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Heartland authenticity: Praise for one paper's nuanced coverage of post-Trump Muslims

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In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's election, one of the prevailing — and predictable — storylines has been the plight of Muslims in the U.S.

It's sort of the post-election version of the "Muslim backlash" stories that follow any terrorist attack by an Islamic radical.

Among the major news organizations where I've seen such reports: CNN, the Dallas Morning News, the Detroit News, National Public Radio and Religion News Service.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal (among others) reported this week:

Hate crimes increased nearly 7% in 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said Monday, a rise that was driven partly by a sharp increase in anti-Muslim incidents, which rose 67%.

At the same time, some are skeptical of claims of a "post-election hate crime epidemic." 

And in his post Tuesday, GetReligion's Ira Rifkin delved into reports "that Trump secretly reached out to Arab embassies in Washington to say they should simply ignore his anti-Muslim campaign statements."

So — on this subject matter — where does the politically correct narrative end and the actual news begin? Some of that may depend on one's own biases and life experiences. A few of the reports cited above are better than others, and I'll acknowledge that I didn't have time to digest each word of all of them.

But I do want to endorse a piece by Jaweed Kaleem of the Los Angeles Times. 


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Memory eternal, Cliff Barrows: A strategic voice inside the Billy Graham team

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Back in the mid 1980s, people were already starting to talk about the Rev. Billy Graham doing his "final crusades." Thus, when the Graham team came to town for the Rocky Mountain Crusade in 1987, that event was hailed as the great evangelist's last major event in Denver and the press handled it that way.

I was at the Rocky Mountain News (RIP) at the time and flew back to Charlotte, where I had worked for the Charlotte News and the Charlotte Observer, and then drove up into the mountains to spend most of a day interviewing Graham. I was planning on writing a magazine piece on Graham's marriage to the brilliant, and very independent, Ruth Bell Graham -- so we talked quite a bit about issues linked to marriage and family.

In that context, Graham made an interesting comment about the core team that built the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and made the strategic decisions that set its course.

For some reason, he said, writers keep underestimating the role played by music director Cliff Barrows. The youngest member of the team was much more than the man who directed stadium-sized choirs and served as emcee for Graham events of all kinds. What they didn't understand was how important his voice was in private, offering counsel and advice at strategic moments, stressed Graham.

Now Barrows is gone, at age 93. Sure enough, the Associated Press obituary for Barrows -- at least the one I am seeing online -- is 126 words long and it seems even shorter than that. The basics are there, barely.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Cliff Barrows, the long-time music and program director for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has died after a brief illness. He was 93. ...
The two men met in 1945 while Barrows was on his honeymoon, and together they went on to form the association. Barrows traveled the world with Graham since his first crusade in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1947. Barrows also hosted the weekly Hour of Decision radio program for more than 60 years.

As you would expect, the tribute in The Charlotte Observer is much, much longer and captures more of this man's role in the Graham organization, even if key links are not made explicit.


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Que sera, sera: It's Trump's turn to deal with Middle East. Let the guesswork begin in earnest

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Que sera, sera: It's Trump's turn to deal with Middle East. Let the guesswork begin in earnest

The presidential election is finally over and according to the rules of the American electoral system Donald Trump will be our next president (my bias is showing). That means it's that time in the journalistic election cycle to guess at what the president-elect may or may not actually do once sworn in.

Yes, guess work Is pretty much the state of affairs, at least as of my writing this post. We may soon have a better understanding, but for now candidate Trump's steady stream of contradictory, conniving, condescending and cockamamie pronouncements makes it hard for his opponents and supporters alike to know just what he plans with much certainty.

So sit back and watch as aspirational, personal projection and shot-in-the-dark journalism swarms the field.

Oh, wait.

It appears that aspirational, personal projection and shot-in-the-dark journalism have been on the field all along, given what the majority of political polls predicted, and what some of our best journalistic minds (seriously) said before being proved wrong.

Others at GetReligion have written extensively about the domestic side of Trump's victory. So as this column's title suggests, I'm going international, starting with the Middle East. I'll begin with Israel before getting on to the Arab and Muslim Middle East actors. (I'm skipping the Syria-Iraq situation in this post; it's a post itself.)


