Social Media

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'Prayer shaming' -- The New York Daily News jumps in with both feet after San Bernardino

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It was about noon Tuesday -- Pacific time -- when news of yet another mass shooting started hitting the news. This time it was in a facility for the disabled in San Bernardino, Calif. 

Of course, this produced the same sickening it’s-now-happening-every-week feeling that Americans keep getting in their gut. We followed the sounds of the cop cars racing through the streets, the press conferences by the local police chief and wishes of anger, disbelief and prayers emanating from Twitterland.

Except that something really interesting happened on Twitter that placed the blame for the whole mass-shootings trend not on the shooters but on those who prayed for their victims. I’ll let the Atlantic describe what happened next in a story headlined “Prayer Shaming:”

Directly after a mass shooting, in the minutes or hours or days between the first trickle of news and when police find a suspect or make arrests, it is very difficult to know what to do. Some people demand political action, like greater gun control; others call for prayer. In the aftermath of a violent shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday, in which at least 14 victims are reported to have died, people with those differing reactions quickly turned against one another.

The story showed a compilation of reactions from Twitter, contrasting Hillary Clinton’s “I refuse to accept this as normal. We must take action to stop gun violence now. -- H” with vapid comments from GOP presidential candidates offering “thoughts and prayers” for the victims.

No doubt Clinton got the media zeitgeist right on this one. The Atlantic continued:


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Washington Post goes inside ISIS propaganda machine (with near zero interest in message)

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I was about halfway through the latest Washington Post news feature on life inside the Islamic State -- "Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine" -- when something hit me.

The Post team had produced a fascinating and haunting piece about the ISIS teams that crank out its propaganda, while focusing only on the hellish or heavenly images in the videos. Apparently the words that define the messages contained in all of this social-media material are completely irrelevant.

This is rather strange, considering the meaning of the word "propaganda," as defined in your typical online dictionary:

prop·a·gan·da ... noun
1. derogatory information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

After 20-plus years of teaching mass communications and journalism, trust me when I say that I know that we live in a visual, emotional age. The Post article does a great job of describing the care given to the images and the music that are helping define the Islamic State for both its converts and enemies.

But are the words that define the visual symbols completely irrelevant? Why ignore what the voices and texts are saying about the goals and teachings of the caliphate?

I can only think of one reason: Quoting the content of the propaganda would require the reporters and editors at the Post to deal with the twisted, radicalized version of Islam that ISIS leaders are promoting, it would mean dealing with the content of the state's theology (as opposed to its political ideology, alone). Ignore the words and you can continue to ignore the religion element in this story.

OK, that's my main point. I also want to stress that this is a must-read story, even with this massive Allah-shaped hole in its content.


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The New Yorker does amazing profile of former Westboro Church rising star

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It’s been three years ago this month that the bad girl of the Westboro Church crowd deserted the group with her sister. This month, the New Yorker came out with a huge piece on how and why she left. The lead photo shows Megan Phelps-Roper posed in something with black straps with a tiny nose ring in one nostril. Obviously something’s changed big time.

We've reported on Westboro before, sometimes in the context of whether to cover their bizarre antics. One doesn’t decide to leave such a famous group – and one’s own family -- lightly, especially when you’ve been picketing the funerals of AIDS victims since age 5 and giving interviews since age 11. And lo and behold, we find that it was Twitter, of all things, that eased Phelps-Roper out the door.

From the middle of the story:

Phelps-Roper first considered leaving the church on July 4, 2012. She and (her sister) Grace were in the basement of another Westboro family’s house, painting the walls. The song “Just One,” by the indie folk group Blind Pilot—a band that C.G. had recommended—played on the stereo. The lyrics seemed to reflect her dilemma perfectly: “And will I break and will I bow / if I cannot let it go?” Then came the chorus: “I can’t believe we get just one.” She suddenly thought, What if Westboro had been wrong about everything? What if she was spending her one life hurting people, picking fights with the entire world, for nothing? “It was, like, just the fact that I thought about it, I had to leave right then,” she said. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.”  …


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Spot the religion ghosts in story about homeless man's attack on actress Pauley Perrette?

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So, news consumers, which of the following two news story lines do you find the most poignant?

