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No actual news? No problem as elite paper puts Bible Belt city under Islamophobia microscope

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What do the kind people of Murfreesboro, Tenn., a city of 126,000 about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, think about Muslims?

It's complicated.

Read all 1,800-plus words of today's Washington Post takeout on the "midsize college town" (aka the sixth-largest city in Tennessee), and the difficulty in making broad generalizations about the community's attitudes and opinions becomes clear.

However, nuance apparently does not buy exclusive real estate (read: Page 1) in the dead-tree edition of one of America's elite newspapers.

What does? Try the possibility of Islamophobia and intolerance in the "buckle on the Bible Belt." That'll get a story on the front page, even without a timely news peg (unless you consider events that happened five years ago timely).

Thus, below a headline about Muslims in a Tennessee town "holding their breath," this is the Page 1 lede where the Post acknowledges (sort of) that there's no actual news here. But now that Donald Trump has been elected president, who knows what might happen, so there must be a story here, right?:

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — It was here, in this midsize college town in the dead center of Tennessee, that a right-wing effort to ban Islamic law found one of its first sponsors. Here, too, a congressman co-sponsored a plan to “defund Muslim ‘refugees’ ” and local residents sued to block construction of the only mosque, a fight that ended at the Supreme Court.
The town’s Muslims carried on through all of that, raising their children, saying their prayers, teaching at college, filling people’s prescriptions and filling their tanks, contributing to the civic life in a city of 126,000. They felt the familiar grief and fear of reprisal last year when a Muslim man killed four Marines in Chattanooga, 90 minutes away.
Now Donald Trump — a man who has repeatedly cast doubt on the patriotism of Muslims — is the president-elect, and he has selected a national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has called Islam a “cancer.” And a deep unease has again seeped into the daily life of many here in this Muslim community of about 1,500.
There has been a smattering of post-election harassment and insults — at schools, in parking lots, on the road — but nothing to take to the police or put Murfreesboro back in the national headlines.
“Right now, we’re hoping that it’s going to be calm,” said Saleh Sbenaty, an engineering professor at Middle Tennessee State University and one of the founders of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. “But we don’t know if it’s the calm before the storm or the calm after the storm.”


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Who went insane? BuzzFeed editors or the Greek Orthodox believer who leads the GOP?

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What happens when you mix Christmas, politics, Twitter and the ongoing emotional meltdown on the cultural left in the wake of the 2016 presidential race?

Trust me, the answer to that question is a bit crazy.

So was anyone else on Twitter enough in the past day or so to catch the latest mini-media storm about Christians in the Republican Party and the ugliness of their love affair with Citizen Donald Trump?

That's one way to spin this crazy mess. You could also simply note that we are dealing with another case of a major newsroom -- wait, is BuzzFeed a major newsroom? -- failing to contain even one or two people who have any idea how ordinary Christians out in Middle America use language when talking about matters of faith?

For those out of the digital feedback loop, here is the dramatic double-decker headline atop the BuzzFeed "story" that is in the middle of all this:

People Are Arguing About Whether Republicans Just Compared Trump To Jesus
A Republican spokesman said Christians view only Jesus as king and to ask otherwise was “frankly offensive.”

What does it mean to say that "people are arguing about" something? Does that mean a few activists on the left served up a bunch of wisecracks and then people responded by noting that they were out of their minds? 

If you want to look at this as a journalism case study, then the former GetReligionista Mark Hemingway put it best in this tweet:


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It's Christmas (1.0) in Bethlehem and the Associated Press still can't get its facts straight

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Dear editors of the Associated Press:

I have a dream.

It's a Christmas dream, actually.

I dream that some Christmas morning, after I get home from church on Dec. 25th, I will pick up my newspaper and, as always, see an Associated Press story with a Bethlehem dateline. This story will, of course, detail what happened on Christmas Eve and in the early hours of Christmas morning there in that ancient biblical town, with its strange mix of joyful pilgrims and tense security people.

But this time the story will be slightly different, in terms of the facts used to describe some of the religious rites on that first of two, yes two, Christmas celebrations in the churches, yes plural, located next to Manger Square.

Alas, this was not the year that my dream came true. Here is some of the key summary material in the 2016 AP report:

Christian clergymen welcomed the top Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land inside the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, the birth place of Jesus Christ, as Christians worldwide begin to prepare to celebrate Christmas this year.
The Rev. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the apostolic administrator of the Latin Patriarchate, is the temporary chief clergyman to the local Catholic population. He traveled from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on Saturday in a traditional procession. Later, he was to celebrate Midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity, built at the grotto revered as Jesus' birthplace.
"I wish this joyous atmosphere of Christmas will continue in the year and not just for a few days and I hope the coming year will bring a little more serenity and peaceful relations in our country. We need it," he said.

