Journalism

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On the religion beat: Alma mater hails New York Times and Washington Post alums

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On the religion beat: Alma mater hails New York Times and Washington Post alums

Three important women working the religion beat right now all graduated from the same small college within a span of six years.

Coincidence? Perhaps not when their alma mater is Wheaton College, the elite and devout evangelical campus whose magazine's current issue surveys a dozen alums in media careers.

(That's Wheaton of Illinois, not the Massachusetts school of the same name where religious roots are long distant. Disclosure: The Guy's late wife Joan was a 1961 Wheaton graduate, journalist and college journalism teacher.)

The three: Ruth Graham, '02 (no relation to the famed evangelist) was hired by The New York Times last year to report on "religion, faith and values" out of church-saturated Dallas. The influential daily bragged that Graham forms "a powerhouse team" with the Washington bureau's Elizabeth Dias, '08, a "faith and politics" reporter since 2018. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, also '08, joined the Washington Post's equally talented religion crew in 2015, based in New York where husband Jason (class of '07) is a Times editor.

Outsiders may assume that seriously religious colleges inculcate a narrow view of life and of religion. But The Guy observes that good liberal arts education, as much or even more at a religious school than today's secularized campuses, does not wall off students from a broad outlook. Moreover, the best way to understand any and all religions is immersion in a specific believing community, whether through education or personal experience.

It figures that a Wheaton graduate will comprehend the influence of religion on individuals and societies with sophistication. Whatever their private beliefs, nobody can claim these Wheaton alums show religious favoritism. If anything, they're more likely to lift rocks on evangelical embarrassments thanks to good sources.

Perhaps employers in the East Coast cultural bubble have come to realize that evangelicalism is the nation's largest and most dynamic religious sector, and that "Wheaties" are well-equipped to interpret its vast complexities. Just so, the media scouted for writers of Catholic background during the Second Vatican Council e.g. John Cogley at the Times, writer John Elson and Rome correspondent Robert Kaiser at Time and Kenneth Woodward at Newsweek.


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Yearenders-palooza: What do a swarm of religion websites want you to read about 2020 news?

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Yearenders-palooza: What do a swarm of religion websites want you to read about 2020 news?

Once upon a time, it was normal for news organizations to produce lists of the Top 10 stories of the year, usually with the emphasis on their city, region or nation. Others focused on the concerns of their readers or the unique editorial viewpoint of the publication. Some focused on the whole world or a specific kind of news in the world.

That was then. This year, I can’t even find a hard-news Top 10 list at The Associated Press mega-promotional page for “The Year in Review.” If I missed that list somewhere, please let me know.

Here at GetReligion, we have published several items looking back and also looking forward:

* Of course the pandemic was top 2020 religion-news story: But which COVID-19 story?

* So what went wrong in #2020, other than that whole coronavirus pandemic thing?

* Final #2020 podcast: The year when religion news went viral, and that was a bad thing

* New year and many old issues: Catholic storylines journalists need to keep an eye on in 2021

* Pondering 'Things to Come,' with help from savvy thumbsuckers and backgrounders

We will have a collection of Bobby Ross, Jr., items on 2020 — from several different angles — this coming Monday.

What happened to the old Top 10 list format?

It got lost, of course, in the need to point niche readers toward specific links of topical news, features and commentaries, hoping that they will click, click, click there way through a specific website’s offerings.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. After all, I just hit readers with a blitz of #2020 GetReligion URLs.

Now, let me point readers toward lots of other features of this kind elsewhere, all with specialty religion-news hooks. If I missed some good ones, please let me know in our comments pages.

First, there is “Our best religion stories from a terrible year” at Religion News Service. Summary:

It’s no news that 2020 will go down as one of the worst years in recent memory. But the triple-whammy of pandemic, economic crisis and demonstrations for racial justice that left many Americans beleaguered and angry also yielded some inspiring and profound stories of faith and spiritual connection. Here are 11 stories by our staff and frequent contributors that captured moments of resilience and perseverance, and even a few moments of celebration.

Looking ahead, there is this: “RNS reporters on the big stories they expect to cover in 2021.” As a sample, here is the item from veteran religion-news scribe Bob Smietana:


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New year and many old issues: Catholic storylines journalists need to keep an eye on in 2021

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I am not a very good prognosticator. Yet this is the time of year that forces many journalists to do just that.

What will 2021 bring? That’s the big question following a 2020 that will forever remain a year where the world was held hostage by a pandemic. It was also a year where we had a combative presidential election and a reawakened social justice movement that brought our divided politics out into our streets. Could any of us have accurately predicted what 2020 would have been like? I don’t think so.