(1) A Hollywood star is mugged by a mysterious homeless man who threatens to kill her.

(2) A Hollywood star who does regular volunteer work with a homeless ministry -- perhaps linked to her church -- is mugged by a homeless man who threatens to kill her.

Now, the USA Today story about this incident involving Pauley Perrette does hint at the religious ghosts in this event. It also included a photo of the essay the actress posted in social media about the incident. That text contains several faith references. We will come back to that in a moment.

Anyway, here is how the story begins:

NCIS actress Pauley Perrette, who plays the show's Goth crime lab tech Abby Scuito, had a real-life scare Thursday in Los Angeles. A "psychotic homeless man" jumped her on the street outside her home and punched her in the face several times.
"I almost died tonight," she wrote on Twitter. "Tonight was awful, life changing and I'm only grateful to be alive."
Perrette recounted the incident in detail in an essay, which she photographed and attached to her post. In it, she said the man kept telling her his name (William) and that he was going to kill her. "I was alone, terrified and trapped," she said, grateful he hadn't dragged her to a empty garage nearby. "I knew if he got me in there, I was dead."

And here is how it ends:


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This is not a news story! But, alas, we are likely to see more brews coverage about it

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This is not a news story! But, alas, we are likely to see more brews coverage about it

It's the question that drives editors crazy in this age of click-bait media: Why do some stories go viral, while others do not?

How about viral news stories in which there is little or no evidence that there is actually a story to be reported in the first place?

I'm talking, of course, about the spew your liquid caffeine on your keyboard levels of media attention dedicated to the Starbucks hates Christmas story that broke out this week, after the usual craziness in social-media land. See the post by our own James Davis with the pun-tastic headline, "Red Cup Diaries: Mainstream media cover Starbucks' Christmas brew-haha." Apparently, there is some kind of pay-cable reference in that naughty headline, too, but that went over my head.

On Facebook, I offered this mini-rant:

Is it acceptable for me to be very upset that millions of Xians think that it's already Christmas and we haven't even started Nativity Lent yet? I mean, who runs their churches, the god of the local mall?

The graphic at the top of this post, passed along by the edgy and hilarious graphic novelist Doug TenNapel, says it all.

At least, I thought it said it all, until M.Z. "GetReligionista emeritus" Hemingway, now with The Federalist, went old-school GetReligion on this mess in a piece that ran under this headline: "Nobody Is Actually Upset About The Starbucks Cup. Stop Saying Otherwise." MZ did her thing, but then turned this piece into some completely different -- making it must reading for journalists facing the challenge of finding valid pre-Christmas stories to cover this year (and every year, come to think of it). Her piece opened with this summary:


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Red Cup Diaries: Mainstream media cover Starbucks' Christmas brew-haha

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So this Christian guy online aims a camera at his face and says that coffee cups show Starbucks "hates Jesus."

Can you say click-bait? There go those religious crazies again. Just the kind of story that mainstream media like to pounce on, eh?

Except, to my surprise, most didn’t this time. Instead, they just covered it, pro and con, and looked for facts.

Our story starts with Joshua Feuerstein, a former evangelical pastor based in Arizona. Feuerstein saw Starbucks' new cups for the Christmas season -- plain red with the company's green mermaid trademark -- and freaked.

"Do you realize that Starbucks wanted to take Christ and Christmas off of their brand-new cups?" the fast-talking minister says in a video.  He boasted that he entered one of their coffee shops and told a barista his name was "Merry Christmas," forcing the worker to write the phrase on his cup.

He chortles:

So guess, what, Starbucks? I tricked you into putting "Merry Christmas" on your cup. And I'm challenging all great Americans and Christians around this great nation: Go into Starbucks and take your own coffee selfie. And then I challenge you to not only share this video so that the word gets out, but let's start start a movement, and let's call it, I dunno, "#MerryChristmasStarbucks," and I know that by sharing this video, and getting other Christians to do it, well …


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KHOU takes a quick, and sadly typical, trip into another public classroom culture war

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Rare is the week in which your GetReligionistas do not receive some kind of note from a reader pointing us toward a news report in which there are claims that conservative Christians have suffered some kind of discrimination at the hands of the agents of "political correctness," usually public-school officials.

