Journalism

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Masturbation bill: This isn't fake news, it's parody news — and it doesn't help newspapers' credibility

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Dub this Viagra Bill 2.0.

Although — to be more accurate — this marks at least the fourth time a state lawmaker somewhere in the U.S. has generated a wave of news media coverage with legislation poking fun at anti-abortion forces.

Last time I wrote about this, I pointed out: 

It's a valid story, of course. The issue is whether journalists are willing to do more than lead cheers for her cause.

Fast-forward 13 months, and the lawmaker and the state have changed, but the pesky journalistic issue remains the same.

The latest, mostly one-sided reports emerged over the weekend in Texas: Lone Star State journalists — mimicking their peers in other states — dutifully turned parody legislation into serious headlines. But again, the news organizations largely failed to give the other side a chance to respond. (Please honk if you don't need to be reminded about pro-abortion bias seeping into the news.)

Some of the Texas headlines:

Texas lawmaker files bill that takes aim at men’s health care (Austin American-Statesman)
Texas men would face fine for masturbating, need rectal exam for Viagra under proposed law (Dallas Morning News)
New bill takes aim at men's masturbation habits (Houston Chronicle)

Other news organizations reporting on the bill include the San Antonio Express-News, the Washington Post, BBC News, the Huffington Post and the International Business Times.

The lede from the Houston Chronicle:


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With The New Yorker, you can have your cake and gain insight into flowers and same-sex weddings, too

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If you've followed the religious liberty headlines of recent years, you're familiar with Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., and Barronelle Stutzman of Arlene’s Flowers, in Richland, Wash.

The New Yorker has a piece out this week that references both.

Now, if you're a regular GetReligion reader, you may wonder: Is The New Yorker even news? After all, our journalism-focused website avoids critiquing advocacy reporting and opinion pieces. The answer is that sometimes The New Yorker is news, and other times it isn't.

In this case, it is.

And it's good news. I'm not talking about the subject matter, mind you. I'm referring to the fairness and quality of the journalism.

In a Twitter post, LGBT Map described The New Yorker story as a "helpful overview of the high stakes in this case" (meaning, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case). And the president of Come Reason Ministries characterized it as "a fairly well balanced summary of the legal questions surrounding cake bakers & gay weddings." I agree with both of those tweets.

I'll highlight three things that struck me about this story, which contemplates whether the U.S. Supreme Court might take up the case of either Phillips or Stutzman:


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Why did Reuters (and almost everyone else) miss Pope Francis' all-too-familiar Bible/cellphone quote?

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Your correspondent is neither a prophet nor is he the son of a prophet, but I can muster one small claim to fame in the predictive realm. In 2013, I reported in The Washington Times the rather prophetic utterance of Cardinal Donald Wuerl of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington that the next Pope would have to master social media.

There can be little doubt that the current Pontifex Maximus, the Argentinian-born Pope Francis, has indeed done so, having an estimated 23 million Twitter followers.

Thus, it's certainly news when the tweeting pontiff says, before a congregation of thousands in St. Peter's Square, that it's time to "Love your Bible as you do your cellphone," as the Christian Science Monitor headlined it. The Monitor report indicates it included data from a Reuters dispatch, which was the first I'd seen of the comments:

Pope Francis on Sunday called on people to carry and read the bible with as much dedication as they do their mobile phones.
Speaking to pilgrims in a rain-soaked St. Peter's Square, the 80-year-old pope asked: "What would happen if we treated the bible like we do our mobile phones?"
He continued: "If we turned around to retrieve it when we forgot it? If we carried it with us always, even a small pocket version? If we read God's messages in the bible like we read messages on the mobile phone?"
Francis called the comparison "paradoxical" and said it was meant to be a source of reflection, adding that bible reading would help people resist daily temptations.


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Associated Press story on Wyoming judge is fair enough, but about that 'anti-gay' headline ...

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Pretty nice story, Associated Press.

But the headline? It's less than perfect.

That's my quick assessment of the wire service's coverage of a decision concerning a Wyoming judge who refuses to perform same-sex marriages.

