Bill Keller

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Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did

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Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did

If you know anything about world religions, then you know that Easter is a big deal in Christianity.

In Eastern Orthodox churches, the Big Idea is stated this way, over and over, in rites for Pascha (Easter): “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life” (see this flash mob celebration in Lebanon).”

I don’t bring this up as a matter of evangelism or some other #triggerwarning behavior. I am noting that this is an essential fact about Christianity, the world’s largest religious faith. Easter isn’t a “bunny” thing.

This brings us to one of the more unusual “religion ghosts” we spotted several times during the 20-year history of GetReligion. Here’s a case study at Newsweek and another at Facebook news. However, the classic version of this ghost appeared in the holy (in journalism terms) pages of The New York Times in this 2014 feature: “Hoping War-Weary Tourists Will Return to Israel.” Here is the key passage:

On a recent afternoon in the Old City of Jerusalem, while fighting raged in Gaza, Bilal Abu Khalaf hosted a group of Israeli tourists at his textile store in the Christian Quarter — one of Jerusalem’s tourist gems. …

“That’s the first group I’ve had here in more than a month,” Mr. Abu Khalaf said. “There have been whole weeks when no one has been inside the shop. I’ve sold almost nothing the entire summer. Business hasn’t been this bad since the first intifada in 1989, when the Palestinian groups ordered us to shutter our stores.”

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus was buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

Now, what’s unusual about that? Well, it helps to know that the printed version said:

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

It’s all about the word “is,” isn’t it?

Inquiring minds wanted to know: Was there anyone in the editorial chain at the world’s newspaper of record who knew the essential fact that traditional Christians don’t believe Jesus is buried anywhere? It’s that whole “Easter” thing.


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Podcast: Behold! ChatGPT has interesting, haunting thoughts on religion-beat questions

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Podcast: Behold! ChatGPT has interesting, haunting thoughts on religion-beat questions

It is highly likely, at this point, that most news consumers have heard of the ChatGPT website.

If not, click here to surf through the 56,100,000 reports currently about at Google News about this artificial intelligence (AI) project. Some would prefer to spend several months watching videos on the subject at YouTube. Good luck using the actual ChatGPT site — odds are high that you will have to wait in a long cyber-line to get access.

Journalists are concerned about ChatGPT because it offers a vision of what could be ahead in newsrooms, with computers “reporting” background reports on news events and even trends. And ChatGPT is a big deal in higher education, since it’s highly effective at faking all or significant chunks of term papers. The bot recently passed the U.S. Medical Licensing exams.

I was curious to know what ChatGPT thought about (#DUH) religion-news coverage. The results provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in). For example, I asked: “What does the website GetReligion.org do?” The response:

GetReligion.org is a media criticism blog that focuses on examining the way religion is covered by the mainstream news media. It aims to provide analysis and commentary on news stories that deal with religious topics and to point out instances of inaccurate or biased reporting.

Not bad. That’s part of what we do here. We also provide as many, or more, think pieces, Q&As and memos about topics linked to religion-beat work, care of patriarch Richard Ostling, chart-master Ryan Burge and others. We also, from time to time, praise high-quality reporting from mainstream newsrooms.

Oh, I also confess that I asked ChatGPT about that Terry Mattingly guy and — on my birthday, no less — received a kind report on my work that also (#shudder) implied that I am dead.

Terry Mattingly was an American journalist and religion reporter known for his writing on religion and culture. He was a syndicated columnist and founder of the website "GetReligion", which analyzed religion news coverage in the media.


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Pew gap in blue America? David French and Ryan Burge offer much to think about

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Pew gap in blue America? David French and Ryan Burge offer much to think about

If you have followed GetReligion over the past decade or two then you have probably spotted some common themes linked to ongoing news trends (and I’m not talking about the musings of one Bill “Kellerism” Keller).

Here is a quick refresher with a few big ones:

* The press tends to ignore the RELIGION side of liberal faith groups, focusing only on their political stands.

* One of the biggest news stories of the late 20th century was the demographic implosion of Mainline Protestantism, leaving a public-square void filled, for the most part, by evangelicals.

* The rise of nondenominational evangelicals, with zero ties to existing evangelical power structures, has really confused lots of political reporters.

* It’s hard to do accurate, balanced, fair-minded journalism in an age when the technology pushes people into concrete media silos full of true believers. Preaching to the choir, alas, is good for business (but not for America).

* Newsroom managers need to hire experienced, trained religion-beat pros. That helps prevent lots of tone-deaf mistakes.

Here is one more. The political “pew gap” is real. Citizens who are committed members of traditional faiths tend to have radically different beliefs than those who are not. All together now: “Blue Movie.”

