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Your weekend think piece: A different take on America's shortage of minority journalists

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For several decades, one of the primary goals of those who run American newsrooms has been (and justifiably so, from my point of view) increasing the number of mainstream journalists who are African-American, Latino, Asian, Native Americans and part of other minority groups, defined by race.

At the same time, there have been less publicized debates -- mostly behind the scenes -- about the need to bring more intellectual and cultural diversity into our newsrooms. As one journalist friend of mine once put it, what's the use of bringing in more African-Americans, Latinos, etc., if they all basically went to the same schools as everyone else and have the same set of beliefs between their ears?

You can see these two issues collide in William McGowan's the much-debated 2003 book, "Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism." He argues that years of diversity training in American newsrooms has actually made them more elitist and narrow, purging many professionals who come from blue-collar and non-urban backgrounds.

Before you write that theory off as conservative whining, what was that statement near the end of the famous New York Times self-study entitled "Preserving Our Readers' Trust (.pdf)"?

Our paper’s commitment to a diversity of gender, race and ethnicity is nonnegotiable. We should pursue the same diversity in other dimensions of life, and for the same reason -- to ensure that a broad range of viewpoints is at the table when we decide what to write about and how to present it.
The executive editor should assign this goal to everyone who has a hand in recruiting.
We should take pains to create a climate in which staff members feel free to propose or criticize coverage from vantage points that lie outside the perceived newsroom consensus (liberal/conservative, religious/secular, urban/suburban/rural, elitist/white collar/blue collar). 

And also: 


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NPR leaves several big holes in report on non-Catholics struggling with Irish schools

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On American shores, attending a private religious school is an expensive privilege.

Such schools only accept certain people and tuition per student easily eats up $5,000 or more a year. My daughter was briefly enrolled in a kindergarten at a classical Catholic school and although we were allowed in on the “Catholic rate” versus the extra $3,000 most non-Catholics were charged, the extras really added up. We’re talking uniforms, mandatory contributions to the school operating fund and required volunteer hours by the parent.

But what if the only school available to you was Catholic? That’s what NPR tried to describe in this broadcast: 

In the U.S., parents who want to give their children a religious education have to pay for it for the most part. In Ireland, it's the opposite -- 92 percent of state schools are run by the Catholic Church. That's even though growing numbers of people in Ireland no longer identify as Catholic. And this is creating new tensions for parents trying to find schools for their kids. Miranda Kennedy has been digging into this from Dublin. ...
MIRANDA KENNEDY, BYLINE: Nikki Murphy is showing me around the small house she shares with her husband, Clem Brennan, and their two young children. She loves their neighborhood. … But when their older son Reuben turned 4, they discovered a problem with their neighborhood.
MURPHY: One huge obstacle is trying to get Reuben into school. Yeah, it's been horrendous.
KENNEDY: Nikki and Clem chose not to baptize their son.


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AP produces a nice feature on Episcopal monks' 'silent sanctuary,' but not without a few ghosts

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Fascinating subject. Nice writing. But there are a few religion ghosts to discuss.

That's my quick assessment of The Associated Press' feature this week on the "silent sanctuary" provided by a community of monks near Harvard Square. The lede:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -- Just blocks away from the bustling heart of this city, a community of monks offers a silent escape from it.
The Society of Saint John the Evangelist, an order of Episcopal brothers, has kept a guesthouse at its monastery for decades to give outsiders a place to unplug and relax in a place of deep, serene quiet.
Behind the stone walls, idle chatter is taboo. Cellphone calls are to be taken outside, or not at all. Signs posted throughout the house ask guests to respect the quiet.
It all acts as a counterweight to the hurry-scurry of Harvard Square around the corner, where crowds of tourists jostle with Ivy League academics amid the clamor of street performers, vendors and the thrum of traffic.
On the edge of that worldly world, the black-cloaked brothers say their goal is to offer spaces of silence and simple comfort.
"It's a place of sanctuary where you can be safe, and you can actually unpack what may be the jumble of your life," said Brother Curtis Almquist, one of the resident monks.

Keep reading, and the AP offers a little more insight -- a little more -- into the motivations of the people who come:

The meditative hush of the monastery is popular with parish groups on retreat, but guests come for reasons both religious and otherwise.
Many skip the chapel's worship services to dive into a novel or a nap. A few visitors have confided to the brothers that they mostly needed a place to stay for a conference.
"We're delighted to welcome them," Almquist said. "I think life is full of very mixed motives all the time."

