If you were going to create an FAQ built on complaints from ordinary news consumers about the journalism biz, some variation on this question would have to be at or near the top of the list: “Why do journalists cover so much bad news? Why do they ignore all the good things that people do in our town/city/country/world and focus only on the bad things that a small handful of people do?”
I believe it was the late Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News fame who said something like this (I’ve been hunting, but can’t find the quote): It would be a terrible thing if we lived in a world in which good news was so rare that everyone considered it unique and truly newsworthy.
If you pay attention to religion threads on Twitter, you know that we are living through a textbook case study of people arguing about this subject. This time, the question looks like this: Why are the few pastors who reject “shelter in place” orders getting so much ink with their face-to-face worship services, while the vast majority of clergy who have moved their rites online — often for the first time — are getting little or no coverage? I have already written about this twice at GetReligion — look here and then here.
Some people are upset, I think, because the rebels are all independent church leaders who, as a rule, perfectly match each and every stereotype of the angry white evangelicals and Pentecostals who back, you know, Citizen Donald Trump. In a way, this is a life-and-death example of the great evangelical monolith myth. Here is what people are feeling: How come some angry preacher deep in the Bible Belt is getting all this coverage and, well, online efforts by the still massive Southern Baptist Convention are ignored?
Frankly, the leap to online worship hasn’t been ignored. It has been covered over and over in local and regional news and in a few national stories that have not received all that much attention.
It’s also true — you know this if you follow Twitter — that Catholic and Eastern Orthodox people have been arguing about “shelter in place” rules, as well. The news there is that bishops have been making decisions to protect their priests and laypeople (see my most recent “On Religion” column). That’s a big story, too.
So what do these mad-preacher stories look like? For some reason, Reuters seems to be Ground Zero. Consider this headline: “The Americans defying Palm Sunday quarantines: 'Satan's trying to keep us apart'.” The story opens with a brave woman near Cincinnati who is staying at home and then jumps to this:
