programs -- "all sorts of earthly tortures (kidnapping, child abuse, drug abuse, a hidden pregnancy)" -- through the lens of Immanuel Leidy’s Church, near Philadelphia. It's intense, maybe shocking -- and a bit flawed -- but not cynical.

The last is not unimportant: This topic is ripe for ridicule, if the reporter is so inclined. But WaPo tells the story, quotes the people on their feelings, and rejects the usual "trip to the zoo" contempt of many secular media:


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This Bible Belt paper just discovered some interesting folks -- they're called 'evangelicals'

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Just more than a week before the election, The Oklahoman — Oklahoma City's daily newspaper — has identified a group of Oklahoma voters who could play an outsize role in my home state's balloting.

These voters — "made up of mostly white members of Protestant churches that profess a born again-centric theology" — have a special name.

They're called "evangelicals."

OK. OK. I'm being a little facetious about my local newspaper — to which I subscribe and for which I worked nine years as a reporter and editor. But Sunday's front-page story has a certain "go to the zoo and see the evangelicals" feel to it.

Let's start with the lede:

The path to victory in an Oklahoma election goes through the pews of the state’s evangelical churches. And while the number of self-proclaimed evangelicals has declined in recent years, it remains one of the state’s largest voting blocs and is instrumental in deciding everything from the result of state questions to Oklahoma’s seven presidential electoral votes.
As a part of America’s Bible Belt — if not the buckle — Oklahoma’s likely voting population on Nov. 8 is estimated to be 55 percent evangelical, according to SoonerPoll’s analysis of likely voters.

According to a pollster quoted by The Oklahoman, the Bible Belt state has a total of 1.1 million voters expected to participate in the Nov. 8 general election. That includes "over a half million people identifying as evangelical."

Apparently — and amazingly — none of those evangelical voters were available for comment for the newspaper's story. That is, unless you count the Republican congressman quoted toward the end. He, presumably, will vote for himself.

Then again, if you were writing a story about giraffes at the zoo, would you actually quote any of the giraffes at the zoo? I mean, really. 


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Atheist ranks aren't solid, even in politics, says an eyebrow-raising RNS piece

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Atheists differ strongly on views of religion, of themselves, even what group to join; Richard Dawkins famously compared organizing atheists to herding cats. But I'll confess that I never thought of political differences also -- not until I read a new story from the Religion News Service.

The article is couched in terms of the presidential race -- as almost every American news story this season seems to be -- but have patience. It's a fresh approach to a little-reported facet of religious (or non-religious) life.

RNS veteran Kimberly Winston starts with the event that may have gotten her attention: a video by atheist blogger Hemant Mehta. He gets pretty strident in his opposition to Trump and to whoever supports him:

"I don’t want a president who couldn’t even explain evolution. I don’t want a president who can’t tell fact from fiction and seems to believe anything someone tells him on Twitter," Mehta says in a recent You Tube video that has garnered a lot of attention in atheist corners.
"If I wanted to hear people whose best evidence for their belief is, ‘Well, some people have said,’ then I’d go to church."
So, Mehta, best known as "The Friendly Atheist"  on his popular blog, will vote for Hillary Clinton — and he spends more than seven minutes trying to persuade other atheists to do the same because, he believes, she — a lifelong Methodist — is the only candidate who shares their core values of separation of church and state, LGBT equality and science-based education.

Winston then reveals what may surprise: Despite their commitment to pluralism and liberal politics, Democrats cannot expect a bloc vote from atheists.  "For some, the choice is not clear," the story says of the 2016 race.


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Yes, we read that viral story on reporters #Biased against Trump. Here are five key thoughts ...

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"This Washington Post piece is worthy of some love," said a friend who sent me the link.

"By all means, grab it," said GetReligion editor Terry Mattingly when I shared it with our team.

Both my friend and tmatt recognized that this story is likely to resonate with GetReligion readers, even if it doesn't have a direct religion angle. 

I'm talking about the Post's Style section feature this week on #Biased political reporters who don't hold back their true feelings (read: negative feelings) about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The Post's lede:

News reporters are supposed to keep their opinions out of the stories they write and air. Twitter, it seems, is another realm entirely.
With the political campaigns staggering into their final days, mainstream reporters otherwise obligated to objectivity — or at least a reasonably balanced, non-argumentative account of events — have taken to Twitter to unburden themselves of their apparently true feelings about the race.
The primary target of their derision and general snark: Donald Trump.
Trump was “really just asking for it with this venue,” tweeted New York Times political reporter Alex Burns the other day, when Trump gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pa. “Like a losing caucus candidate speaking in Waterloo, IA.”
Over news that Trump held a rally in Bucks County, Pa., outside Philadelphia, wherein Trump pledged to put “our miners back to work,” Burns commented, “Like going to Manhattan and pledging to defend sugar subsidies. Really great,” he tweeted.
Burns has had plenty of company in the dump-on-Trump arts. Michael Hirsh, national editor of Politico’s magazine, let fly after a colleague confessed his exhaustion with covering the Republican nominee. “The entire nation needs a vacation from a certain person. #LetItEnd,” Hirsh tweeted, apparently referring to Trump.
His Politico colleague Ben White offered his own one-word take on news that Trump had used donors’ money to buy copies of his book “Art of the Deal”: #scampaign,” he tweeted.
Editors have long tried to keep reporters’ opinions out of stories by excising them from unpublished copy. But social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook give scribes a direct and unfiltered publishing platform, enabling them to address thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers without a meddlesome editor standing in the way.