That hasn’t stopped many from trying to predict what next year will be like. The vaccine could bring with it prosperity and freedom again, but a new strain of the virus has forced much of Europe into lockdown once again. A lot of what 2021 will look like — in terms of religion and faith — will depend on the virus and how politicians choose to handle it.

It’s true that the pandemic exposed all kinds of issues in our society. The journalism that is tasked with objectively reporting these issues so that citizens can make informed decisions failed us miserably, a trend that was years in the making, but peaked in 2020 with the presidential election. My post from this past June highlighted this extremely difficult realization for me after more than 20 years in the business. Here’s the main thrust of that post:

News coverage — be it about politics, culture or religion — is largely made up of crimes (in the legal sense) or lapses in judgement (in a moral one). But the news media has changed in the Internet age, primarily because of social media. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, to name just three, allows users — everyday people — to pump out content. That content can take many forms — from benign observations to what’s called hot takes — for all to read and see.

Truth, fact checking and context are not important. What matters are likes and followers. What we have now is something some have called “The Great Awokening” and it appears to have forever transformed our political discourse and the journalism that tries to report on it.

Mainstream news organizations, in their quest for clicks amid hope of figuring out a new business model, now mirror the content we all see on social media platforms. Newsrooms loaded with a younger generation who grew up in this environment have imposed their own woke politics as their morality thermometer.

The news media both underplayed COVID-19 and then hyped it, only to pause their concern in the wake of the George Floyd protests. For a list of 2020 media misses, check out this roundup.

That’s in the past now, but we will indeed be talking about 2020 for years and decades to come. Instead of trying to predict the future, the aim of this post is to advise mainstream journalists on what the major Catholic news storylines will be over the next 12 months — in the United States and the world.


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Ties that bind Joe Biden and Cardinal Gregory: How will Catholic issues shape the news?

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Politics and religion can make for strange bedfellows. We know that from the past four years and the cozy alliance President Donald Trump forged with conservative Christians.

Evangelicals and traditional Catholics in large numbers voted for Trump over the last two elections, many with enthusiasm and others with great reluctance. The fallout from that voter trend will be felt for years to come.

President-elect Joe Biden is the nation’s second Catholic president, the first since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Biden didn’t run away from his faith in 2020. Instead, he embraced it.

Biden’s brand of Catholicism resonated with the mainstream press and many voters. The election now over, how Biden navigates the complicated world of the church’s hierarchy will be a big storyline.

There will be a general sense of calm in news coverage once Biden starts his term. That means the typical honeymoon period offered every president (with the exclusion of Donald Trump) will stretch far beyond the first 100 days.

How religion is covered in this climate — and Catholicism specifically — by mainstream newsrooms will affect many news stories. Look for stories that celebrate any and all Catholic images and teachings cited by Biden in support of left-of-center political efforts. There will be a revival on the religious left.

Coverage during recent weeks may serve as a prelude to what’s to come.

Many journalists feel that the press helped elect Trump, offering waves of coverage of his candidacy during the GOP primaries before the 2016 election. This year, the Hunter Biden scandal offered the press a chance to beat up on Joe Biden and we could have seen a repeat of 2016. Instead, the press ignored the scandal — with help from Big Tech — and blamed it on Russian disinformation.

With the election now over, we have learned that there was an investigation underway and that this topic would have been fair game for coverage.

You don’t need to be a Trump fan to see that many professionals in America’s press have gone astray. Many journalists are now rationalizing an advocacy brand of journalism, instead of doing what they traditionally have been paid to do — report the facts and give readers and viewers unbiased reporting.

How will these trends affect coverage of Biden’s faith and Catholicism in this country?


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Hong Kong media titan Jimmy Lai jailed: Do journalists realize he's an outspoken Catholic?

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If you have followed events in Hong Kong for several decades, then you know this name — Jimmy Lai.

Journalists certainly should know that name, since this free-swinging billionaire founded Apple Daily, one of the city’s most popular newspapers. Using his clout as a businessman and as a publisher, he has been one of the most outspoken defenders of human rights in the face of crackdowns by Communist authorities.

One other thing: Lai is concerned about freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. There’s a logical reason for that, since he is an outspoken Catholic and one of Hong Kong’s best known Christian leaders. See this recent Catholic News Agency story: “Catholic Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai — ‘The Lord is suffering with me’.”

Surely journalists know that Lai wears several hats during pro-democracy protests — a role that has landed him in jail, without bail. To state this in American terms, Lai is trying to promote both halves of the First Amendment, since freedom of conscience affects both the press and religious institutions. That has been obvious during all the hymn-singing (click here for Julia Duin post on this topic) in Hong Kong protests.