The news report itself is clear and concise. The 740-word piece simply reports the facts. It avoids loaded (read: biased) language.

A big chunk of the opening:

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — A small-town judge who says her religious beliefs prevent her from presiding over same-sex marriages was publicly censured by the Wyoming Supreme Court on Tuesday.
But while the court said her conduct undermines the integrity of the judicial system, it does not warrant removal from the bench. In a 3-2 decision, Justice Kate Fox wrote that Judge Ruth Neely violated judicial conduct code but removing Neely would "unnecessarily circumscribe protected expression."
"Judge Neely shall either perform no marriage ceremonies or she shall perform marriage ceremonies regardless of the couple's sexual orientation," Fox wrote.
Neely has never been asked to perform a same-sex marriage, and Fox said that the case was not about same-sex marriage or the reasonableness of religious beliefs. ...
Neely's case has similarities to legal action against a Kentucky clerk of court jailed briefly in 2015 after refusing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. The case against clerk Kim Davis, a conservative Christian, sparked a national debate over the religious freedom of civil servants versus the civil rights of same-sex couples. Davis ultimately agreed to alter the licenses to remove her name and title. ...
(T)he dissenting justices argued that Neely didn't violate any judicial conduct code. "Wyoming law does not require any judge or magistrate to perform any particular marriage, and couples seeking to be married have no right to insist on a particular official as the officiant of their wedding," Justice Keith Kautz wrote in the dissent that was joined by Justice Michael K. Davis.


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Can anti-Trump U.S. Jews and Muslims put aside historic differences to work together over time?

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Can anti-Trump U.S. Jews and Muslims put aside historic differences to work together over time?

Negative circumstances can sometimes produce a surprisingly positive results. That's the case now with American Jews and Muslims as an outgrowth of the wave of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim acts currently making unwanted headlines.

An increasing number of groups and individuals within the two religious communities -- historically wary of cooperating because of their profound political differences over Israel and the causes of Islamic-inspired terrorism -- have come to each others' assistance in response to the incidents.

If you haven't kept up with this twist, the following stories can bring you up to speed.

This one's from USA Today. Here's a second from NBC News. And here's one from The Los Angeles Times.

It's a step forward when generally estranged communities come to each other's aid. But let's be realistic.

This new-found cooperation does not for a second offset the gravity of the hateful incidents, which have also impacted non-Muslim, non-white immigrants.

Nor does it mean that the cooperation will continue once the current crisis passes, which I certainly hope is soon. I say this because this scenario has played out before.

The 1994 Oslo peace accord signing is one such instance. American Jews and Muslims fervently embraced cooperation then, only to back away from each other when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heated up yet again. Anger and distrust on both sides forced the swift pull back.

So my advice to journalists covering this story is to be careful not to over inflate the strength of this cooperation.


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Of 'MormonLeaks,' intellectual property and The Salt Lake Tribune -- recipe for bias?

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There are, as many people know, two daily newspapers in Salt Lake City, Utah, the state's largest city, its capital city and, yes, world headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often colloquially referred to as the Mormon Church.

One newspaper is the Deseret News, where I served as a national reporter in 2014 and 2015. The LDS Church owns the company that publishes the paper. Many church members in Utah appreciate the Deseret News' coverage and family-friendly orientation. (And as noted when I rejoined the GetReligion team, I do not report on the paper's faith coverage due to my previous association there.)

The other newspaper is The Salt Lake Tribune, now owned by a son of billionaire Jon Huntsman Sr. after years of tumult following the paper's migration from local ownership to being part of a hedge-fund controlled national chain. This newspaper has often run pieces critical of, if not hostile to, the LDS Church, mostly in the opinion pages, but occasionally elsewhere. The Trib's longtime religion reporter, Peggy Fletcher Stack, is an award-winning Godbeat journalist who is very well sourced in the LDS community, as well as among other faith groups in the Beehive State.

But it was another Trib reporter, Christopher Smart, who recently took on a dispute between the Mormon leadership and an independent website called "MormonLeaks," which disseminates its information via Twitter and, until recently, Facebook. The group, headed by Ryan McKnight, a former member of the LDS Church, seeks to make public internal Mormon documents in order to bring "transparency" to the membership. (There's another group with the "Mormon Leaks" name, who assert their data relates to LDS history, not current church operations. These people disavow any association with McKnight and company.)

