Under normal circumstances, GetReligion’s weekly “Crossroads” podcast focuses on a discussion of a major religion-beat story or perhaps a trend related to it. Every now and then, we talk about the topic addressed in my weekly syndicated column for the Universal syndicate.
This week’s discussion (click here to tune that in) is different, because the online professionals at The New York Times recently dedicated one of their “Insider” features (“Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together”) to a Q&A with the newspaper’s two religion reporters.
As you would expect, the hook for this piece is political — as clearly stated in the introduction. Spot any significant buzzwords in the first sentence?
The discourse surrounding the background of the Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the support of white evangelicals for President Trump has deepened political divisions in the country, and the conversations are two examples of why it’s important to understand conservative Christians and their impact.
The double-decker headline for the “Insider” chat says pretty much the same thing: “When Faith and Politics Meet — Two Times journalists talk about the challenges of covering religion during a pandemic in a campaign season.”
All of this reflects one of the major themes of GetReligion’s work over the past 17 years. If you want to write a religion-beat story that will automatically make it to A1, then you need to have a news hook centering on (a) politics, (b) scandal, (c) sexuality or (d) all of the above.
For way too many editors, politics is the most important thing in the “real” world — the way things that really matter get done in real life. Religious faith, on the other hand, is not really “real,” unless it overlaps with a subject that editors consider to be “real,” and politics is at the top of that list.
I would say that 90% of “they just don’t GET religion” problems that your GetReligionistas discuss here, week after week, have little or nothing to do with the work of religion-beat specialists. We cheer for religion-beat pros way more than we criticize them.
No, most of these journalism trainwrecks occur when editors assign stories that are linked to religion (or “haunted” by religious facts and ideas that journalists fail to see) to reporters who are assigned to desks dedicated to “real” topics — like politics or national news.
Before we get to the “Insider” talk with reporters Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham — both of whom are graduates of Wheaton College — let’s look at a recent Times story about a “real” topic, the potential political sins of a Supreme Court nominee. Looking at this piece will illustrate the topic that really needed to be discussed. That would be this — how do Times editors decide when a story deserves input from the religion-beat pros, or not?
The headline on this piece proclaimed:
An Earthquake, an Orphanage, and New Beginnings for Haitian Children in America
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, 19 children from one orphanage were flown to the U.S. to be adopted by American families. One would later meet President Trump.
In the past (see excellent National Review piece here) reporters would not dig into the lives of a political figure’s children, including the adoption of children. However, the rules change when the Gray Lady is facing the cataclysmic nomination of a conservative Catholic woman (who didn’t attend Harvard or Yale law schools) to fill the U.S. Supreme Court seat of a liberal icon.
It was also crucial that, in the heated world of Twitter, important liberal voices were suggesting that there had to be something wrong with the Barrett family adopting two children from Haiti. If reporters hit paydirt — think scandal, sex, abuse, etc. — it might shut down the nomination process.
Now, what about religion? If you know anything about the Barrett family, isn’t it safe to say that Christian faith would be right at the top of the list of motivations to adopt children children who have been abandoned in one of the world’s poorest regions?
So let’s search for some logical terms in this Times investigative piece.
How about “prayer”? That would be “no.” The same goes for “Catholic,” “church,” “faith” and “Christian.”
Apparently, religious faith had absolutely nothing to do with this topic, although there is a fleeting, unexplored reference to the Barretts being “Inspired to adopt by a couple they met in their marriage preparation course.” Where was that marriage preparation course held?
So what matters? Obviously the Trump card matters, as in the crucial reference to the fact that “one boy and his older adopted Haitian sister ended up in the Rose Garden last month, introduced to the world by President Trump as two of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s seven children.” Then there is this:
Judge Barrett has talked about their adoptions regularly in public speeches. She was inspired to adopt, she once explained, because “there are so many children in need.”
Just as everything with her nomination, the adoptions have been hard to totally separate from the politics of the moment.
Some critics have noted the irony of a president who has worked to close the United States to disaster refugees and once referred to Haiti with an expletive lauding the Barretts’ adoptions. And an ongoing debate over international adoption has played out as well. Advocates hope the Barretts’ story will encourage other prospective parents to come forward. Detractors have criticized as “white saviorism” the judge’s public accounts of her children’s dire situations before they left Haiti.
See how that works? Now, did any of that affect the actual decision by the Barretts to open their lives and their home to two children from Haiti?
This is, of course, the kind of story that tends to make religious and cultural conservatives have second thoughts about cooperating with reporters from elite newsrooms, such as The New York Times.
This affects the work of religion-beat professionals, even when these tensions have nothing to do with the reporting work in stories that ignore or mangle the beliefs of “stakeholders” in stories of this kind.
That leads us to this quote from Dias:
The polarized political climate has made reporters’ jobs harder all around. I’ve found conservatives are increasingly wary of talking with us no matter what the story is, from sexual abuse in evangelical churches to Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination. That means these important stories often take longer to do becau
Later, there is some discussion — #SHOCKING — of the “complete marriage of white evangelicals to President Trump,” even with the exit poll evidence that half of those white evangelicals didn’t want to vote for Trump, but reluctantly cast their votes because they felt that they had no other choice. You knew that would come up, didn’t you?
What about QAnon, that other hot-button religion-and-politics story? Graham notes:
Yes, I’m actually starting to work on a Q-adjacent story right now. It’s a movement that has really taken off among Christian conservatives, and some have argued that QAnon itself is best understood as a homegrown religious movement. So there’s a lot of natural overlap on the religion beat.
That’s one word away from being on target and way less simplistic?
What we needed was the insertion of the word “some,” as in, “It’s a movement that has really taken off among SOME Christian conservatives.” See this recent podcast: “The Atlantic needed to interview some evangelical leaders about QAnon heresy.”
Gosh, why are so many religious conservatives hesitant to discuss religion and politics with reporters?
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