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Gay Muslims: This RNS feature offers one-sided coverage of a retreat in South Africa

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Gay Muslims are media-sexy these days, especially since Omar Mateen opened fire on a gay nightclub in Orlando in June. With its feature on the annual Inner Circle retreat in South Africa, the Religion News Service avidly joins the journalism pack.

Typical of many social-issues articles these days -- as with The Associated Press on Russia's expulsion of a pro-gay missionary -- the piece is written entirely from the viewpoint of the subjects. Not only about what they think, but how they feel, how they perceive non-gay society, how they interpret their holy texts.

In other words, the story covers one side of a debate and one side only. Example:

Cape Town-based Imam Muhsin Hendricks founded The Inner Circle 20 years ago in his garage as a safe space for queer Muslims. He now sees the annual gathering as a refuge for those who feel ostracized by LGBT communities because of their Muslim faith and shunned by Muslim communities because of their sexual orientations or gender identities.
"Tomorrow will be very emotional," Hendricks said before the closing ceremony at the end of a busy week. "People are already suffering withdrawal symptoms and separation anxiety because now they have to go back to these horrible contexts, and here was such a beautiful space of acceptance and love. They’re going to miss that."
The "beautiful space" Hendricks cultivates each year has much to do with the scenery and camaraderie, but also with the legal and social environment in which the retreat is held.

The Inner Circle gathered 125 LGBT Muslims and their allies from around Africa. They talk out anxieties, analyze issues and share ideas for coping. They sprinkle their quotes with terms like Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, patriarchy and "hate agenda." They prefer the term "queer," although the article never really says why.


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Climate change will heat up West Africa's religious conflicts -- and a whole lot more

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Climate change will heat up West Africa's religious conflicts -- and a whole lot more

Africa presents a host of formidable problems that limit quality coverage by Western -- and in particular, American -- news outlets. That means there's a gaping hole in the information needed to understand in significant depth Africa's huge role in global social changes and conflicts.

Some of the problems are physical; the continent's colossal size and relatively poor transportation and communications infrastructures, for example.

But some are attitudinal. Press freedoms overall are more limited in Africa in line with the continent's generally less than stellar political profile

Close to home, Americans also have been shown, repeatedly, to favor domestic over international news. And those of us who do pay closer attention to foreign stories tend to prefer those originating in nations with which we have greater historic, geographic and cultural affinity, or substantial national involvement -- which is to say, Europe, the Middle East and, increasingly, Latin America.

What coverage there is of Africa tends to concentrate on the catastrophic -- civil war, terrorism, Christian-Muslim religious conflict, poverty, disease, government corruption and African migrants desperately trying to flee their homelands for Europe.

Here's a sampling of journalistic, think tank and academic pieces that address why Africa coverage is below par. There's a lot here, so read them at your leisure. Click here, and here. And here or, finally, here.

Now, let's narrow our scope to just one region, Africa's sub-Saharan west.


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Breaking news: Facebook and politics don't mix — and yes, there's a holy ghost here

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Newspaper headline writers face a big challenge.

They must boil down a story — often a complicated one — into a few words in a tight space.

From personal experience, some of my least favorites to write are one-column, three-line headlines at, say, 36-point type. I didn't take out my pica pole (because I don't own one anymore) to measure the exact size of such a headline on the front page of today's Dallas Morning News, but I'm guessing it's in that ballpark.

I'm talking about the headline on the social media story at the bottom right.

The headline is:

Politics,
Facebook
don't mix

If you've ever been on Facebook, I know what you're thinking: That's not exactly breaking news. Except that it is.

The Morning News story reports on a new study — and actually, the headline writer does a nice job of nailing the key point:


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On abortion, last Trump-Hillary debate was no contest, saith the Washington Post

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How can you tell the viewpoint of a book or movie? Common wisdom says it's usually in the longest, most eloquent speech of the story.

I don’t pretend to know the innermost thoughts of anyone at the Washington Post. But with its sort-of news article on the state of the anti-abortion movement after the last Trump-Hillary debate, it could sure look that way.

The article reports the disarray of the anti-abortion movement after that debate. Donald Trump's assertion that later-term abortion requires doctors to "rip the baby out of the womb" has dismayed pro-lifers and, they fear, set back their painstaking progress:

Earlier this year, he suggested that women who have abortions should be punished, a position he later reversed. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said in a recent interview with the New Yorker that the remark was "a great example of him just undoing decades of work where we worked really hard."
And Wednesday, in a nationally televised debate, he criticized his opponent for wanting women to have access to a procedure in which, he said, doctors "rip the baby out of the womb . . . just prior to the birth" — a crude description of abortions that he claimed occur late in pregnancy.
"Politically, we’re on defense," said Eric Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League. "There are some really serious things at stake in this election, and we’ve seen the legislation we fought hard for being rolled back by the Supreme Court."

First, some praise for the Post. It gets deeper into the pro-life movement than any secular news story I've ever seen. It quotes veterans like Eric Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, and Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America. And it shows some respect, with a lack of bias adjectives and sarcasm quotes.


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