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Trumped-up quarrel fuels mainstream media campaign coverage

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Donald Trump is brash and boorish, and he seldom takes back anything he's said. So he set himself up for the garish headlines.

Still, that doesn't mean mainstream media had to write them. But (sigh) they did.

* "Trump Goes After Carson," Ken Walsh's blog in U.S. News & World Report trumpeted.

* "Trump Questions Carson's Faith, Won't Apologize," says a Newsweek headline, with an equally gossipy lede: "As the third Republican presidential debate approaches and the field narrows, Donald Trump and Ben Carson continue to use religion as a cudgel for beating each other over the head."

* "Donald Trump Attacks Ben Carson, and Highlights His Religion," says the usually restrained New York Times.

What-all did Trump say to deserve this? Not a whole lot, according to CBS News: "I'm Presbyterian. Boy. That's down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventists, I don't know about, I just don't know about."

That's it. That's what Trump said in toto.

"What did you mean by that?" Jonathan Dickerson asked on CBS' Face the Nation.

Trump's reply: "I don't know about them. I don't know about what that is. I'm not that familiar with it. I've heard about it, but I'm not that familiar with it.  That wasn't meant to be an insult, obviously. It's just that I don't know about it."

Some media, including the Washington Post, tried to have it both ways: first, a j'accuse of a headline -- "Donald Trump: No apology for questioning Ben Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist faith" -- then a more sober recap of the facts:


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The New York Times magazine finally connects Donald Trump with prosperity theology

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Every so often, you run across a piece of writing that is simply beautiful and, at the same time, laden with religion ghosts. Such was this New York Times Magazine piece on Donald Trump, written by a reporter fortunate enough to get significant face time with him. 

Ghosts? You may ask, what does this have to do with religion? More than you think.

First, the reporter doesn’t spare himself or his fellow media elitists for not deigning to cover Trump because he was plebian and, well, they were not. 

This is blunt: “I was, of course, way too incredibly serious and high-­minded to ever sully myself by getting so close to Donald Trump,” he writes.

And yet his lead in the polls kept growing. He was impolite company personified, and many Republican voters were absolutely loving him for that. They seemed to be saying en masse that even if Trump could be crass and offensive at times (or, in his case, on message), could he possibly be any worse than what politics in general had become?

Trump, the writer learns is infinitely easier to approach than Hillary Clinton. This was a relief:

... for political reporters accustomed to being ignored, patronized and offered sound bites to a point of lobotomy by typical politicians and the human straitjackets that surround them. 

Now, what comes next is long but essential. Pay close attention to this:


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Budget woes on the mission field? Wall Street Journal has the intriguing story

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When giant corporations or major industries downsize, what better newspaper to report the news than The Wall Street Journal?

But cutbacks at the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board?

OK, I was a little surprised — pleasantly — to see the Journal delve into that important religion story.

The byline on the story belongs to Tamara Audi, who describes herself this way on her Twitter profile:

L.A.-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering news in the West, and religion all over the place.

Audi does a nice job with this relatively concise — at about 825 words — report. I'm going to need to pay more attention to her byline.

Three keys that make this story work:

1. Real people.

Starting at the very top, the Journal puts a face on the news by focusing on a real missionary couple:

Peter and Jennie Stillman felt a divine calling to preach the gospel abroad. So the Southern Baptist couple left Texas with their three young daughters 25 years ago and became missionaries in Southeast Asia.

Now, the Stillmans are responding to a new call: early retirement. They are among hundreds of Southern Baptist missionaries working abroad who are being summoned home in a move to slash costs, after years of spending to support missionary work around the world led to budget problems.

“There’s definitely a sense of this being premature, but definitely a sense, too, of sovereign direction from God,” said Mr. Stillman, 59 years old.


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It's thumbsucker time, after the 'tea party' bishops crash the synod on the family

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The 2015 Synod of Bishops is over and this weekend was, as required by the traditions of journalism, dedicated to the writing of thumbsuckers.

What was the synod on the family all about? What did it mean? And most importantly, from the everything-is-politics viewpoint of most journalists, which political party won, the "reformers" who back Pope Francis and his appeals for mercy or the tea-party-like radical conservatives who want people to follow all those old church rules? 

Tea party? More on that later.

Any journalist who has ever written a summary, reaction think piece after a major event like this knows that one of the crucial questions is: Who gets the first quote? Journalists may interview dozens of people, with a variety of perspectives, but a reporter has make a choice and give someone the first quote. This choice almost always points to the thesis of the piece.

For example, consider the opening of the New York Times reaction story that was built on the reactions of New York Catholics.

People streaming into Catholic churches across New York over the weekend were struggling to understand the meaning of a statement issued by an assembly of bishops in the Vatican on the place within the church of Catholics who divorce and remarry.

And the first quote:

Ann Moore, 71, of Pittsburgh, attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan on Sunday. She expressed disgust with the bishops, who had been summoned by Pope Francis for a three-week global assembly on family issues, for not letting divorced and remarried Catholics receive communion.
“It’s wrong,” said Ms. Moore, who was in town to celebrate her daughter’s 50th birthday. “If Jesus forgave everybody, why can’t these big shots?”

This quote, for me, raised an interesting question that had been nagging me throughout the coverage of the synod.

Whatever one thinks of the Catholic Church's teachings on divorce, and how these doctrines are fleshed out at the level of pews and altars, I was struck by the fact that journalists -- at least the mainstream reporters I was reading -- were not quoting a rather authoritative source in their reports. To understand the high stakes of the battles in Rome, one really needed to hear from this particular voice of authority.

That source? That would be Jesus, as in the Gospel of Matthew:


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Generic, very modest Christians walk across America for some vague reason

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This is one of those posts where readers really need to be able to see the art that ran with a specific newspaper story, but that isn't possible because of copyright issues.

So let's start off by saying that you need to go take a look at The Denver Post story, the one with this headline: "Family ends hike across America at Union Station on Saturday."

OK, so you surfed over and looked that the photograph. What did you see?

With that in mind, here is the top of the story:

With 45-pound packs on their backs and a lifetime worth of tales, an Alabama family strode in front of Union Station on Saturday afternoon, marking the end of their walk across America.
Cheerfully sporting a broken collarbone, Jennifer Sunde said it was her idea to embark on the American Discovery Trail with her husband, Chris, and 18-year-old daughter, Katlyn.
The trail is more than 6,000 miles long and connects cities like Washington, D.C., and Colorado Springs with national and state forests, parks and historical sites. The motive of the trek was to spread love and encouragement to whomever they met along their journey while enjoying the sites.
"We are Christians," Sunde said. "We're told to love one another, so we wanted to show everyone that someone out there loves you no matter your religion, social status, class and so on."

Once again, think about the photo. Again, what did you see?

Describing the family, The Post team went with this:


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Sing it! Going to the 'chapel' (maybe) and we're gonna get married (on our terms)

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Sing it! Going to the 'chapel' (maybe) and we're gonna get married (on our terms)

There is an old saying in the religion-beat world that goes something like this: You can always find interesting news trends if you keep looking at what happens when each generation moves through the symbolic crossroads of life -- being born, getting married, having children and dying.

During this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in), host Todd Wilken and I talked about a number of different trends linked to marriage in this day and age, spinning off from two New York Times stories. One was about people flocking to New York City for secular weddings in a state-run marriage bureau chapel. Yes, "chapel." The other was about the trend toward very sexy -- but still white -- wedding dresses.

All kinds of issues came up in this discussion. For example: Lots of churches have had to establish policies on how to handle couples who have been "living in sin" -- that's what people used to call it -- before marriage. There are still interesting stories to be found linked to that topic. But times move on. I am curious. In the age of R-rated wedding dresses, are religious leaders going to have to have wedding dress codes for brides? Do priests and rabbis need to approve wedding dresses in advance?

Truth be told, there is a big, big subject looming in the background during this chat. We are talking about radical American individualism and its whole "this day is all about you" wedding ethos that produces both gigantic, break-the-bank church weddings and all of those destination weddings on beaches, mountain cliffs and who knows where.

The bottom line is even bigger than the financial bottom line: Is the wedding a sacrament or not? Is the rite defined by individuals or by worshipping communities?


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On the journalistic usefulness of independent partisans in religion news

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On the journalistic usefulness of independent partisans in religion news

Godbeat 101: Reporters who cover the sprawling Southern Baptist Convention are well advised to monitor both the official Baptist Press and Baptist News Global, operated by folks who disagree with the SBC’s staunchly conservative administration. Likewise with the Presbyterian Church (USA); reporters should check out the headquarters Presbyterian News Service but also fare from the conservative www.layman.org.

The usefulness of such independent partisans is also evident with the Episcopal Church’s ongoing struggles. For example, the official Episcopal News Service has been slow to post an article about the 2014 local reports (.pdf found here) compiled in the annual “Table of Statistics." Has anything been published? Keep checking here.

