Business

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About that semi-apology by Chick-fil-A czar: Is this a mainstream news story or not?

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As we approached New Year’s Day, and this new era in GetReligion.org work, religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling started floating some trial balloons in our team’s behind-the-scenes email chatter.

For example, he suggested that we needed to run short, punchy commentary items every now and then when there was an interesting religion-beat story breaking or there was a potential story lurking somewhere in the digital weeds.

Long ago, GetReligion even had a “Got News?” logo for that kind of thing, atop posts that pointed to interesting, potentially newsworthy items in denominational wire services or other alternative sources of religion-beat information.

So what would this look like? Maybe something like this. Have you seen any mainstream news coverage of the leader of Chick-fil-A writing a letter admitting that his company messed up the whole ties-that-bind situation with Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

This story is all over the place in conservative Christian media, but, so far, I’m not seeing anything in the mainstream press. Here is the headline at DISRN: “Chick-fil-A CEO laments “inadvertently discrediting outstanding organizations" in giving strategy switch.”

So is this a story or not? It’s obvious that the original funding shift was a story, because it caused a firestorm in elite media (must-read Bobby Ross post here). Now there is this, care of DISRN:

In an open letter to the American Family Association (AFA), Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy expressed that the company "inadvertently discredited several outstanding organizations" when the fast food giant announced it would be restructuring its philanthropic strategy by halting donations to the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes last year.

AFA President Tim Wildmon had written Cathy asking if Chick-fil-A would publicly state that both ministries are not hate groups because of their beliefs concerning sexuality, marriage, and family.

Cathy responded:


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Nonprofit groups destined to command big chunk of journalism? What about religion news?

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As the 2020s dawn, the Internet-ravaged newspaper business is paying close attention to The Salt Lake Tribune, long known for independent-minded reporting that includes stellar religion coverage by Peggy Fletcher Stack and colleagues. The  148-year old Trib is conducting an experiment as the first important U.S. daily to turn non-profit. 

A related phenomenon is wealthy investors who needn’t fret about profits purchasing, e.g., the Boston Globe, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Diego Union-Tribune, Washington Post, Time magazine and The Atlantic. (The latter made good use of a $490,000 Henry Luce Foundation grant for religion coverage.) 

Are charities and nonprofit groups destined to command a major chunk of American news reporting, including religion coverage? 

 On the religion beat, we see The Associated Press’s deal to distribute copy from two non-profits, Religion News Service (which has emphasized opinion pieces in recent times) and TheConversation.com (which re-frames scholars’ thinking for general audiences).  This innovation is funded by $4.9 million from the Lilly Endowment. (Disclosure: The Guy was an AP religion writer 1998-2006). 

An example of this newborn joint operation is “Reparations and Religion: 50 Years after ‘Black Manifesto’,” a solid  RNS article The AP transmitted December 30 that was widely picked up online by other media.

Notably, the article has a double byline. Matthew Cressler, no journalist  but a religion-and-race scholar at the College of  Charleston, is named first out of alphabetical order, indicating priority over co-author Adelle Banks, a well-respected RNS reporter.


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Thinking along with Emma Green: Sen. Josh Hawley dares to tilt at many GOP windmills

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It’s the question that many politicos have been asking: What happens to the Republican Party after the Citizen Donald Trump era?

Here’s another question that is linked to that: What happens to cultural and religious conservatives — those that backed Trump and those that opposed him (openly or privately) — after this fever dance of an administration is over?

That was the topic looming in the background of a recent Emma Green think piece (yes, another one) at The Atlantic that ran with this headline: “Josh Hawley’s Mission to Remake the GOP.”

In most press coverage, the Missouri freshman is painted as a rather standard-issue conservative in the U.S. Senate. After all, those conservatives are all alike — even if libertarian folks often clash with religious conservatives in ways that don’t get much ink.

However, journalists who parse the texts produced by Hawley will notice strange subplots, like the fact that he is known for, as Green puts it, “casually citing the philosopher Edmund Burke and the Christian monk Pelagius in a single stretch.” But here is the paragraph where things get serious:

His speeches around town, including one he delivered … while accepting an award at the annual gala of the American Principles Project Foundation, a socially conservative public-policy organization, are bracingly defiant of Republican orthodoxy: He rails against income inequality, condemns the policy deference afforded to corporations, and speaks warmly about the civic value of labor unions. He often talks about the “great American middle” being crushed by the decline of local communities, the winner-take-all concentration of wealth, and the inaccessibility of higher education. And he said that the modern Republican Party’s split over competing impulses toward free-market economics and social conservatism has led some conservatives to ignore the effects of their policies on the middle and working class. “It’s time to do away with that,” he told me.

