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Thanksgiving gloom 2016: Have we beat this Election Year story to death at this point?

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Greetings from the Bible Belt, where the arrival of your Thanksgiving Day newspaper means -- in addition to five pounds of Black Friday advertising inserts -- seeing headlines like "Local Tennessee players open their homes to teammates on Thanksgiving" and "Making Them Feel At Home: Knox Area cares for firefighters battling blazes in Tennessee."

I'd link to that second headline, the A1 banner, but The Knoxville News Sentinel team, for some reason, didn't put that story on the newspaper's website. Anyway, there is enough information there for you get the point, as everyone in this region prays for rain.

The big picture down there: Thanksgiving stories are about families getting together, helping people who are in need and, yes, lots and lots of food.

I get the impression that the basic mood is a little bit different today in Washington, D.C., where a quick survey of the Washington Post headlines yields:

"America: Be thankful you have something to complain about."

"How to prevent Thanksgiving Armageddon."

"How to survive Thanksgiving 2016."

Ah, the chattering classes. How would we know what to think and feel without them? But, hey, not everything is political in that newsroom. There are these offerings as well:

"What the label on your Thanksgiving turkey won’t tell you."

"11 strategies for getting through the holidays without weight gain."

"When you cook your worst at Thanksgiving, here’s how to recover with grace."

Finally, there is one actual feature to read, an "Inspired Life" feature with this headline: Can family trump Trump? How to survive political disagreements with relatives this Thanksgiving. This story is exactly what you think it would be, in keeping with the post-Election Day meltdown in elite Acela zone newsrooms:


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'Cruxifiction': Numbing media reaction after a mayor renames Good Friday

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Come with us now to Bloomington, Ind., where Mayor John Hamilton has announcement. He says the city's 700 employees will get two paid days off: Fall Holiday and Spring Holiday.

Don’t recognize those holy days? You may know them as Columbus Day and Good Friday. Hamilton wielded his mayoral power to rechristen them.

To be blunt about it, this is a story built for mainstream media. As usual, though, much of the mainstream news coverage is better at citing the secular side than the religious opposition.

You know, like the New York Daily News:

Hamilton espoused acceptance in a memo to city employees.
"We are terrifically proud of our diverse workforce at the city. That diversity makes us stronger and more representative of the public we proudly serve," he wrote. "These updated names for two days of well-merited time off is another way we can demonstrate our commitment to inclusivity."
Bloomington, home to Indiana University's largest campus, sits in predominantly liberal Monroe County.

Like other accounts, the newspaper also gives a rundown on the meaning behind Columbus Day and Good Friday.

That's nice, but how about some religious voices on the latter? How do church leaders feel about the safe, pastelized reference to Good Friday? It's not like journalists couldn't find local people of faith -- not with Google listing 20 congregations in several denominations in the Bloomington area. Can you say, "Google"?

The issue has even drawn attention abroad. The BBC's version sprouts so many partial quotes, it read almost like sarcasm:


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Getting upset while doing errands and listening to NPR stories about Israel

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Getting upset while doing errands and listening to NPR stories about Israel

National Public Radio floats in and out of my journalistic consciousness, but not as much as in the past. Since I (thankfully) no longer commute for work, I now spend little time in my car stuck in rush hour traffic, the only time I listened to NPR with any real consistency.

I appreciate NPR's attempts to deliver a quality product.  And while it often succeeds, I do not think everything it does is top-notch. Like any news operation, at times it messes up. Then there's the brevity of the broadcast news format; outside of special features, it leaves little time for context and nuance.

Clearly, I'm a print guy. Though I did a short stint back in 1970 writing rip-and-read, top-of-the-hour, news roundups for United Press International radio clients when I worked in the agency's San Francisco bureau.

One subject about which I think NPR could do better is its coverage of Israel and Israeli Jewish society. I'm not alone on this. Right-of-center pro-Israel groups have long claimed that NPR is biased in favor of the Palestinian side, and goes out of its way to make Israel look bad.

Click here for an example of that criticism. To read an NPR ombudsman's response to the bias claims, click here.

