Theologian Karl Barth had the most wonderful advice for preachers back in the day: Teach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.
If only more conservative religious leaders would try that. I’ve been in journalism since I was 16 and I’ve never seen the hatred against the media that I see among today’s evangelical Protestants, and I suspect conservatives in other traditions aren’t far behind.
I ran into this as I was reporting on singer/politician Sean Feucht and his “worship protest” concerts for Politico for a piece that ran Oct. 25. Getting rebuffed whenever I tried to interview him got rather tiring when I noticed how he was tweeting his vexation with media coverage while planning a huge Christian concert on the Mall that day.
Note to public figures: When you continually refuse to give reporters access, don’t be surprised when their coverage isn’t what you’d like.
I first invited Feucht to be on a panel for the annual conference of the Religion News Association in late September. Even though he wasn’t on the road that week, his spokeswoman, Whitney Whitt, would not make him available. Here he had an amazing opportunity to tell his side of the story to 123 reporters and editors from around the country and he couldn’t be bothered.
Then I got an assignment from Politico to describe this man and why he was running around the country having these mask-less and non-socially distant concerts that were infuriating officials in a number of the cities in which he appeared. Whitt finally said I could have 10 minutes of his time. But when I called, he wasn’t there.
The spokesperson then said she’d messed up the time zones (he was on Central and I was on Pacific), so I reminded her that the ethical thing to do — when it’s their fault the interview didn’t happen — was to re-schedule as soon as possible. She ignored me from then on.
This guy had run for political office earlier this year. He’d showed up at the White House late last year and snagged a photo of himself with Vice President Mike Pence (shown with this blog post) and made it into a campaign poster. He then started getting major backing from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley for his unorthodox open-air worship rallies.
Note to Feucht and evangelical/charismatics like him: If you’re going to run with the big boys, you need to ramp up your professionalism. I repeat: Any time you get involved in politics, you should expect to intelligently engage with liberal as well as conservative media. Refusing to answer their calls is an insane media strategy, one that is guaranteed to lead to one-sided coverage.
I’ll get back to Feucht in a moment, but I first need to explain the background folks like him come from and what a mess we’re in when one side of the argument doesn’t even care about facts anymore.
That’s the “Christian” side, people. Steven Waldman, president of Report for America, explained this dilemma in a Facebook post I saw:
“ … the most destructive thing about the Trump presidency is … the debasement of truth. Convincing people that journalists routinely make up things. Convincing people that actual research by a broad range of people in the intelligence and law enforcement community cant be trusted because...deep state.
Convincing the public that all politicians lie so Trump's lies are no biggie. Making it so that astonishing pieces of investigative journalism have no impact because... fake news. Making it so politicians now have an incentive to lie more brazenly because it's proven to be more effective. Making it so Americans do not have a common set of facts because there's no such thing as facts.
Covid is worse because of debilitation of truth. But if we don't restore a sense that there is such a thing as truth -- or at least an intellectually honest search for it -- we will never be able to solve our own problems.
Christians say they are all about truth, but many show a complete disregard for it these days.
When I ask the folks in my prayer group who reads a local newspaper –- where I live, it’s the Seattle Times –- no one does. One person reads the Wall Street Journal. A few watch Fox News. A few may watch religious channels such as CBN and TBN. The rest read news clips off Facebook or listen to podcasts. On the left and the right, people have stopped listening to voices on the other side of America’s most important debates.
That’s it.
My more liberal friends in my journalistic orbits have no idea how far conservatives have strayed from the establishment-media plantation. They’re not even on the same continent anymore. Here in the Puget Sound region, conservatives got angry years ago with how the secular media have continually mocked them, killed religion coverage (unless it’s a scandal) and portrayed them as nitwits and (more recently) racists.
So they logged off for good.
I will add that the secular media seriously doesn’t get how abortion is a non-negotiable for conservatives. The former realize there are 60 million dead due to 47 years of legalized abortion in America and can’t understand why journalists relentlessly report on racism or oppression of Native Americans, yet ignore this elephant in the living room.
Thus, journalists everywhere are running into these enormous barriers just to start a conversation. The New York Times recently ran a piece on their two religion reporters. One thing the two women said, over and over, was how hard it was to gain the trust of religious conservatives and how the distrust has made their jobs so much harder. Here at GetReligion, tmatt wrote quite a bit about their quotes and noted that many, if not most of the problems, center on political specialists trying to cover stories in which religion is an essential component.
Many of my Christian friends are in this twilight existence where they cannot discern the difference between what someone posts on Twitter and a researched, documented story by a media outlet. I constantly get stuff on Facebook sent by conservative contacts from feeds that masquerade as news. Their information is inaccurate at best, but my friends really don’t care at this point.