On March 1, attorneys for Intellectual Reserve Inc., a non-profit LDS Church corporation that owns the copyrights to LDS Church publications and documents, sent a "takedown notice" to McKnight's MormonLeaks group, and one of its hosting sites declaring a leaked document asserted to be copyrighted LDS Church property. The document was reported to be an internal slide presentation for church leadership summarizing why some people quit their membership. 

Sharing these slides online, the letter stated, infringed on that copyright. The hosting firm took the document down, and now the Trib jumped in.


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Scare quotes and factual journalism in Florida: This here is what they call a 'religious liberties' bill

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Yes, there are scare quotes in the Miami Herald's coverage of a fast-tracked religious liberties bill in the Florida Senate.

As regular GetReligion readers know, that is so often the case when the mainstream press reports on such legislation — but not always.

However, we come today not to dwell on the Sunshine State newspaper's sin (we're in a forgiving mood) but to praise the overall quality of the Herald's reporting.

The lede sets the scene:

TALLAHASSEE — Students and teachers in Florida’s public schools would more explicitly have the right to say the Lord’s Prayer, pray to Allah or worship Satan under a highly polarizing measure that’s being fast-tracked through the Florida Senate as the 2017 session begins this week.
Called a “religious liberties” bill, SB 436 is intended to “clarify First Amendment rights of free speech, specifically as they apply to religious expression,” said Sen. Dennis Baxley, a conservative Republican from Ocala who’s driving the measure in the Senate.
“I grew up in an America where you were free to express your faith, and there was no intimidation of whether you could say ‘Jesus’ out loud or not,” Baxley said. “This is where we’ve come: The pendulum has swung so far that there’s been a chilling effect on people of faith of just expressing and being who they are.”
While comments before the Senate Education Committee on Monday heavily emphasized a need to protect Christians, Baxley’s bill would shield students, teachers and school staff of all faiths from religious discrimination — protections already guaranteed through the Florida and U.S. Constitutions, as well as U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

The phrase "called a 'religious liberties' bill" gives the impression that the concept is new to the Herald, when, in fact, that issue was a factor in Donald Trump's surprise election as president. 


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In Dallas Morning News crime narrative, forgiveness feels more philosophical than theological

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Warning: This is a critique in process. The final verdict remains uncertain.

That's because I'm going to highlight an ongoing Dallas Morning News narrative series that launched Sunday with Part One and continued today with Part Two. The next installment is scheduled for Tuesday. I don't know exactly how many total chapters are planned.

But this much is already clear: There seems to be a strong religion angle to this in-depth project. The story focuses on a father whose teenage daughter and her boyfriend plotted 25 years ago to kill his wife — and did — and tried but failed to take his life.

Already, forgiveness has emerged as a major theme of the father's journey. But that angle remains largely unexplored.

"Betrayal" was the banner headline Sunday as the project opened with this dramatic scene:


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Dirty words? Conservatives, liberals and accurate descriptions when reporting on religious freedom

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Everybody loves a sequel, right?

I hope so because this is my third post of the week on the same topic.

But I really believe the information I'm going to share is relevant. Even better, it's at the heart of GetReligion's mission to promote quality news coverage of religion.

Before I get to that, though, please hang with me for just a moment. I need to help everybody who might have missed the first two posts catch up.

1. I began the week with a, shall we say, negative critique of NPR's coverage of the religion freedom issue.

2. But overnight, NPR suddenly "got religion" in a big way, which is to say that Godbeat pro Tom Gjelten tackled the same subject matter in a much better fashion.

My follow-up post gushed all over Gjelten's piece on the religious freedom debate:

Wow!
This latest piece is absolutely fantastic: 1. No scare quotes. 2. No biased language such as "so-called." 3. No favoritism — it clearly explains both sides and fairly represents each side's arguments and concerns.

So why do a third post? Because of the excellent discussion generated by a reader's question about Gjelten's story.


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