Does anyone remember fax machines?
This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on a sad, but very old reality in mainstream news coverage — the lack of mainstream news coverage of the massacres that take place year after year in Nigeria at Christmas.
To put this trend in context, I backed up to an “On Religion” column that I wrote in 1996 that opened like this, focusing on a tragedy that was unfolding in Sudan:
It's possible to buy a Christian slave in southern Sudan for as little as $15.
Last year's going rate for parents who want to buy back their own kidnapped child was five head of cattle – about $400. A boy might cost 10 head. An exiled leader in Sudan's Catholic Bishops Conference reports that 30,000 children have been sold into slavery in the Nuba mountains. In six years, more than 1.3 million Christian and other non-Muslim people have been killed in Sudan – more than Bosnia, Chechnya and Haiti combined.
A Jewish activist, Michael J. Horowitz of the Hudson Center, faxed my column to the legendary A. M. Rosenthal, the retired editor of the New York Times and a former foreign correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. This led to many “On My Mind” columns at the Times, including one in which Rosenthal noted that Horowitz “screamed me awake” on the undercovered reality that is religious persecution.
That fax contact led to some conversations — via email and telephone — in which Rosenthal and I talked about the journalism realities behind a global story that was shamefully undercovered then and that remains the case to this day.
When Rosenthal died in 2006, I wrote a column (“Rosenthal refused to remain silent”) that noted:
Some human-rights activists are convinced that one of the reasons he lost his column and was forced to leave the Times was because he wouldn't stop writing about the persecution of religious minorities around the world.
Rosenthal couldn't understand why so many journalists just didn't "get" that story. …
Rosenthal said he asked some newsroom colleagues this wasn’t a big news story. No one had a good answer. He ended up writing — in one year alone — 20 columns about the persecution of Christians, Buddhists, moderate Muslims and other religious minorities in human-rights hot spots around the world.
Here is a key Rosenthal quote from one of those interviews:
"You don't need to be a rabbi or a minister to get this story. You just need to be a journalist. You just have to be able to look at the numbers of people involved and then look at all the other stories that were linked to it," he said.
"So why are journalists missing this?... I am inclined to believe that they just can't grasp the concept of a movement that includes conservatives, middle-of-the-road people and even some liberals. Their distrust of religious people — especially conservatives — is simply too strong for them to see what is happening."
Please click here and read this early Rosenthal column on this topic at the Times.
Please read it all, but here is the overture:
Some columns can be postponed for more important topics, some put off until they seem newsier and many dropped because they do not flesh out. But some have to be written as soon as information is collected, no matter how late.
This column is late, not because so much has been written about the subject and everybody knows, but for exactly the opposite reason.
A few journalists have written about the persecution of Christians in Communist or religious dictatorships. A few legislators have risen to protest. A few clergymen and their religious organizations try to arouse congregations.
But astonishingly few, compared not only with the spread of the persecution, but what could be done to fight it, if the political, religious, business and press leaders of the world had the will and courage.
That column ended with what Rosenthal called a “personal note” to himself: “Once awake, don't fall asleep again.”
I wrote a key phrase in my notes, echoing what this great Times editor had told me: “Journalists just don’t get this story.”
A few years later, GetReligion.org was born.
This brings me full circle to the recent massacres in Nigerian churches — the most recent of many. Here is a Google News search focusing on this year’s Christmas horror stories in Nigeria. Did into those links and you will see that this is a topic — nearly three years after Rosenthal’s anguished pleas to journalists — that is covered in “religious” and “conservative” media.
The persecution of religious minorities, not just Christians, remains a “conservative,” “religious” issue.
What happened this year? The essential Catholic news source Crux offered this report: “Nigerian Christians slaughtered in Christmas attacks.”
While Christians in most of the world were full of Christmas joy, it was the reverse atmosphere in Nigeria’s Central Plateau State where attacks in several localities on Christmas Eve left at least 160 people dead and about 300 others injured.
The attacks started on Saturday but continued into Christmas Day. They targeted 20 Christian villages across the Bokkos and Barkin Ladi areas of Plateau state.
“We were taken unawares and those that could run, ran into the bush. A good number of those that couldn’t were caught and killed with machetes,” local resident Magit Macham told Reuters.
It’s important that Reuters published several stories about the massacres. The Crux reference helped me find those with a more refined search.
Yes, Crux notes that there have been attacks both ways. Also, there are claims that government forces have been involved in some of the attacks. It helps to know that northern Nigeria is almost exclusively Muslim, while South Sudan is mostly Christian.
Read this carefully:
A Catholic-inspired NGO called Intersociety also condemned the killings, saying in a December 26 statement that the massacre “was likely a clandestine government-coordinated revenge killing using the government-protected Fulani Jihadists to launch a reprisal attack over the Dec. 3 killing of over 120 defenseless Islamic festival celebrants in Tudun Biri part of Kaduna State,” the group said.
The Muslims, numbering over 120, were killed by two airstrikes coordinated by the Nigerian Defense Headquarters of the Nigerian Armed Forces. The military said it was accidental, but the Board Chair of Intersociety, Emeka Umeagbalasi, told Crux he wasn’t surprised at the latest attacks. …
“We have blood suckers all over the place, and as I have said it before, the Nigerian security forces are biased, crudely biased. They are pro-Islamist security forces,” he said.
I’ll end with this Crux summary of the big picture — year after year.
“The Nigeria government has continued to treat Christians as third class citizens and the Muslims are first class citizens,” Emeka told Crux, and noted that such instrumentalization of religion goes counter to the letter and spirit of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution that expressly prohibits the elevation of any religion to the status of a state religion.
He predicted that by the end of the year, at least 4500 Christians would have been killed in Africa’s most populous nation, a figure he asserted reflects recent trends.
“We monitored the killing of Christians last year. In the end, up to 5,000 Christians were slaughtered. The same thing was applicable in 2021, slightly lower in 2020, and this year from January to July, we already counted over 2500. Nigeria will be ending 2023 with no fewer than 4,000 Christian deaths,” he told Crux.
Yes, this is a complex story. Yes, it’s dangerous for foreign correspondents to attempt to cover militants linked to the Islamic State.
But is this an important story that was worthy of mainstream-media coverage, especially with the painful Christmas timing?
What would A.M. Rosenthal say?
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others. And remember that you can subscribe to “Crossroads” with Apple podcasts.
FIRST IMAGE: An image from the days when changes in fax technology made news, care of the TPX.com website.