Some of us have been saying for years that newsrooms need to reflect the lives and beliefs of people other than the usual East Coast elites but it wasn’t until 2015 that the Washington Post hired a known evangelical for their religion desk. Evangelicals had been applying for jobs there for several decades.
(I took advantage of this blind spot, as I was working at the rival Washington Times from 1995-2010 and getting stories they weren’t. One way I talked my way into freelancing for the Post’s Sunday magazine in 2011 was that I had inroads into evangelicals, homeschoolers and Pentecostals, and the folks at the Post realized that they needed to cover this population.)
It took the New York Times until 2018 to hire someone from an evangelical background. (They’ve since hired another, which makes three religion reporters at both newspapers with ties to Wheaton College, an evangelical bastion outside of Chicago). I am glad they’re there now but that sort of hiring should have happened when George W. Bush got elected in 2000.
In other words, valuable time was lost in gaining the trust of what is now the major swing vote in terms of re-electing President Trump. Major media aren’t one to two years behind; they are 15-20 years behind with this crowd and many of them have left the building for good. You’re not going to get those folks back.
Still, I am telling conservatives who still care about such things: You’re crazy not to talk to media when they actually do the courteous thing and call you. At least take some responsibility for shaping your narrative, because if you don’t shape it, there are other folks who will. Your enemies will define you and set the terms for the debate.
Feucht has foolishly gone this direction, but he’s not the only one. I’ve been following the saga of Grace Community Church in suburban Los Angeles and its fight to stay open when California is forcing churches to stay closed because of coronavirus. My efforts to get through to a spokesperson or John MacArthur, 81, its famous crochety pastor, got nowhere. So where did I find news about him?
On a podcast. That’s right. There’s one called the Bible-thumping Wingnut that does a pretty good job keeping up with MacArthur’s latest doings. That said, podcasts aren’t held to the same level of accuracy as a newspaper is.
If you don’t think newspapers and other media outlets aren’t under pressure to be accurate, you’ve never worked at one. Make one mistake in a story, and you get calls from people ready to sue you for libel. No joke. There’s a reason why media outlets have legal departments.
As I searched and Google’d Feucht extensively, coming up with a lot of interviews, posts and photos, I noticed how he was fine talking with the most obscure Christian podcasters. But when anyone from a major outlet — other than Fox & Friends — called, he couldn’t be bothered.
I tried contacting his friends and two Seattle-area pastors who supported him. No one was getting back to me until I found one of Feucht’s former pastors who was willing to talk. I was beyond grateful for that interview, but incredulous that the other friends and pastors had so written off the media, they couldn’t be bothered to even say something nice about Feucht.
Feucht had planned to cap his current protest series with a concert on the National Mall. As that day (Oct. 25) approached, I began to notice articles in other publications: Rolling Stone, Religion News Service, the Daily Beast, to name a few and all were saying that Feucht (in other words, his spokeswoman) didn’t respond to multiple calls asking for comment.
The only reason I got any info from Whitt in my story was because I showed up at two of Feucht’s Seattle rallies and confronted her for her refusal to answer calls. None of the reporters — except for RNS on the day of the Oct. 25 rally — actually attended one of his concerts. Feucht was — at that point — giving two concerts a week around the country and those outlets should have at least staffed them.
But they didn’t. If these outlets said anything Feucht didn’t like, he went after them. He personally slammed Rolling Stone in this reply. He even criticized me, which had the happy effect of sending about 1,000 readers to the Politico site who would have otherwise not gone there. Wish he had apologized for standing me up for the interview — but repentance doesn’t seem to be his strong suit.
There was one bright spot in all this. Feucht attends Bethel, a megachurch in Redding, Calif., that has spawned many news stories. I had to call Bethel to get some information on Feucht’s association with the church’s worship component, Bethel Music. The church spokesman Aaron Tesauro, got back to me right away and was quite helpful.
At one point, I asked him how he got to be the communications director and he told me that the church’s default position had been to not interact with the media. That stance was causing it a lot of PR problems. He volunteered to do the job with the philosophy that it’s always better to engage the media than ignore them.
Bethel still may not be wild about the kind of coverage it gets, but at least, through Tesauro, they can contribute their point of view to the coverage.
It really is possible to deal with the media in a sane way. Liberal believers of many religious persuasions figured this out eons ago. Conservatives are still trying to figure out what the problem is. I keep on telling conservatives (behind the scenes) to get with the program and at least try to interact with reporters. Yes, they may want to record their own interviews as a form of protection.
Until they do, they shouldn’t complain about the news coverage.