However, here's my obvious question: For those who come for religious reasons, what would examples of those reasons be?


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Concerning green frogs, fish stories and Christians who keep falling for faux news

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Concerning green frogs, fish stories and Christians who keep falling for faux news

Long ago, when I worked on The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette copy desk, the news editor quickly discovered there was one unpleasant newsroom task for which I was uniquely qualified, as a Southern Baptist preacher's kid and would-be religion-beat professional.

Every now and then an angry reader would call and accuse the newspaper of being prejudiced against all religious people or of deliberately screwing up facts in a story about religion. You might say that some readers were convinced that the editors simply did not "get religion."

However, there was a problem. Even when these readers had a valid point to make -- especially concerning errors -- they tended to go completely over the top in their criticism of the staff at the newspaper. In voices that would get more and more enraged, they seemed determined to accuse the editors of sins against God, as opposed to sins against the standards of journalism.

The news editor would bite his tongue and try to listen, as people accused him of taking orders directly from Satan. But after awhile he would roll his eyes, place his hand over the telephone mouthpiece and stage whisper across the news desk, "Mattingly, there's another GREEN FROG on line one. You take this call."

"Green frogs," you see, were religious folks who basically hated journalism.

Now, this unique newsroom term came up this week in the GetReligion "Crossroads" podcast, which focused on my recent "On Religion" column about why religious believers seemed determined to fall for every piece of fake news, or "fish story," that rockets across cyberspace. Click here to listen to my latest chat with host Todd Wilken.

There is a connection, you see, between that "green frog" phenomenon and the tendency for believers to fall for what the online Evangelical maven Ed Stetzer calls "faux news."


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Reuters reports Ashley Madison hack, but shrugs off moral and biblical issues

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With its story on the hack attack on adultery website Ashley Madison, Reuters stumbles a couple of times onto biblical references. But no worries -- it jumps up, brushes itself off and hurries on.

Ashley Madison, as you may know by now, is for "discreet" hookups for married people -- i.e., Web-assisted affairs. On Tuesday, a shadowy group calling itself the Impact Team cracked the site and stole the info of perhaps 37 million customers -- "nude photos, sexual fantasies, real names and credit card information," Reuters says. Then it uploaded the data on the Internet.

The potential is explosive, if you consider the 37 million relationships that could be disrupted. It's even worse when you read that thousands of e-mail addresses belonged to "U.S. government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives," plus academics at the likes of Yale and Harvard. The sheer bulk of the 43 million-plus news, blog and opinion pieces also testifies to the size of this religio-moral matter.

Unless you're Reuters, that is. The 900-word story quotes a paltry four sources, one of them unnamed, and none of them a minister, social ethicist or moral theologian. Instead, we get a divorce lawyer, two government folks and two therapists. I guess the latter are supposed to be the stand-ins for clergy.

Here's the first near-Bible experience in the Reuters article:

Prominent divorce lawyer Raoul Felder said the release is the best thing to happen to his profession since the seventh Commandment forbade adultery in the Bible.
"I've never had anything like this before," he said.

Even that bare mention was born as a gaffe. One of GR's readers told us the article originally said "Seventh Amendment," not "Seventh Commandment," then was corrected. Not the best evidence for the scriptural savvy of one of the world's largest news agencies.

Reuters misses another biblical reference in quoting a psychologist:


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Jimmy Carter calmly faces death, for reasons that some scribes still find mysterious

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Whatever you think of the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the odds are good that those views have now blended into some kind of appreciation for some of the work accomplished during his long and complex ex-presidency. Note the double use of the word "some" in that sentence.

However, even the most negative evaluations of his work usually show some respect for what Carter has done with a Bible in one hand and a hammer in the other, working on countless projects at home and abroad to help the least of these.

Carter's Baptist beliefs have, of course, continued to evolve, moving him to the doctrinal left on most moral and cultural issues. But there are still times when you can hear him arguing with himself on these matters. Soon after he left the White House, I interviewed him and watched him interact with a group of Lutheran young people meeting in Denver. He began crying as he described the frustrations he felt trying to place any kinds of legal limits on abortion in America, but he kept trying because he knew what science said about when life begins, as well as what his faith told him to do.

Like him or not, Carter is the man who made history by pulling millions of evangelical Protestants into the political arena, either to support him or to oppose him.