So what is the problem there?


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Time to wrap up 2016, starting with: 'Religion still matters, whatever your beliefs'

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If you have followed GetReligion through the years, the you know that we never completely close our cyber-doors during the 12 days of the Christmas season -- but we do slow down a bit.

We also mark the end of the religion-news years with quite a bit of commentary from hither and yon about the news events and trends of the year that is ending. We'll post the Religion News Association Top 10 stories list, as well as my annual "On Religion" commentary on that, along with a podcast about both of those. Religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling has already turned in a pair of memos looking ahead to 2017.

You get the idea. We will also post more than the usual number of think pieces about subjects we assume will be of interest to people who care about the state of religion news and topics linked to that.

So let's start that off with a piece from The Times on the other side of the pond that ran with this GetReligion-friendly double-decker headline:

Religion still matters, whatever your beliefs
From US politics to Middle East terror, it has never been more important to understand how faith shapes our world

Commentator Tim Montgomerie begins with the rather obvious -- now -- observation that Hillary Rodham Clinton probably wishes, when looking back on the year that was, that she had hired a few more people to pay attention to religious voters in the American heartland, especially the Midwest, when picking out the 4,200 members of her campaign staff.

For example, there wasn't a single Clinton campaign staffer -- saith Slate magazine -- who was assigned to investigate the concerns of evangelical Protestants. If Clinton had done half as well with evangelicals as did Barack Obama, she would be president-elect.

So what's the bigger story here? It's the fact that many journalists just don't get religion, of course.


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Where are the essential facts about religion in news reports about fall of eastern Aleppo?

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American news consumers, as a rule, do not pay much attention to foreign news coverage. Here at GetReligion, we know that writing a post about mainstream media coverage of religion news on the other side of the planet is not the way to get lots of clicks and retweets.

That doesn't matter, because news is news and it's genuinely tragic that many Americans are in the dark about what is happening outside our borders. We will keep doing what we do.

This leads me to news coverage of the fall of the eastern half of Aleppo in Syria, a landmark event in that hellish civil war that is receiving -- as it should -- extensive coverage in American newspapers.

As you read the coverage in your own newspapers and favorite websites, please look for a crucial word -- "Alawites." President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is a member of the often persecuted Alawite sect of Islam. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

Let's start with the top of the Washington Post report, since this story is very typical of those found elsewhere, such as The New York Times and also Al Jazeera.

BEIRUT -- Syria’s government declared Thursday that it had regained full control of Aleppo after the last rebel fighters and civilians evacuated the key city as part of an agreement brokered by Russia and Turkey.
The Syrian military announced on state media that “security and stability” had been returned to eastern Aleppo, once the largest rebel stronghold. The “terrorists” -- a term used by the Syrian government to describe nearly all of its opponents -- had exited the city, the military said.
President Bashar al-Assad’s consolidation of Aleppo marks the end of the opposition presence in the city for the first time in more than four years and deals a major blow to the rebellion to unseat him.

Think about this as a matter of history, for a moment. Is there anything bloodier and more ruthless than a civil war, with fighting and acts of violence taking place inside a nation, pitting armies within its population against one another?

If that is the case, then it is crucial how one labels and defines these armies.


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Flush with controversy, 'bathroom bill' coverage skirts faith-based roots of opposition

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There have been many times in recent months that I've thought of the late "philosopher" Rodney King, Jr., whose plaintive "Can we all just get along?" (often misquoted as "can't") resounded across the nation following the 1992 Los Angeles riots. (King, who died four years ago, was the police beating victim; an acquittal in the case involving four officers accused of harming him set off the disturbances.)

Can we all just get along, then, when it comes to gender and bathroom usage? And is there a spiritual and even doctrinal angle -- on one side of this public debate -- that is missing in the latest flush of coverage about North Carolina?

You probably know the background: A move early in 2016 by Charlotte's city council to allow transgender individuals to use the restroom of their choice in any "public accommodation" in the city brought a backlash from the North Carolina legislature, which outlawed such protections statewide. The state ban brought economic and artistic boycotts, and allegedly cost the state hundreds of jobs. The most prominent job loss might have been that of Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, who narrowly lost a re-election bid in November.

This week, a "compromise" of sorts was reached: Charlotte said it would repeal its ordinance if the legislature would "fully repeal" HB 2, the much-derided ban. The Charlotte repeal included some phrases legislative Republicans didn't like; the proposed state measures included wording the Democrats didn't like. The result: No repeal of HB2 and uncertainty in Charlotte.
 
