End of the year wrap-up features are a great time to study the priorities that shape the news produced by many powerful newsrooms. There’s no way around the fact that creating a Top 10 list of “big” stories is an exercise in which editors state that some stories (or entire genres) are more important than others.
Back in the fall of 1981, when I started researching my graduate project (short version here) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, I had several conversations with the late George Cornell of the Associated Press. He was a trailblazer on the religion beat — period.
Cornell said many things that stuck with me, For example, he said that — over the decades — he kept a file of annual reports about the AP’s Top 10 news stories. It was extremely rare, he noted, to have a year in which there were not five or more stories containing obvious links to religious facts, themes or historic trends. Yet the religion beat remained a one-man operation and a low priority with editors.
Cornell may or may not have said that these stories were “haunted” by religion. All I know is that, in 2003, his insight was on my mind when Doug LeBlanc and I started work on what would become GetReligion.org and, while doing so, created the concept of “religion ghosts” that haunt many major news stories.
So what was 2020 all about, other than the the COVID-19 pandemic?
From coast to coast, many news consumers will see an Associated Press report with a headline something like this one: “A divided nation asks: What’s holding our country together?” This is a political story, of course, since that is what really matters in life. Here’s the overture:
Elections are meant to resolve arguments. This one inflamed them.
Weeks after the votes have been counted and the winners declared, many Americans remain angry, defiant and despairing. Millions now harbor new grievances borne of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. Many Democrats are saddened by results that revealed the opposition to be far more powerful than they imagined.
And in both groups there are those grappling with larger, more disquieting realizations: The foundations of the American experiment have been shaken — by partisan rancor, disinformation, a president’s assault on democracy and a deadly coronavirus pandemic.
Now, there are lots of ways to define the bitter schism at the heart of American life and that list includes several obvious factors. But what is the factor that Cornell would note is missing and, in fact, is linked to several of those hot-button topics?