You need another clash?


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Another Salvation Army story: This time, Nordstrom's dumps its famous bellringer

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The Salvation Army is the world’s largest social services provider, serving 23 million individuals a year. It is a venerable organization here in Seattle, active for at least 50 years, with bell ringers all over the city and surrounding suburbs.

Lately, it’s been clashing with the department store empire Nordstroms; it too a Seattle institution that was founded in 1901.

The Army’s been having a bad month PR-wise after the fast food giant Chick-fil-A announced it would no longer donate to them, ostensibly because both organizations have gotten a bad rap from homosexual groups. The Army’s been denying left and right that it discriminates, but the knives are out and what better place than liberal Seattle to wield them?

So The Seattle Times ran this on Christmas Eve:

For 19 years, 85-year-old Dick Clarke has raised money for The Salvation Army during the holiday season — 18 of them ringing a bell beside a red kettle for donations outside Nordstrom’s downtown Seattle store. He loved the conversations and the feeling of giving back through the more than $100,000 he collected. He volunteered five days a week, six hours a day.

“The best thing I like about Thanksgiving is the next day I go to work,” said the retired teacher and principal.

Or that’s how he used to feel. This year, Nordstrom told The Salvation Army it would no longer allow solicitation in front of its doors.

Beyond stating that policy, Nordstrom spokeswoman Jennifer Tice Walker did not answer questions about the change. But Clarke said he was told in a meeting last week with head of stores Jamie Nordstrom that LGBTQ employees said The Salvation Army’s presence made them uncomfortable.

Apparently this decision was made several weeks ago.

Why the Times didn’t get around to printing this until now is a mystery. Maybe it just had “Christmas Story” written all over it. And how many uncomfortable Nordstrom’s employees are we talking about here? One? Five? Ten?


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Merry, well, happy, uh, Trump-era SOMETHING from Twitter, care of Ryan Burge

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So, the day is finally here. It’s Christmas (unless you are part of an old-calendar Orthodox parish).

In shopping-mall liturgy, today marked the end of Christmas — which began just before Halloween with the running of the first cable-TV holiday movies. If you are part of a congregation that is into things like Christian tradition (or Charles DIckens), then the season has just started. In a way, old-school Christmas is rather nice — since the advertising tsunami has passed by.

I realize that some people have been greeting friends and family with “Merry Christmas” — or “Happy Christmas,” for Brits — for weeks now. Others have been more careful and stuck with “Happy Holidays.” Some of us old-school folks waited, you know, until Christmas to start saying, “Merry Christmas.”

But is this choice actually POLITICAL, in this age in which everything can be interpreted as a statement against or in favor of you know what and you know who?

What about on Twitter? What language did you use?

Yes, it’s time for another Ryan Burge chart.


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Wired reports on the trumpet-blaring donations of Marc Benioff

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A 6,400-word article in Wired about the founder and CEO of Salesforce (who rescued Time from the silken coffin of the Meredith Corp.) sounds promising at first, and its headline — “The Gospel of Wealth According to Marc Benioff” — suggests insights into what makes the man tick.

Now, having read all of it twice through, I’m saddened by the thinness of Benioff’s presentation and execution. Benioff, like many others in woke capitalism, already has shown his willingness to use the threatened absence of his company as a way of punishing states that pass laws he considers flawed.

Wired’s report, by contributor Chris Colin, also shows Benioff’s willingness to use philanthropy as a way of shaming his fellow Bay Area executives who express contrary but mainstream opinions.

Colin writes about Benioff’s involvement in San Francisco’s Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax Ordinance (Proposition C):

Declaring that “our city is in a crisis,” he threw his full support behind the measure that promised to take his company’s money. He publicly outflanked the city’s ostensibly liberal mayor, London Breed—who opposed it on grounds that the measure didn’t allow for enough accountability—and pledged upward of $2 million to the Prop. C campaign. But it was on Twitter that Benioff truly went to town. “As SF’s largest employer we recognize we are part of the solution,” he declared on October 9.

Jack Dorsey, cofounder and CEO of Twitter and founder and CEO of Square, surely still smarts from what followed.

“I want to help fix the homeless problem in SF and California. I don’t believe this (Prop C) is the best way to do it,” Dorsey replied. “Mayor Breed was elected to fix this. I trust her.”

Maybe Dorsey hadn’t spent much time on Twitter. In 279 characters Benioff calmly eviscerated him.