Compare this reluctance with Baptist Press’s prompt recent report on unhappy annual statistics.

Reporters who carefully follow independent sources already knew about the Episcopal numbers because they’re reported -- indeed, trumpeted -- by juicyecumenism.com from the conservative Institute on Religion & Democracy, which keeps a close skeptical eye on the “mainline” Protestant denominations. I.R.D.’s  polemical headline: “Episcopalians Continue Bleeding Members, Attendance at Alarming Rate.” 

The nub: Episcopal attrition continues.  Compared with the prior year, membership dropped 2.7 percent, to 1,817,004. The decline in average Sunday worship attendance was worse, by 3.7 percent to 600,411. The South Carolina diocese’s walkout is a good chunk of this. Other numbers were also down. Consider that as recently as 2002 average attendance was 846,640 and membership was 2,320,221. Not to mention the 3,285,826 members back in 1970; in the years since, the U.S. population has more than doubled.  

Most “mainline” groups have likewise suffered steady losses since the 1960s but, writer Jeffrey Walton notes, the Episcopal slide mostly leveled off during the 1990s.


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Religious freedom bill: Sarasota newspaper knows how you should view it

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Florida's Protection of Religious Freedom Bill was only born on Wednesday, and pro-gay advocates already want to strangle it in the crib. Unfortunately, some of them are in media that are supposed to inform, not propagandize.

HB 401 would protect a "health care facility, health care provider, person, closely held organization, religious institution, business owned or operated by religious institution, or private child-placing agency that refuses to perform certain actions that would be contrary to religious or moral convictions or policies." The bill was inspired by lawsuits in other states against people who didn’t want to make cakes or shoot photos for gay weddings, as its sponsor has said.

That was enough for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune to take off running. Here are the first three paragraphs:

Florida adoption agencies could turn away same sex couples for religious reasons and certain businesses in the state could deny them products or services under a bill filed Wednesday by state Rep. Julio Gonzalez that echoes highly-controversial legislation from other states.
The bill – slammed by gay rights leaders as one of the most discriminatory anti-LGBT measures in the nation – is a response to infringement on religious liberties around the country said Gonzalez, R-Venice.
“There have been various situations where there are increasing possibilities of subsections of society having their religious freedoms encroached on,” Gonzalez said. “Over time it became obvious to me we need to adopt some statutory protections.”

So we start with two negative paragraphs, finally followed by a quote from Gonzalez. The newspaper then adds background on similar legal measures -- in Florida, Indiana and Arkansas -- that failed to pass or withered under boycott threats and negative publicity.

Given all that, can you guess what attitude the newspaper wants to impress on you?

The Herald-Tribune article did make an impression: Within a day, the story rippled through gay media.


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Washington Post offers another 'omniscient anonymous voice' clinic in synod report

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One of the most frustrating things in journalism these days (your GetReligionistas write about this all the time) is the blurring line between news and commentary.

It's not simply a matter of snarky material on Twitter by reporters about topics, institutions and people that they are also covering in hard-news stories. That's a problem, but not the biggest problem, from my point of view.

Meanwhile, I'll be honest. If I was a reporter right now, instead of a columnist and an opinion blogger, I do not know how I would handle Twitter.

No, I'm talking about the material that is actually being produced by newspapers, wire services and major news websites. Some use clear labels for "analysis" work and others do not. There are reporters who do straight news and also analysis and, at times, there are no graphics or labels to clearly tell you which is which and what is what.

Some standing online features with titles are news and some are not. There are "reported" blogs and blogs that are totally opinion. The logos often look the same to me. There are online-only features that look like news, but they are not, and people who only see certain newspapers in digital forms have no way to know which is which.

I don't think this digital swamp will be cleared up anytime soon. Still, I want to confess my frustration. This leads me to another example of a related trend, the writing style that your GetReligionistas call "omniscient anonymous voice." Here is how I described this journalistic trend in an earlier post:

Normally, hard-news journalism is written in third-person voice in past tense, with a heavy emphasis on the use of clear attributions for quoted materials, so that readers know who is speaking. That crucial "comma, space, said, space, name, period" formula is at the heart of traditional, American Model of the Press journalism.
The bottom line: It's a key element in retaining the trust of readers. Traditional journalists are, as a rule, going to tell the reader the sources for the information they are reading.

So what are we dealing with when journalists publish copy with paragraph after paragraph of material with little or no clear attribution? You know that this material has sources; but you also know these sources, for some reason, are not being cited. What does this look like?

Consider this recent story in The Washington Post.


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