My take is that the right-wing media watchdogs -- whose complaints help swell my email inbox -- too often find bias where I find only journalistic tripwires, such as quoting the same available officials over and over, or favoring English speakers over others simply because the NPR audience is English speaking.

However, two recent NPR stories I heard on separate days while in my car doing local errands did get under my skin more than usual.


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AP reports churches transcend racial barriers after Mississippi arson — but do they really?

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Being a media critic means sometimes asking pesky questions about warm-fuzzy storylines. 

Please forgive me for being that guy, especially on the day before Thanksgiving.

And if I'm just being a crank, feel feel to tell me so. In fact, this is one of those rare cases where I'd love to be persuaded that I'm wrong.

But here's the deal: The Associated Press has a story out of Mississippi today with this inspiring headline:

2 Mississippi churches transcend racial barriers after arson

However, after reading the story, my annoying question is this: Are they really transcending racial barriers? 

The lede sets the scene by highlighting the racial divide in many churches nationwide:

GREENVILLE, Miss. (AP) — Back in the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week in America, a fact that remains true in many communities today.
But three weeks after their church in the Mississippi Delta was mostly destroyed by arson and someone spray-painted "Vote Trump" outside, an African-American congregation has been welcomed into the church of its white neighbors.
The bishop of Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church, Clarence Green, says the generosity of First Baptist Church of Greenville demonstrates that "unlimited love" transcends social barriers. And his host, First Baptist's senior pastor James Nichols, says their brothers and sisters in Christ are welcome to stay as long as they need a home.
The Hopewell congregation, about 200 strong, is holding services a mile away at 600-member First Baptist. The guests are using the chapel, a space with dark wooden pews and bright stained-glass windows where small weddings and funerals are usually held. It's on the downtown campus of First Baptist, a few steps from the larger main sanctuary.


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A word from Australia: Rural voters ruled 2016, but journalists should keep an eye on ...

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As you would imagine, I am still digging through stacks and stacks of emails and (digital) news clips in the wake of the Election Day earthquake and the news-media meltdown that followed. You don't even want to know the size of my email in-box right now.

While doing that, I came across a think piece on the election results -- from Australia, of all places -- that contained a useful typology that journalists might want to study. This is especially true for reporters who are sincerely interested in what happened with American evangelicals, especially those in predominately white congregations.

It helps to know that the author of this piece. the Rev. Michael Bird, is an Anglican priest and theologian, linked to Ridley College in Melbourne, who also blogs and writes essays of this kind for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The bland and rather wonkish headline on this particular piece was: "US election: Why did evangelicals vote for Donald Trump?"

The key to the piece is that this is not the question that interested him the most. The heart of the essay focused on another question that should be more interesting to journalists: Who are these Americans who everyone keeps calling "evangelicals" and leaving it at that?

Early on, Bird notes that he was in Houston during the GOP primaries and delivered a lecture attended by quite a few conservative Christians.

I began my talk by asking three questions: Why don't Americans use the metric system? Why is the cheese orange? And who are the evangelicals who are voting for Donald Trump?
I got a response of riotous laughter because just about everyone there supported Ted Cruz and hoped a local Texan would defeat the vulgar New Yorker. I asked the last question because, among my hundreds of American evangelical friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, I could count all of the Donald Trump supporters I knew on one hand.


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Were U.S. bishops really sending Trump (or Rome) a message through Archbishop Gomez?

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One really annoying thing about the secular media is the inability of many in it to see anything outside the political grid. When I saw this headline over this article in the Los Angeles Times: “LA’s Latino archbishop now holds a top position among U.S. Catholics. Some think that’s a shot at Trump,” I had misgivings. 

For starters, hearing that vague “some think” attribution -- or non-attribution -- drives me batty, as more often than not, it is the reporter’s opinion or the reporter's summary of what's happening, in this case, in the Catholic blogosphere.

I've covered the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meetings many times and it's never easy to discern just what such-and-such a vote might mean. It always helps to remember that the teachings of the Catholic faith simply do not fit neatly into one political party.

So, see what you think about the opening paragraphs of the Times' piece. 

Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez -- a native of Mexico, an American citizen and a supporter of immigration reform -- was elected vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. ...
The first Latino to hold the position, he will begin his three-year term just eight days after the country elected Donald Trump as president. Trump has vowed to deport millions of immigrants who are here illegally and made the construction of a border wall a centerpiece of his campaign.
In a phone interview from Baltimore, where the bishops assembled, Gomez said he was surprised by the results but “grateful to my brother bishops for their trust in me.”
He dismissed the notion that his selection had anything to do with Trump, saying it was about the “challenge in our country to address the broken immigration system.” In elevating him to vice president, Gomez said, the bishops were acknowledging the “importance of Los Angeles in our country and the importance of Latinos in our country.”

Right out of the blocks, Gomez says there's no politics involved.


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Thanks for the (attempted) correction, Dallas Morning News, but your story is still wrong

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Last week, I tried to help the Dallas Morning News fix some incorrect biblical information in its newspaper.

And as the folks who know how to get clicks on social media like to say: You won't believe what happened next!

Really, you won't. Or maybe you will.

Short version: The Dallas newspaper attempted to fix its mistake online (with no note to readers) and even ran a Page 3 correction in its printed newspaper. But I apparently didn't explain the error well enough because the corrected story is still wrong eight days later. So I'm going to try again.

But first, let's back up and catch up everybody on the background.

My original post explained to the Dallas newspaper — which used to have full-time religion writers but obviously does not anymore — that the Bible contains two books of Timothy and that Peter didn't write them.

This was the original Dallas Morning News paragraph with which I took issue:

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.

 


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Memory eternal, C.S. Lewis: Another story on Nov. 22 that might be worth some ink

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Here in the United States of America, Nov. 22 will always mean one thing on the news calendar. That's especially true in Texas and for folks like me who are natives of Dallas.

As you would expect, there was some mainstream coverage of the fact that today is the 53rd anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I expect some second-day coverage of events linked to the anniversary, as well.

However, on the other side of the Atlantic, this day also marks the 53rd anniversary of the death of another famous man -- a scholar and popular writer whose works are just as influential today as they were on the day he died. We're talking about C.S. Lewis.

I know that I am biased -- "The Great Divorce" is my favorite book -- but I am thinking that many Americans would want to know if there are any events on the other side of the pond, even coverage after the fact, marking this event. This 2013 story from The Independent -- timed for the 50th anniversary -- contains plenty of information to serve as a starting point.

CS Lewis: In the shadow of JFK's death...
The author of the 'Narnia' children's books, died an hour before Kennedy. His stepson recalls the day

The stepson is Douglas Gresham, known to some Americans for his role in promoting the work of Lewis and for playing a role in turning some of the Narnia books into mainstream movies. That series will be rebooted with the release of "The Silver Chair," which is expected in 2018.

This passage from the earlier story provides all the context that journalists would need:


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Fighting taxes: Just crazy religious antics to the Indianapolis Star

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The religious crazies are at it again in Indiana, trying to use the state version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act for their aberrant behavior. This time, it's a guy who's trying to get out of paying taxes.

And once again, the Indianapolis Star has managed to run a religion story without talking to any religious people.

One Rodney Tyms-Bey says that "paying his state taxes is a burden on his religion," the newspaper says:

At trial, Tyms-Bey, 41, claimed the religious freedom law is a valid defense for tax evasion, an argument the court rejected.
A clause in Indiana's RFRA permits individuals to cite the law as a defense in criminal legal proceedings, unlike the federal RFRA law enacted in 1993.
"When this law was signed, it opened up a whole new world of legal defense," said Matthew Gerber, Tyms-Bey's defense attorney.
The state argues that Tyms-Bey cannot use the defense, as he failed to identify his religion and the state's imposition of income tax does not burden his religious practice — whatever it may be.

The case is two years old, but oral arguments were scheduled for appellate court today -- showing how tangled matters of church and state can get. We GR folk have scrutinized reports on RFRA and its state versions for a couple of decades -- from gay marriage in Mississippi to Santeria sacrifices in Florida -- but Tyms-Bey's case seems like an enormous reach.


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