Ethics

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Podcast: How the tragic fall and suicide of a pastor-politico became national clickbait

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Podcast: How the tragic fall and suicide of a pastor-politico became national clickbait

I get waves of emails and in that flood I always look forward to hearing from former Getreligionistas.

Obviously, no one knows more about news stories that I need to see than journalists who have spent time writing for this weblog. Since we’re nearing our 20th birthday, that’s an interesting, deep list of former contributors who get what we do and why we do it.

A few days ago, Mark Kellner — currently covering religion news for The Washington Times — sent a note asking my reactions to the tragic suicide of the Rev. F.L. “Bubba” Copeland in Alabama. Kellner was reacting to one of those long tabloid headlines that are common in the online edition of The Daily Mail:

Inside the secret life of Bubba Copeland: How Alabama mayor and pastor adopted a second persona online — becoming a transitioning curvy girl called Brittini — before killing himself

There’s a lot of news happening right now and, to be honest, I had not clicked into the stream of stories about Copeland’s life and death. However, when I did I immediately saw an issue that I thought would interest listeners for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

Kellner said I could share his concerns here, focusing on the first report from a conservative Alabama news and commentary website:

Given that Mr. Copeland had not been charged with any crime, should "1819news.com" have "outed" him? Yes, his behavior was odd, to say the least, for a pastor and a local politician. But having strange fantasies and even posting them online isn't necessarily criminal. It might merit his removal from the pulpit and perhaps his defeat at the next mayoral election, but apparently, this online report — and the subsequent media storm — pushed a rather fragile soul over the edge. 

In short: Does the media exist to crucify people without real cause? If someone is a child molester or otherwise acts inappropriately or illegally, that's one thing. But there should be a line somewhere, right?

Here is the key, for me. This started out as a rather sensationalistic (to say the least) story about a man who was clearly a public figure in Alabama (yes, a photo of Copeland with President Donald Trump pushed buttons). At the same time, Copeland was also the pastor of a Southern Baptist congregation, a flock of believers that has been quite outspoken on matters of sexual morality.


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Hey, Tennessean folks: Has SBC President Bart Barber changed theologically? Yes or no?

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Hey, Tennessean folks: Has SBC President Bart Barber changed theologically? Yes or no?

This is a strange one. In a recent profile of the Rev. Bart Barber — the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention — the Nashville Tennessean team did something that was both unusual and totally predictable.

Unusual? My state’s dominant newspaper used a theological term when it needed to find an accurate political term, of some kind. Yes, you read that right. I just urged some journalists — in this case — to use accurate “political” language instead of mangled doctrinal language.

Predictable? The abused theological term was “fundamentalist.”

To make matters even more complicated, the Tennessean used an ACCURATE historical-political reference in the headline — “Bart Barber defied the Conservative Resurgence. How it is now shaping his SBC leadership” — and then turned around and used “fundamentalist” in the overture.

Dang it! (I will also ask: Is the pronoun “it” in the headline a reference to Barber’s decisive act of defiance or to the Conservative Resurgence itself?) Here’s that flawed overture:

Bart Barber defied the top brass.

In May 2018, the Texas pastor and his fellow trustees at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth fired seminary president Paige Patterson, the architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Following years of financial-related controversies, revelations about Patterson mishandling reports of sexual abuse pushed Southwestern’s board past a point of no return.

Barber, once a loyal foot soldier in Patterson’s movement, was a decisive vote in Patterson’s dismissal, thereby severing his allegiance. 

The emphasis on the “Conservative Resurgence” as a movement inside the SBC is accurate, since that is a commonly used term among historians. The Tennessean kind of explained that term later in the story, and we will get to that.

After making that wise choice, why use the church-history term “fundamentalist” at the top of the story? That’s a word that fit with some Southern Baptists who supported (as opposed to leading) the “Conservative Resurgence,” but not to all. Using that term also suggested that Barber has changed some of his theological beliefs, as opposed to his stance on crucial issues in SBC politics.