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While media focus on dangers to gays, anti-Trump mobs tear up the streets

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Every so often, the New York Times gifts us with an article that breaks new ground in being so one-sided, off-the-rails and lacking in even the most elementary sense of fairness that one runs out of words to describe it.

While the Gray Lady runs pieces about how a country under Trump might turn out badly for the LGBTQ crowd, mobs of anti-Trump supporters recreated their own kind of media-friendly, multicultural riots a few nights ago on the streets of Portland, Ore. More on that in a moment. 

What the Times does is museum-quality Kellerism, a term created by tmatt several years ago to portray an attitude among the MSM. In this case, societal persecution of gays and lesbians is the prevailing narrative and other points of view, primarily linked to the First Amendment, don’t deserve space or explanation. It is a term that means that a media outlet that has made up its mind on a certain hot button issue to the point where there is no legitimate other side to the story. See if you can spot the Kellerism factor below:

The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency sent panic through much of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, which for the first time in eight years will face an administration hostile to its civil rights goals and a president-elect who has expressed a desire to reverse many of its political gains.
Jay Brown, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, said its office had received calls throughout the day on Wednesday from frightened people who wanted to know what the election results might mean for them.
Some callers wondered if they should speed up wedding plans so they could be married before the inauguration, in case a President Trump tries to overturn gay marriage, he said. Others worried that the military would reinstate “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the ban on openly gay and lesbian service members that ended in 2011.


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Based on Trump's win, it looks like religious liberty really is a thing -- with no scare quotes

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Time flies.

More than five years ago, I wrote a piece for Christianity Today that posed this question: "Should the Marriage Battleground Shift to Religious Freedom?"

Hang with me for just a bit here, and I'll make a point — an important one, I believe — about current media coverage. But first, some background might be helpful for most readers.

The main ideas of the 2011 story that I mentioned were:

1. States increasingly were passing same-sex marriage and civil union laws.

2. Given that trend, Christians advocating for traditional marriage might be better served by shifting their resources to fight for their religious freedom.

By the time U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage last year, conscience claims by religious people who view marriage as a sacred union between one man and one woman already were making frequent national headlines. 

Of course, in most media reports on those claims — before and after the high court's 5-4 ruling — the word "conscience" never appeared. Rather, news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times framed the issue as a matter of Christians wanting to "deny service" or "refuse service." Often, news stories on the subject carried scare quotes around terms such as "religious liberty" and "religious freedom" — a journalistic eyebrow raising, if you will.

In many cases, news organizations didn't even bother quoting any religious people or attempting to understand their perspective. If you were a Christian baker who didn't want to make a cake for a same-sex wedding — or if you were a Christian photographer who had a problem taking pictures of a same-sex couple — you were a bigot until proven otherwise. And usually, not much opportunity was given for someone to prove otherwise. The media elite already had decided who was right and who was wrong.


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Meltdown update: Does the New York Times want to cover America's heart and soul?

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The leaders of the New York Times have, for more than a decade, known that many of their critics -- loving critics and otherwise -- believe that the world's most powerful newsroom lacks intellectual, cultural and religious diversity.

After all, that was one of the main conclusions in the visionary "Preserving Our Readers' Trust" document (.pdf here) released in 2005 after a sweeping self-study of ethics issues in the newsroom (to state things mildly).

Anyone who wants to understand the back story to the current Times meltdown over Donald Trump and the lives of many Americans who voted for him must read that document. Yes, that document also meshes nicely with the latest pro-journalism sermon ("Want to Know What America’s Thinking? Try Asking") from Liz Spayd, the public editor at the Times. Hold that thought.

After the release of the 2005 self study, then editor Bill Keller released his formal response, "Assuring Our Credibility (.pdf here)." Like the self study, this document was haunted by issues linked to coverage of religious and cultural issues. One more time, let's look at Keller's conclusion:

First and foremost we hire the best reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the business. But we will make an extra effort to focus on diversity of religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class.
Of course, diversifying the range of viewpoints reported -- and understood -- in our pages is not mainly a matter of hiring a more diverse work force. It calls for a concerted effort by all of us to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation.

See the connections to the current debates? #DUH

And finally:

I also endorse the committee's recommendation that we cover religion more extensively, but I think the key to that is not to add more reporters who will write about religion as a beat. I think the key is to be more alert to the role religion plays in many stories we cover, stories of politics and policy, national and local, stories of social trends and family life, stories of how we live. This is important to us not because we want to appease believers or pander to conservatives, but because good journalism entails understanding more than just the neighborhood you grew up in.

Amen. However, note that Keller -- for some reason -- feared that hiring more professionals with training or experience in religion-news coverage might be seen as appeasing "believers" or pandering to "conservatives." That's one way to read that paragraph.

Let's move on.


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Red and Blue America: Does the New York Times give facts on ground or views from top?

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In yet another election postmortem, the New York Times team tried a novel idea -- a street-level view of the thoughts and fears that drove Red and Blue America. The simple goal was to report what ordinary people said.

Or at least readers got to hear what the Times people heard. Some of the 2,600-word piece reveals a viewpoint as skewed as some of those it reports.

The article is broken into segments, each by a different writer, and they vary widely in tone and balance. Some are genuinely sensitive.

There's an almost palpable anguish in Julie Turkewitz' section, on how many people isolate themselves from those who differ with their worldviews:

In some ways, the echo chamber was the winner of this election. Here we are, deeply connected. And yet red America is typing away to red America, and blue America is typing away to blue America. The day after the election, some people said the echo chamber had begun to feel like a prison.

Turkewitz notes that one of her two main sources truly wants to escape her bubble. The woman, who voted for Hillary Clinton for president, has only two or three friends -- both on Facebook -- who supported Trump. The other woman, a fellow Clinton supporter, seems happy to stay in her echo chamber.

Religion is seeded throughout the article, but only one section deals directly with it. Times veteran Laurie Goodstein draws from interviews on the Godbeat this year.

She sounds sympathetic to people on the Right, at first:


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Hey Dallas Morning News: Bible contains two books of Timothy, and Peter didn't write them

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Imagine if a sportswriter covering the Dallas Cowboys (who are on quite a roll!) didn't know the difference between a touchdown and a two-point conversion.

Or if a journalist reporting on the Texas Rangers (my beloved Texas Rangers) failed to understand how a batter could swing and miss at strike three — and still reach first base safely.

Now contemplate this for a moment: What if —  a la Donald "Two Corinthians" Trump — a major newspaper's reporters and editors failed to realize that the apostle Paul wrote two letters, not one, to his "son in the faith" Timothy? Or even that Paul, not Peter, was the one who penned them?

Welcome to the Dallas Morning News of 2016 — a once-great newspaper with a once-unrivaled team of Godbeat pros.

These days, this — referring to Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas — is what passes for religion reporting in the Texas newspaper:

In another video he posted Wednesday morning, Jeffress pointed to the Book of Timothy, where Peter instructed Christians to pray for all leaders. He tweeted that he would have the same message if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency.

For everyone reading this in the Dallas Morning News newsroom (and that's no longer a large group of people, which is part of the problem), those New Testament epistles are known as 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy. (Or for president-elects who might ever need to mention them out loud, think First Timothy and Second Timothy.


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Meltdown flashback: Once more into the New York Times 'spiritual crisis' breach

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Please hang in there with me for a moment, or several moments. There is much to discuss and it will require more than one post.

I was going to write a post this morning about the much-discussed letter to readers from New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and executive editor Dean Baquet. That's the letter that is being interpreted as a mild act of journalistic repentance, stating, sort of, that the Times team -- after missing the whole Donald Trump and middle America thing -- promises to go back to doing basic news coverage, rather than advocacy journalism.

The problem, however, is that this is not what the letter actually says. It says the Times needed to turn "on a dime" in order to react to election night developments, but that the newsroom then did what it has "done for nearly two years -- cover the 2016 election with agility and creativity." Then there was this:

As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.

So there is the issue once again. The Times leaders believe that they have been producing journalism that shows understanding and, dare I say, respect for "all political perspectives and life experiences" in America, as opposed to here in New York City (I am writing this while looking out a window towards the World Trade Center). #REALLY

I wanted to write a post about this remarkable letter, but then it hit me. In a way, I have already written a recent post about this issue -- back on August 1. So before we look at new materials linked to the Times culture, religion news and the newspaper's critics, please let me do something that I have never done before in the nearly 13-year history of this blog -- republish a whole post and urge you to read it. Then we will move on in the days ahead.


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