This brings me to the mainstream media coverage of Carter's press conference dealing with his current battle with cancer, including small melanoma cancers in his brain. Watch the video at the top of this post and then think about this Twitter comment by Sarah Pulliam Bailey of The Washington Post (who, of course, used to write for GetReligion):


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The (insert adjective here) Islamic State strikes again, for reasons that are hard to explain

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Journalists continue to wrestle with a problem that they now face day after day: How to describe the Islamic State in a way that admits the obvious, that this horror is rooted in its leaders'  approach to the Islamic faith, yet using accurate words that are not offensive to mainstream Muslims.

This needs to be a formula that can be used over and over, with variations, and take a sentence or two at most.

For all of you non-journalists reading this: Accurate daily journalism is tough work.

I thought of this struggle yet again read some of the mainstream coverage of the tragic and twisted death of 83-year-old Khalid al-Asaad, the antiquities expert who was often called "Mr. Palmyra." This story continues to read like nightmares from "Game of Thrones" scripts. In the New York Times story there is this

After detaining him for weeks, the jihadists dragged him on Tuesday to a public square where a masked swordsman cut off his head in front of a crowd, Mr. Asaad’s relatives said. His blood-soaked body was then suspended with red twine by its wrists from a traffic light, his head resting on the ground between his feet, his glasses still on, according to a photo distributed on social media by Islamic State supporters. ...
The public killing of Mr. Asaad, who had retired a decade before and had recently turned 83, his son said, highlighted the Islamic State’s brutality as it seeks to replace the government of President Bashar al-Assad with a punishing interpretation of Islam across its self-declared caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq.

What, precisely, does the word "punishing" mean in that context? There is no "punishing" element -- differences of degree, not kind -- in Iran or Saudi Arabia? What is the specific information readers are supposed to draw from that unique adjective? Hold that thought.


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Why were some verses removed from the New Testament?

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Why were some verses removed from the New Testament?

CASSANDRA’S QUESTION:

I’m just shocked by the information I just received about the N.I.V. Bible, that many verses of the Scriptures have been removed. So I’m searching for a reliable version of the Bible to study from. Any suggestions?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The Guy reassures Cassandra, who’s been reading the Bible for 21 years, that well-qualified translators produced the many modern English editions on the market, and that includes her New International Version. Inevitably, translators will make different word choices and most of these variations are unimportant. But she’s correct that the N.I.V. and most other recent Bible editions omit certain verses that are familiar from the revered “King James Version” authorized by the British monarchy 404 years ago. The following discussion assumes Cassandra is concerned mainly about the New Testament, not the Old Testament.

Why we get the specific wordings in today’s Bibles involves a specialty known as “textual criticism,” which analyzes all available materials to render the Scriptures as closely as possible to the original writings. The Religion Guy relies especially upon “The Text of the New Testament” by the late Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary. Cassandra should know that Metzger (1914-2007) was not only a top expert in these technicalities but a judicious one and known for strong faith in the Bible’s reliability and authority.

Metzger noted that only one manuscript survived of the first six books of the “Annals” by Tacitus, an important history of the Roman Empire, and it was copied nine centuries after the original writing. By contrast, far closer to the 1st Century originals we have some 50 ancient manuscripts of the entire New Testament and 5,000 or so partial texts and fragments. The earliest is the celebrated P52 papyrus with verses from John’s Gospel, that was written in early or mid-2nd Century Egypt.

Such rich resources greatly authenticate the New Testament.


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5Q+1 interview: Melissa Binder on the thriving Godbeat in America's least-religious city

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Melissa Binder is rocking the Godbeat in one of the unlikeliest of places -- Portland, Ore.

"Who else is going to tell you what religion in the rest of the United States might look like in 50 years?" The Oregonian writer responds when asked about covering faith and values in America's least-religious city.

Binder's journalism talents earned her prestigious national awards even before her graduation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. Besides gaining photography, writing and digital news experience on campus, she interned for major news organizations such as the CNN Wire, the Charlotte Observer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

After graduation, she joined The Oregonian as a neighborhood news reporter covering parts of Portland before transitioning to the newspaper's newly revived religion beat less than a year ago. 

In introducing herself to Portland readers, she cited her own faith:

I'm interested in this beat for reasons beyond intellectual curiosity. Belief is central to individual identity for many of you. As a person of faith, I get that. I grew up in a North Carolina church (quite literally — I attended a Christian elementary and middle school in the same building where my family attended regular services). You can find me with my husband in the front row at Imago Dei Community in Southeast Portland almost every Sunday morning.


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