I see zero evidence in this news report that Barber has changed theologically. It that is the case, then ask him hard questions about that and then report the answers.


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Pope Francis vs. Bishop Strickland feud highlights the good and bad of journalism today

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Pope Francis vs. Bishop Strickland feud highlights the good and bad of journalism today

Another week and yet another headline about Pope Francis feuding with a doctrinally conservative American prelate.

It’s become an all-too-common story and one that the legacy media often can’t resist.

It was late last month that the pope lamented what he called a “reactionary” Catholic church in the United States, where he said political ideology had replaced faith. Pope Francis had made the comments on August 5 in a private meeting in Lisbon — published three weeks later by the Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica — with members of the Jesuit order, of which he is a member, during his trip for World Youth Day.

The pope’s comments, and the expected fallout, were widely covered by both the secular and Catholic press in the United States and abroad.

The latest salvo in this transatlantic war-of-words took place last week, on Sept. 11, when The Pillar reported that the pope had “discussed with Vatican officials the prospect of requesting the resignation of Bishop Joseph Strickland of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas.”

This is what The Pillar reported:

The pope met Sept. 9 with Archbishop Robert Prevost, OSA, head of the Dicastery for Bishops, and Archbishop Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to the United States — both cardinals-elect.

Several sources close to the dicastery told The Pillar ahead of the meeting that the prelates would present the pope with the results of an apostolic visitation of Stickland’s diocese, conducted earlier this year, as well as subsequent public actions by the bishop, who has emerged as an outspoken critic of the Holy Father.

“The situation of Bishop Strickland is the agenda,” one senior official close to the dicastery told The Pillar, “and the expectation is that the Holy Father will be requesting his resignation — that will certainly be the recommendation put to him.”

While noting that the papal audience did not exclusively concern the Bishop of Tyler, who has previously accused the pope of having a “program [for] undermining the Deposit of Faith,” the official said that Strickland’s case was set to be the “primary point of discussion.”


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How AI may be able to improve journalism when it comes to reporting on Catholicism

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How AI may be able to improve journalism when it comes to reporting on Catholicism

One of the things I enjoy about the summer is catching up with people I haven’t seen all year to discuss news, politics and culture. Since so many of my friends are in the news business, inevitably the state of the mass media comes up as a topic.

The one constant subject that has arisen from these conversations is the rise (and potential threat) of artificial intelligence. Specifically, the topic of how AI can (and will) replace humans who report and write for a living.

While machines have yet to replace all writers, the threat is real. This isn’t just limited to journalists. AI has impacted Hollywood (look at the current writers strike), education (from grade school to college) and the retail industry. And yes, journalism is up there to when it comes to an industry seen as under threat, according to a poll conducted earlier this year.

AI a either a new technological monster or a friend to journalists. The industry is divided by the issue. Like the internet back in the 1990s, AI is both astonishing and perplexing.

How has AI and machine learning impacted journalism? Can it make it better or worse? These are just two valid questions people in newsrooms are asking. The question here at GetReligion is how AI could affect religion-beat work and, in this case, the state of Catholic news and publications.

For starters, consider that there will be 10 new AP Stylebook entries to caution journalists about common pitfalls in coverage of artificial intelligence. Here’s what the Associated Press said:

While AP staff may experiment with ChatGPT with caution, they do not use it to create publishable content.

Any output from a generative AI tool should be treated as unvetted source material. AP staff must apply their editorial judgment and AP’s sourcing standards when considering any information for publication.


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Want a tough, newsy 'theodicy' question? 'If God is good, why do animals suffer?'

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Want a tough, newsy 'theodicy' question? 'If God is good, why do animals suffer?'

