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In “The Jihadist Next Door,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Andrea Elliott’s Sunday cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Elliott turns her laser focus on the journey of one American youngster who decides to join a Somali terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.
We have a very complex and ugly story developing right now down in Haiti, one than calls up the demons of all the tensions that exist in that nation between Americans and Haitians and, it must be stressed, between competing religious groups inside Haiti.
This is a case where I know, in a few days, GetReligion readers are going to send me URLs for this Orthodox story when the mainstream media in America get around to covering it. Thus, I think I’ll go ahead and try to get ahead of the curve.
I am always amazed by the amount of information that we receive day after day, week after week, from faithful, and even faithless, GetReligion readers. We would be dead in the water if not for the many interesting URLs that people send us for “haunted” stories in their local media.
I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to report on the relief and recovery efforts in Haiti, much less manage or participate in them. I keep reading the news and feeling sicker and sicker. One of the things that struck me about personal emails or messages out of Haiti is how they all emphasize the religious lives of the survivors. And it’s nice to see that much of the mainstream media coverage is touching on that as well.
Journalists in the mainstream press often talk about covering both sides of a story fairly and accurately. I can say “Amen” to that, even while acknowledging that it is rare to cover a major story that only has two sides. Nevertheless, the key is for journalists to keep seeking multiple points of view, especially when covering a subject as complicated as religion.
Haiti is a very complex, but intense, culture when it comes to religion. Thus, the more time that passes after this killer earthquake, the more journalists will be surrounded by stories linked to the faith of the locals and the faith of those who pour into the country to offer help.
I do not know about you, but I have been overwhelmed by the coverage of the earthquake in Haiti. I feel like I have been stranding underneath a digital waterfall of pain, trying to make some sense out of all of the details, trying to see the larger picture.
The Orthodox church that I attend is part of the ancient Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese, which means that its ancient liturgical language is Arabic, even though our pan-Orthodox congregation uses English about 99 percent of the time.