Don’t elite journalists know all of that?

It would appear that this is not the case, considering a faith-free story that ran recently at The New York Times with this headline: “Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong Media Tycoon, Is Denied Bail on Fraud Charge — Mr. Lai, who founded the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was ordered jailed until April.” Here is some crucial material at the top of the story, which has a Hong Kong dateline:

The detention of Mr. Lai, 72, came a day after three leading Hong Kong activists were sentenced to prison for participating in a protest last year, the latest blow to the territory’s pro-democracy movement.

The Chinese government imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong at the end of June, and Mr. Lai became the law’s most high-profile target in August, when he was arrested along with his two sons and four executives of his media company, Next Digital.

But the new fraud charges are unrelated to the security law. Rather, they accuse Mr. Lai of violating the terms of the lease of Next Digital’s headquarters, the public broadcaster RTHK reported.

This is a classic, and rather obvious, example of what GetReligion writers have, since Day 1, called a “ghost” — as in a crucial religion-news hook that is mysteriously missing in an important story.


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India's 'love jihad' interfaith marriage story may be political spin -- but its effects are real

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I don’t recall ever watching it but I do remember the brouhaha that erupted within the Jewish community when the short-lived TV sitcom “Bridget Loves Bernie” debuted in 1972.

Despite the show’s audience popularity it was cancelled after just one season because of the high-profile flak it drew from establishment American Jewish community leaders who objected to the show’s premise — an interfaith romance between Bridget, a Catholic, and Bernie, a Jew. (Neither of its stars, Meredith Baxter and David Birney, were Jews.)

Given the entertainment media’s level of religious, racial, and gender mixing and matching today, “Bridget and Bernie” probably strikes you as pretty tame. However, the show’s timing couldn’t have been worse; the American Jewish community was just starting to publicly debate, with alarm, its growing intermarriage rate.

Leading Orthodox, Conservative and even theologically liberal Reform rabbis lambasted the show as an insult to one of Judaism’s most sacrosanct values, marrying within the tribe, which was particularly strong in the decades after the Holocaust. Boycotts were organized and meetings were held with the TV execs who backed the show. The radical, and sometimes violent, Jewish Defense League issued threats.

Yet in the end, “Bridget Loves Bernie” turned out to be a Jewish-American harbinger. Today, an estimated 50 percent-plus of American Jews marry non-Jews, though it’s still relatively rare within traditionalist Orthodox circles..

But as scandalous as “Bridget Loves Bernie” was in its day, it pales in comparison to the controversy now engulfing the contemporary Indian TV drama “A Suitable Boy.”

That’s because the show — which became available to American audiences via the streaming service AcornTV today (Monday, Dec. 7) — features a love story between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman. For India’s fervent Hindu nationalist politicians, that constitutes “love jihad” — a calculated attack by Muslims on the nation’s Hindu heritage.

In India, “A Suitable Boy,” a BBC production, was broadcast by Netflix. And even though the platform has a relatively small subscription base there it was enough to create quite a stir.

Here’s the top of the New York Times piece that alerted me to this story just before Thanksgiving.


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Parts of pope's new book may be woke, but news coverage hasn't told the whole story

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While most of you were either shopping for your Thanksgiving meal or preparing it, Pope Francis was busy promoting his new book.

To be fair, the pontiff wasn’t doing exactly that in the same way as other authors, who typically make TV appearances and do book signings at your local bookstore.

Instead, the pope was getting the word out in other ways. The book, titled Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, was excerpted in the Italian daily La Repubblica, a left-wing newspaper not shy about highlighting the pope’s more woke leanings over the past few years.

The excerpt earned widespread media coverage and praise. The Associated Press, in its Nov. 23 news account after attaining an advance copy, ran with the headline: “Pope book backs George Floyd protests, blasts virus skeptic.”

The key to this story is that this book comes at a time when the Catholic church is deeply divided along doctrinal and political lines. How was this issue handled? Here’s how the story opens:

Pope Francis is supporting demands for racial justice in the wake of the U.S. police killing of George Floyd and is blasting COVID-19 skeptics and media organizations that spread their conspiracies in a new book penned during the Vatican’s coronavirus lockdown.

In “Let Us Dream,” Francis also criticizes populist politicians who whip up rallies in ways reminiscent of the 1930s, and the hypocrisy of “rigid” conservative Catholics who support them. But he also criticizes the forceful downing of historic statues during protests for racial equality this year as a misguided attempt to “purify the past.”

The 150-page book, due out Dec. 1, was ghost-written by Francis’ English-language biographer, Austen Ivereigh, and at times the prose and emphasis seems almost more Ivereigh’s than Francis.’ That’s somewhat intentional — Ivereigh said Monday he hopes a more colloquial English-speaking pope will resonate with English-speaking readers and believers.