QUESTION:

If God is good, why do animals suffer?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

This question was the sub-headline for a recent cover story in Christianity Today magazine (“Why Does Creation Groan?”) by Calvin University theologian John R. Schneider. It’s a twist  on the age-old problem defined as follows by the eminent Christian intellectual C.S. Lewis in his best-selling classic “The Problem of Pain”:

“If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”

Early in the COVID-19 scourge, The Religion Guy attempted to scan the current discussions in a field known technically as “theodicy” — as here. The issue is as ancient as the Bible’s poetic masterpiece from thousands of years ago, the Book of Job, which provides no snappy formulas to answer these mysteries.

Regarding humanity and its problems, theologians have blamed evils on humans’ free will that necessarily allows dire events to occur, and/or on Satan and demonic minions. However, the scale and depth of, for instance, the mass extermination of the Nazi Holocaust  raised the persistent but unanswerable question in both Jewish and Christian circles of why God did not miraculously intervene.

Writing just prior to that and other World War II atrocities, and his own battle wounds from World War I, Lewis advised us to be careful in thinking about God as “all-powerful” because He obviously cannot do things that by their nature are impossible to do. Along similar lines, leading contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame proposed that we cannot logically conceive of any possible universe where the Creator allows human free will to operate and at the same time our existence lacks all sin and consequently all suffering.


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Thinking about C.S. Lewis and today's emerging prophets of transhumanism

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Thinking about C.S. Lewis and today's emerging prophets of transhumanism

Are there any C.S. Lewis enthusiasts in the house?

How about people who, well, detest the famous Oxford don and Christian apologist?

It is my hope that this think piece (pounded out during a two-week road trip) will appeal to both.

Right now, I am about to finish reading — for the 10th time, or something like that — the Lewis “Science fiction trilogy.” It ends with “That Hideous Strength,” a head-spinning mix of science fiction, Arthurian legend and a blistering satire of stuffy, insular, corrupt, boring elites in British higher education (in other words, the world in which Lewis lived until his death in 1963). It’s the narrative fiction take on his prophetic “The Abolition of Man.”

I do not want to give away the plot, of course. But the big idea is that elite there’s that word again) scientific materialists, in a quest for their own brand of immortality and desire to modify the human person, turn to the occult and, well, the Powers of Darkness. You may never hear the term “head,” when used to describe the leader of a school or movement, again without thinking of this book.

So what would Lewis think of this haunting feature from Suzy Weiss at The Free Press? Here’s the double-decker headline:

The Tech Messiahs Who Want to Deliver Us from Death

They see death as a software error — and they have a plan for fixing it. But should they?

The overture:

Kai Micah Mills is going to freeze his parents. 

“They’re both going to be cryopreserved, regardless of their wishes,” Mills told me. 


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Elite editors often ignore Catholic stories, so why is St. Pope John Paul II a target?

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Elite editors often ignore Catholic stories, so why is St. Pope John Paul II a target?

What is news? Who gets to define that term?

These are questions that I ask students when I teach journalism during their freshman year in college.

It sounds like a simple question — but increasingly an important one as we examine trends in recent religion coverage in the news media.

The bottom line: There is a trend where many religion stories — especially those regarding Catholicism — receive zero coverage whatsoever in the secular mainstream press. However, stories about evangelicals, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodoxy and other faiths have also vanished or never appeared in the first place.

When some issues do get coverage, it’s often because it has more to do with politics than debates about doctrine, theology or faith. Why?

That’s the key question.

It takes us back to the original question: What is news?

This trend includes Catholic stories that I have written about here — vandalism of churches/pro-life centers and the FBI spying on parishioners — and others that I have not regarding other faith traditions such as the split in the Anglican Communion.

All of these stories are news — “big” news, even. However, they clash with what left-leaning readers of major legacy news organizations want to see and hear in the publications that they support with their online clicks and subscription payments. That appears to affect a majority of elite editors and reporters (click here for tmatt’s Religion & Liberty manifesto on that topic).