This brings me to a rare business-week “think piece” built on a remarkable David French piece at The Dispatch that will be helpful to journalists who are — to name one trend GetReligion jumped on in 2016 — trying to make sense of the changing choices of Latino (as opposed to Latinx) voters. After watching the chatter on Twitter, I have added two relevant tweet-charts from Ryan Burge, a helpful scholar who cooperates with GetReligion. That French headline:

The God Gap Helps Explain a 'Seismic Shift' in American Politics

The most important religious divide isn't between right and left, but between left and left

The Big Idea: A funny thing happened on the way to that Democratic dream of dominating the future with a multiethnic coalition fighting a lily-white GOP.


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Angry about Roe, many journalists focus on crisis pregnancy centers as villains behind it all

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Angry about Roe, many journalists focus on crisis pregnancy centers as villains behind it all

Before the overturning of Roe v. Wade a little more than a week ago, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) were considered by mainstream media to be the dregs of the pro-life movement, one of the last stories that anyone wanted to cover.

Now that abortion access is heading toward the deep-blue coastal regions with a few blue islands in the middle, a villain must be found. And voilà; the once despised CPCs are to blame for it all. Now, CPCs are worse than a non-story.

Apparently these places are pretty effective, judging from the editorial hate being poured down on them. They’re the bricks and mortar of the pro-life movement. Instead of reporting about how these CPCs — and the churches that tend to support them — have been defaced, set on fire or otherwise attacked, we have hit pieces like this Associated Press article about a “so-called” crisis pregnancy center in Charleston, WV.

The piece is so front-loaded with trash quotes from its opponents — with no rejoinder allowed from leaders or volunteers at the CPC itself — that you almost miss the story about the woman who visited the center back in 2014 planning to abort her child. She was (very reluctantly) dissuaded from doing so and now is “very happily” raising her 7-year-old son.

So, what’s the moral of this story? That this particular mother should have decided that this kid should be dead? The two reporters who did this disaster of a story don't want to go there.

Considering the invective tossed at these CPCs by places like Planned Parenthood, why aren’t reporters treating this more like a business story?

Like, the CPCs have outwitted the abortion clinics when it comes to figuring out what many pregnant women really want and it’s clear the abortion facilities have suffered financial losses as a result. How about asking people at the latter hard questions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad marketing decision that was?

Hint: It might have to do with the free ultrasounds offered by the CPCs. Offering this service was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it really cried out for coverage.


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Words matter: What kind of Catholic is Joe Biden? What kind of American is Rep. Cawthorn?

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Words matter: What kind of Catholic is Joe Biden? What kind of American is Rep. Cawthorn?

For serious journalists, words matter.

This is especially true when covering a subject as complex and nuanced as religion. So let’s ponder a religion-beat issue that, in political terms, is quite simple. However, in terms of history and doctrine, it’s rather complex.

Fill in the blank: “Joe Biden is a ______ Catholic.”

Now, if you follow the mainstream press, you know that for many the answer is “devout.” As in this CNN headline: “Trump claims Biden, a devout Catholic, wants to 'hurt God'.” And here is a typical news-story passage, care of CBSNews.com:

On Election Day, Mr. Biden, a devout Catholic, started out by attending Mass and visiting the graves of his son, Beau, and his first wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi, who were both killed in a car crash in 1972.

On Sunday, Mr. Biden did the same, attending Mass with his daughter Ashley and grandson Hunter at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington, Delaware, and then visiting his family members' graves.

Religion-beat veterans will notice that an important detail is missing from that passage — whether or not Biden received Holy Communion. The assumption, of course, is that he did (and that’s a safe assumption in East Coast establishment Catholicism).

It would appear that the key is that Biden says Catholicism has been a crucial force in his life and that Catholic social doctrine affects his political work. He carries a rosary. He goes the Mass — frequently. Other Catholics will note — a statement of fact — that some parts of Catholic social doctrine affect his political work and others clearly do not.

All of this came up for discussion as we recorded this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), which focused on a common theme from this blog’s 17-year history. Here it is: While many conservatives claim that the mainstream press is “anti-Christian,” or “anti-religion,” that simply isn’t true.

Take the New York Times, for example.


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New podcast: New York Times lets Planned Parenthood spin bad news about Margaret Sanger?

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Soon after the founding of Amazon.com in 1995, I began offering the following research tip to my journalism students.

When reporting about a person or a topic, especially when the subject is controversial, go to Amazon.com and type in two or perhaps three search terms — including a proper name or the keyword linked to the topic you are researching.

Of course, reporters should do broader searches online and in professional-level periodical collections — looking for experts and activists on both sides of the story being covered. What an Amazon.com search gives you is a look at who has been doing, well, book-length studies of a person or a topic.

So let’s take a look at an Amazon.com search linked to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). Let’s search for “Margaret Sanger” and “eugenics.” We are looking for sources that could have been used in the New York Times piece that ran the other day with this sobering double-decker headline:

Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics

Ms. Sanger, a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer, supported a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding

That’s a very controversial topic and this Times piece, we shall see, includes some rather blunt information about this “icon” of the cultural left.