So what's the religion angle, you ask? You will barely find it in the media coverage, such as The New York Times, which had reporters in Raleigh and Atlanta on the case:


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'The Shack' movie cometh, but mainstream reporters miss the real religion issues

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I first heard of William Young’s “The Shack” in 2008, about a year after it came out. I knew it was an indie book set in the Pacific Northwest and, as it turned out, one of the main characters was kidnapped at an eastern Oregon campground that I’d once frequented. When the father of the victim wanders about the wilderness near Hell’s Canyon trying to find his daughter –- or at least her body -– I knew exactly where he was driving.

The book got a very mixed reception due to its unorthodox theology, but when I traveled to Oregon in the summer of 2009 for vacation –- and to interview the author -– I found him a likable, unassuming man. Despite the fact that he was now worth millions, he was plainly dressed and we met in a coffeeshop near his home in Gresham, a suburb east of Portland.

So it’s no surprise that 10 years after the initial 2007 release date, this story has been turned into a major movie. A writer for the Washington Post previewed it in a piece under a headline touting God as a "curvy black woman." Here's how that starts:

In the coming film adaptation of “The Shack,” a fictional book by William P. Young about a father’s path to renewed faith and healing after his young daughter’s murder, the character of God -- as depicted in the novel -- is portrayed as a curvy, maternal black woman. ...
At issue is Young’s characterization of the Holy Trinity, seen through the eyes of the story’s main character, who on the four-year anniversary of his daughter’s brutal killing is mysteriously invited by someone named “Papa” -- his wife’s affectionate name for God -- to the abandoned shack in the Oregon woods where the girl died.
He goes, reluctant and angry, unsure if he’ll be met by his daughter’s murderer.
Instead, he finds this: a Middle Eastern, Jewish carpenter named Jesus; the Holy Spirit embodied in a wispy Asian woman who loves to garden and God (played by “The Help” star Octavia Spencer) as the very opposite of the Gandolf-like grandpa figure modern society is used to seeing.
This depiction -- God as a woman despite its gender-less designation in the Bible -- has some critics incensed.

Whoa –- wait –- God in the Bible is genderless?


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Trump's Israel ambassador pick stirs great discord among Jews, and there's a story there

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Trump's Israel ambassador pick stirs great discord among Jews, and there's a story there

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, or so the city's image spinners tell us. Personally, I have no experience of this, since Las Vegas is a place I avoid.

Israel is a very different story, however, and here I do have a bit of experience.

That experience tells me that just about everything that happens in Israel becomes an international balagan, with a potential for violence -- not to mention a United Nations resolution or two slamming the Jewish state for being solely at fault for whatever transpired.

Take the ongoing flap over the public broadcasting of the Muslim call to prayer.

NIMBY disputes over traffic, noise, and property uses are a staple of the local religion beat. No one in America seems to want a megachurch, a newly enlarged religious school, an exotic Hindu temple, or -- the current ultimate concern -- a mosque, coming to their neighborhood. But unless the dispute rises to a higher court, NIMBY squabbles rarely make news beyond the local level.

Not so in Israel, where a case involving the Muslim call to prayer, known in Arabic as the adhan,  is of a different magnitude from the get-go. That's even more so the case when it involves Jerusalem, the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Seemingly making my point, The Washington Post played its story on the front page of its print addition. The implication was that Israeli Jews just want to stifle a religious freedom Muslims take for granted.

Which leads me to the incoming Trump administration's promise to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the president-elect's designated ambassador to Israel, his personal bankruptcy attorney David Friedman.

There's much on the line here. Being the chief U.S. representative in Israel is as delicate a foreign diplomatic posting as there is. Lives -- Israeli Jewish and Muslim and Christian Palestinian -- hang in the balance.


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Keep reading long enough, and there's another side to Planned Parenthood story in Texas

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Which of these headlines — from different major Texas newspapers today — impresses you as most impartial from a journalistic standpoint?:

1. Planned Parenthood tries to close gaps

2. Provider plans fight over Medicaid

Now read the story ledes that go with those headlines and answer that same question.

First lede:

AUSTIN — Now that Planned Parenthood and its affiliates have been removed from the state’s Medicaid program, the group is trying to make sure thousands of low-income Texas women will still have access to health care.
The group also faces an ongoing investigation from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said Wednesday his office “stands ready to defend any challenge by Planned Parenthood to their termination.”
Texas has been working to remove Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program since October 2015 but didn’t deliver the final notice to the organization until late Tuesday. The notice from the Health and Human Services Commission said Planned Parenthood is “not qualified to provide medical services in a professionally competent, safe, legal and ethical manner” because of conversations officials at the group had about the use of fetal tissue in research.

Second lede:


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