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Emergency contraception clashes with generic 'beliefs'? Readers needed more facts

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Back in my hard-news reporting days, I did more than my share of stories that I knew were going to make people angry. I knew that some of them would call the newsroom to complain to editors.

Welcome to the religion beat. On some stories there’s no way to make everybody happy. In fact, I learned that it was possible to do coverage that made people on both sides mad. This was especially true when covering topics linked to abortion, where there are often extreme activists on both sides — people who want their views in the newspaper and not the views of their opponents.

When covering this kind of story, I often knew that I would make both sides mad and that was a good thing, if it meant that I provided information that was crucial to the beliefs and arguments of “pro-livers” and “pro-choice” people.

That leads me to a recent story that was called to my attention by a longtime liberal reader of this blog. The headline: “MN woman sues two pharmacies for refusing to fill emergency contraception prescription.”

The woman at the heart of the story, 39-year-old Andrea Anderson, is a mother with five children who went to her doctor with an urgent request. Here’s the heart of the story:

Anderson's doctor wrote a prescription for emergency contraception. She called ahead to Thrifty White Pharmacy, the only drug store in town, to make sure the morning-after pill would be available.

"You have five days to take it, so the clock was ticking," Anderson said.

But in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Aitkin County, with the help of Gender Justice, a legal nonprofit, Anderson alleged the pharmacist George Badeaux refused to fill it based on his "beliefs" and "warned" against trying another nearby pharmacy. 

Yes, we have the word “beliefs” in scare quotes. But this time around, that’s not the big problem here.

As the GetReligion reader noted: “Gonna guess religion had something to do with those ‘beliefs.’ Just a hunch.”


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Washington Post and ReligionUnplugged both land stories on Mormon $100 billion slush fund

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Well, it was a race to the finish as to who’d land the story Monday night about a secret –- and possibly illegal - -$100 billion fund made up of Mormon tithes

We think the Washington Post made it to the finish line first, but it was neck-in-neck with Paul Glader, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who now oversees Religion Unplugged. It should be noted that GetReligion and Religion UnPlugged do share some content, but I’m not privy to how Glader got the story other than his note atop his piece that says a source called him in November.

Glader was working solo for the past month or so; the Post had three people on this story plus another two helping out, not to mention the former IRS official they pulled in for advice. I am glad that the Post didn’t just rely on its business reporters but pulled Michelle Boorstein, its senior religion-beat writer, onto the story.

I am curious why the two Salt Lake newpapers totally missed this story as did the Journal, which is usually on top of financial scandals but has continues to lag way behind on breaking religion news.

We will start with ReligionUnplugged:

NEW YORK — A whistleblower complaint filed at the Internal Revenue Service in November by a knowledgeable church member alleges that a non-profit supporting organization controlled by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints used member tithes to amass more than $100 billion in a set of investment funds and the Church misled members about uses of the money.

The complaint may be the most important look at LDS finances in decades, a window into one of the wealthiest religious organizations in the United States and the world. Details of the IRS filing reveal financial assets largely hidden from the church’s membership (often known as “Mormons”) and the public view.


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Breaking news: Man gives 10 percent of his income to charity — what a revolutionary concept

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Let’s not waste any time.

We need to get right to a recent scoop by Vox.

Here it is: According to the headline, a man has given at least 10 percent of his income to charity for 10 years running.

Yes, I know how amazing that must sound to everyone just hearing about it for the first time.

“What a revolutionary idea,” said one person (actually, lots of people) on Twitter.

“Huh,” suggested another. “If only we had a word for this. One syllable? Rhymes with Blythe maybe. I don’t know. Maybe this guy can invent the word.”

Great idea! I suggest we all think real hard and try to come up with such a word.

In the meantime, here is Vox’s lede:

Ten years ago, in November 2009, a philosopher at Oxford named Toby Ord set up an organization called Giving What We Can. His idea was to ask people to commit, with him, to donate at least 10 percent of their income every year to highly effective charities. Ord chose to donate to organizations working to fight global poverty.

This commitment, from a not particularly well-paid research fellow, earned Ord profiles at the time from the likes of the BBC, the Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journal.

Ten years later, over 4,000 people from a wide range of backgrounds — including hedge funders, prominent philosophers like the late Derek Parfit, 2019 Nobel laureate in economics Michael Kremer, and, uh, me — are on the list of signatories.

Ord is now a senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford and has since cofounded the effective altruist movement with fellow philosophers Will MacAskill and Peter Singer. Giving What We Can is now part of a broader suite of organizations under the Center for Effective Altruism, trying to persuade people they can use their time and money to make the world a substantially better place by giving to good causes.

Alrighty.


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