It's pretty clear that the correspondents are primarily upset about the contents of the story, as opposed to the efforts of journalists to cover it. In other words, these readers want GetReligion to publicize or protest THIS CASE, as opposed to critique the coverage.

Now, don't get me wrong. Often the coverage of these stories is pretty lousy, and that's usually just as true in alternative "conservative" media as it is in the mainstream press.

The basic problem is one that reporters face all the time: Once the conflict begins, public officials tend to stop answering questions and hand things over to their public-relations teams. This leaves journalists with quotes from one side of the story -- the angry activists -- and that's that. Some journalists turn this around and only quote the public officials, thus assuming that the people complaining about discrimination are totally out of line and have no facts on their side.

A classic Catch-22.

Consider this recent story from KHOU about an all-too-typical conflict in a public-school classroom in Katy, Texas:

A Katy seventh grader has some strong accusations. She says her teacher asked the class to deny God exists.


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Fighting Boko Haram: Media accounts tell more about the war than the enemy

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I'm glad that mainstream media are keeping our attention on the ongoing tragedy of Nigeria and Boko Haram. But not everyone does it equally well -- and some of the better-known outfits, not as well as you'd expect.

The Nigerian military has resumed raids on the Islamist guerrilla group, rescuing hundreds of women and children; it has issued a "Wanted" poster of the top 100 leaders in the group; and an international task force is mustering for a new round of attacks on the militants.

All this is in multiple reports, but none of them has it all. And few offer background on the warped version of Islam that underlies Boko Haram's basic assumptions.

Some of the reports repeat the horrendous numbers: thousands dead, 2.1 million refugees since 2009. Those are vital stats to remember. But the reports also need to keep plain the ideology of Boko Haram.

Take yesterday's "Big Story" in the much-quoted Associated Press:

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) -- Nigerian troops have rescued 338 captives, almost all children and women, from Boko Haram camps in a northeastern forest, the military said Wednesday.
Thirty extremists were killed Tuesday in attacks on two camps on the fringes of the Islamic insurgents' holdout in Sambisa Forest, according to a Defense Headquarters statement on social media.
Separately troops ambushed and killed four suspects on a bombing mission in northeastern Adamawa state, it said. Hundreds of people have died in suicide bombing attacks mainly targeting mosques and markets in recent months.

Did you notice the attribution? A "Defense Headquarters statement on social media." And no one was directly quoted or even named. This despite the fact that the much smaller African website Sahara Reporters did get a name -- Army spokesperson Colonel SK Usman -- although apparently only on a press release.


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Is European-style, opinion-marbled journalism playing a bigger role in American news?

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I'm often frustrated by one of American journalism's most cherished, but abused, conceits. 

I'm referring, broadly, to "he-said she-said" journalism (HSSS, from here on), the standard news format of contrasting statements meant to convey a sense of fair-mindedness no matter how much stronger, by which I mean believable, one statement is compared to another. It's just so easy to cheat and hide bias and a lack of fairness, even while appearing to do the opposite.

I'm sure you've read an HSSS story with some quote that had you mumbling to yourself, "That's utter crap." Or perhaps you've worded it more strongly? I sure have.

We're taught HSSS in college Journalism 101. It's the mark of "objectivity" (yes, those are scare quotes meant to convey skepticism), the promised redemption of American journalism that never really was and never will be.

Of course, we are talking about a mythical objectivity that represents a kind of blank-slate mental state, as opposed to "objectivity" defined (classic work here, "The Elements of Journalism") in terms of professional standards of accuracy, fairness and respect for the many voices involved in public debates. Those kinds of professional standards are exactly what GetReligion keeps trying to defend.

I struggle with poorly executed HSSS journalism just as "omniscient anonymous voice" journalism bugs GetReligion editor Terry Mattingly. Click here if you need a refresher on his views. He is primarily opposed to hard news newspaper and wire-service journalists -- as opposed to the authors of magazine essays and opinion pieces -- using massive amounts of information and opinion without giving readers any clear indication of where all that material is coming from.

i do not disagree with Terry on that. The raw material leading to journalistic conclusions should be spelled out. Think of it as connecting the dots. Think of it as simple honesty.


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