What the story does not contain, however, is a single quote from a scholar or activist who has done years of research to gather information critical of Sanger and her legacy in American life and culture.

Right at the top of that Amazon.com search are books by two experts who, to my eyes, look solid.

One book is entitled “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.” The author is not a scribe at a right-wing think tank. Instead, Edwin Black — on his Amazon.com biography page — is described as:

Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international investigative author of 200 bestselling editions in 20 languages in more than 190 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel.


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This week's podcast: Bari Weiss and the influence of woke orthodoxy at the New York Times

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When I read the Bari Weiss resignation letter, I knew (#DUH) that it represented an important development at The New York Times and, thus, in American journalism.

I thought that for legal reasons linked to the omnipresent newsroom reality called Slack — the software program that businesses use for in-house discussions, memos and chatter.

Please read the following comments from Weiss — in a letter to the publisher of the Times — and pretend that you are a lawyer who specializes in civil lawsuits claiming workplace discrimination and verbal violence.

My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public.

If Weiss sues the Times, will her legal team — during the discovery process — be able to access those Slack files? How many posts did she save to back her case? Could Times leaders claim a right to privacy there, after years of doing coverage based on internal communications in other offices?

Big questions, but are they linked to religion — other than the Weiss claims that some of her colleagues kept asking why she was “writing about the Jews again”? Was there material here for a “Crossroads” podcast?

As it turned out, there was lots to talk about (click here to tune that in). The key word in the discussion? That would be “orthodoxy.”


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Podcast: Jump in GetReligion WABAC machine and explore roots of @NYTimes revolt

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When I was a kid in the 1960s — soon after the cooling of the Earth’s crust — I was a big fan of the The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. My favorite feature was the show within the show entitled “Peabody's Improbable History," in which the WABAC machine transported the brilliant Mr. Peabody (a dog, actually) and his boy Sherman (an actual boy) into the past to have wonderful adventures.

At two points in my life I have been a fan of the BBC Doctor Who series — especially Tom Baker as Doctor No. 4 and Peter Capaldi as No. 12.

So this time travel thing is a useful concept, methinks, even when dealing with trends in postmodern journalism. You’ll see that (or hear it) during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). In this particular post we will be making four stops, although we could make a dozen.

Turn on the WABAC machine and tell me — as a reflection on the latest editorial explosion in the New York Times newsroom — who said or wrote the following (don’t click the link yet) after debates about fair and accurate coverage of what event?

As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.

That, of course, was part of a letter from New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and executive editor Dean Baquet — responding to complaints that their newspaper had botched coverage of the 2016 White House race and the rise of Donald Trump.

How do those words hold up right now?

The key issue, according to Times public editor Liz Spayd, was whether America’s most influential newsroom was interested in doing accurate, informed, fair-minded coverage of roughly half of the American population. See this column, in particular: “Want to Know What America’s Thinking? Try Asking.” Here is a key chunk of that:


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Be honest: After journalism earthquakes of the past week or so, wouldn't you head for the hills?

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Where are you, right now, on your end-of-the-world bingo board?

Has anything happened that really pushed you over the edge?

Maybe it was the whole Murder Hornet thing.

How about the large asteroid that is scheduled to pass somewhat close to earth?

I’ll admit that the anti-racism rioters defacing the Abraham Lincoln statue in London was a body blow.

But that wasn’t as bad as the retired African-American police officer being killed while defending a store from looters. I’m not sure that had anything to do with #BlackLivesMatter.

Maybe I’m forgetting something? Oh, right, the coronavirus. How about Donald Trump, pepper spray, rubber bullets and that strange Bible drill? Talk about efforts to cancel “Paw Patrol”? And no baseball (right, Bobby Ross, Jr.?). All that and a large chunk of the New York Times newsroom doing its best to kick off a red-state vs. blue-state journalism war. Basically, the advocacy press doctrines of Kellerism (click here for origin of this GetReligion term) are now being applied by Times people to a wider array of news topics.

It all kinds of adds up, especially for old journalists like me. So I am heading to the hills. Actually, I already live in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains outside of Knoxville, Tenn., but my family is going to make one of its regular escapes deep into the mountains of North Carolina.

Forget WiFi. We’re talking about a blue-collar valley where cell signals are so weak that the wind pretty much needs to be blowing from the right direction to send a text message. But, as I have said before, the rocking chairs work fine and so does the gravel road next to the river. And barbecue.

GetReligion will stay open, sort of. This week’s podcast will go up tomorrow. There will be a think piece of two over the weekend and I’ll come back down to “normality” early next week. And if you want to read a fine mood piece on the journalism side of this craziness, let me point readers back to this Clemente Lisi piece: “Journalism cancels its moral voice: What does this mean for Catholic news? For religion news?”

Lisi — as a New Yorker’s New Yorker — basically opened a vein and said what he needed to say. He told me, via email, that he started this piece over and over and finally wrote something he could live with.

So here is a crucial chunk of that. Let us attend:


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