Coverage of these stories either never happened or just vanished, like the manifesto of the Nashville school shooter. Regarding Catholic storylines, a recent First Things essay — written by a prominent American bishop — that all but accused a cardinal of heresy never drew any mainstream media ink.

Neither have the statements of a progressive cardinal who now heads the pro-life Vatican office who says he has no issue with euthanasia.


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FBI war on 'rad trad' Catholics: Where's the outrage (or even fairness) in press coverage?

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FBI war on 'rad trad' Catholics: Where's the outrage (or even fairness) in press coverage?

There are several factors that, when put together, make an event or trend a news story. 

The first is that it is new. It’s not a coincidence that the first three letters of the word news helps to form the word “new.”

Then there’s timing. Not just “what,” but also “when” something happens makes it newsworthy. “What” and “when” are essential to the five W’s (which also includes “where,” “who” and “why”) that reporters and editors worry most when determining news coverage.

The inability for certain types of stories to register with the secular press, especially legacy media, is yet another sign of the political, cultural and moral divisions in our society and the dying American model of the press. 

While this space is very much dedicated to critiquing news coverage of Catholic issues and those involving Catholics, it is very difficult to do so when there is little to no coverage of important Catholic stories by a very sizable chunk of the American media ecosystem. 

This takes us to a trio of stories involving the federal government and the Catholic church that took place during the first half of this month. At a time of year where the mainstream media is seeking Christian storylines to coincide with Lent, Holy Week and Easter Sunday (beyond photos of elaborate hats), the three stories I am about to dissect here drew very little mainstream media attention.

Instead, it was the Catholic press (once again!) and “conservative” secular media that did the bulk of the reporting on, for my first example, the issue regarding the decision by Walter Reed Hospital to drop a contract for Franciscan priests to provide pastoral care of patients and, instead, hiring a secular firm to oversee those same services going forward. Try to imagine “secular” Last Rites for Catholics?

The second was the decision by the Department of Justice to recommend zero jail time in a plea deal involving a suspect charged with destruction of property at a Catholic church in Washington last year.

Finally, there were, according to documents, traditional Catholics who were targeted by the FBI because they could be considered domestic terrorists.


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Will someone please tell editors at the Washington Post how to cover protests fairly?

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Will someone please tell editors at the Washington Post how to cover protests fairly?

Recently I saw that the Washington Post was running a story about drag queens, so I began reading it until I realized it was sheer puffery on behalf of the author and undisguised bigotry against some unnamed religious protestors.

Then I looked up the name of the reporter who’d written this piece and I saw she was the same one who wrote a lyrical ode to a woman who was organizing demonstrations outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavannaugh.

We typically don’t criticize reporters by name here at GetReligion unless the offense is truly bad and there are consistent patterns. We focus on the stilted point of view; the things left unsaid; the side that got ignored. But when the reporter does the same thing over and over again, it’s time to say enough.

I’ve reached that point with Post reporter Ellie Silverman, who covers protests and activism.  Both these topics involve conflict; both sides of a conflict have real live people in their midst and these people deserve a hearing, no matter how much the reporter may personally feel about a matter.

Silverman doesn’t appear to get that concept.

We all have covered movements and public events that require us to interview participants with which we disagree. The mark of a professional is be adept enough at covering the matter, neither side knows how you feel about the topic.

This isn’t the case with Silverman’s stories. In her latest, she focuses on drag queens and, obviously, her inability to understand why religious folks have a problem with drag-queen performances for children:

Lily Pastor knew who she was and wanted to celebrate it. So, last month, she joined about 50 other volunteers to turn a Capitol Hill sidewalk into a rainbow-filled dance party outside Crazy Aunt Helen’s, a restaurant that was hosting a story time event with a drag queen.

Anti-trans protesters had gathered across the street and were deriding hormone therapy, a treatment that provided Pastor a way to feel more like herself. But Pastor said standing alongside the people she met — a trans man, a queer teacher, straight allies — was empowering.


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