At its core, “Let Us Dream” aims to outline Francis’ vision of a more economically and environmentally just post-coronavirus world where the poor, the elderly and weak aren’t left on the margins and the wealthy aren’t consumed only with profits.

It should be noted that the news story deals mostly with Floyd and the pandemic because the press release issued by Simon & Schuster to go with the book that was made available to reporters and reviewers highlighted those sections.

In other words, the press office there knew how to preach to the choir.


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This week's podcast: It isn't 'fake news' to recognize that America remains a divided land

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This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was rather unusual. Instead of focusing on a specific bite of news, or a topic drawing coverage, host Todd Wilken and I spent most of our time discussing a new survey that I truly believe is worthy of coverage.

A key element of this study is the role that “fake news” plays in cleaving America into two warring cultures. However, that omnipresent term really isn’t defined. Apparently, when Americans think about “fake news” we are rather like U.S. Supreme Court justices contemplating pornography — they know it when they see it. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

The key is that “fake news” has become the fightin’ word attached to the many ways in which a rising tide of advocacy media is tearing apart the foundation of American public discourse.

Here at GetReligion, we think that there is more to this than mere political bias. For decades, many — not all — American journalists have struggled to do accurate, fair-minded coverage of religious, moral and cultural issues (think “Kellerism”). This trend has now spread into other parts of American life, leaving far too many citizens, on left and right, locked inside concrete news and entertainment silos. For many citizens, the next step is to embrace conspiracy theories or even dangerous forms of rebellion.

All of these themes show up in the new study, “Democracy in Dark Times,” which is the 2020 edition of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s Survey of American Political Culture series. The team that produced it includes a scholar, sociologist James Davison Hunter, whose works — “Culture Wars,” for example — will be familiar to many GetReligion readers.

Think of it this way: This man wrote a book in 1994, a quarter of a century ago, entitled “Before the Shooting Begins.”

The new study, using terms central to Hunter’s book “To Change the World,” seeks to “understand not just the political weather, but the cultural climate shaping the election as well.” Here is a crucial passage — long, but essential — on the role advocacy media is playing:

The American public’s deep misgivings toward governmental and economic institutions extends to a suspicion of the media. Just over two-thirds (68%) of all Americans agree that “you can’t believe much of what you hear from the mainstream media,” and just under two-thirds (63%) believe that “media distortions and fake news” are a very or extremely serious threat to America.


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What hath Trump wrought? New York Times helps fuel new journalism fires in 2020s

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The New York Times obituary for Seymour Topping, who died Nov. 8 at age 98, accurately summarized the 1969-1986 reign at the newspaper by this No. 2 man with legendary editor A.M. Rosenthal. We're told the team "above all prized high standards of reporting and editing, which demanded fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, political agendas, innuendo and unattributed pejorative quotations."

That was not just a farewell to "Top" but to a fading ideal in American journalism that's steadily supplanted by opinionated and entertaining coverage that wins eyeballs, ears, clicks, digital subscribers -- and profits. Public trust in the news media is eroded to an alarming degree while social media inflame everything, reporters' tweets expose their biases and Donald Trump's attacks accompany media hostility.

This growing trust deficit shapes all aspects of our business, the religion beat included.

A lengthy Times piece Nov. 13 about why 2020 polls were so misleading said Republicans were wary about participating because Trump "frequently told his supporters not to trust the media."

That’s an easy answer. But is suspicion entirely the president's doing? Wholly apart from Trump smears ("the enemy of the American People!"), did mainstream media treatment of the Trump movement, Republicans and political, cultural and religious conservatives sew distrust? What's ahead if Trump succeeds in controlling the GOP and his 73 million voters through 2024?

Vest-pocket history: Starting in 1988 with Rush Limbaugh's outspoken show, conservative talk radio pretty much saved the AM industry. Fox News Channel and MSNBC arrived in 1996, with Fox partially imitating Limbaugh while MSNBC veered ever more leftward, eventually followed by pioneer CNN (founded in 1980). The Times, financially pressed dailies and broadcast networks were tempted toward a more cautious slant.

But with the Trump Era, traditional restraints all but vanished. This advocacy journalism approach — known as “Kellerism,” here at GetReligion — became the norm on coverage of moral and cultural topics in American life.

That brings us to last January's Pew Research Center report "U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided." Media personnel should delve into these data on how 12,043 respondents view 30 varied news outlets.

The Times, so influential among the cultural elite, educators, policy-makers and journalists, exemplifies the concrete news "silos" into which Americans now sequester themselves.


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