Kellerism

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More letters, even from the left, mourning the Gray Lady's slide into advocacy journalism

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There she goes, there she goes again.

Right there in the sacred pages of The New York Times.

You remember, I hope, Liz Spayd -- the pro-American Model of the press scribe who is currently serving as public editor at the Times. During the media meltdown after the election of Citizen Donald Trump as president, she wrote a column addressing the fact that the Gray Lady, as well as the rest of America's elite media, missed this story for some pretty obvious reasons.

The headline for her column said it all: "Want to Know What America’s Thinking? Try Asking."

In my second post about the MSM meltdown, I underlined this passage from her Times column:

Readers are sending letters of complaint at a rapid rate. Here’s one that summed up the feelings succinctly, from Kathleen Casey of Houston: “Now, that the world has been upended and you are all, to a person, in a state of surprise and shock, you may want to consider whether you should change your focus from telling the reader what and how to think, and instead devote yourselves to finding out what the reader (and nonreaders) actually think.”

Another letter, from Nick Crawford of Plymouth, Mich., made a similar point. “Perhaps the election result would not be such a surprise if your reporting had acknowledged what ordinary Americans care about, rather than pushing the limited agenda of your editors,” he wrote. “Please come down from your New York City skyscraper and join the rest of us.”

Well, bless her heart, Spayd is back with another column on this topic and, in it, she offers more insights from the flood of letters and emails continue to swamp her desk. This time the headline reads: "One Thing Voters Agree On: Better Campaign Coverage Was Needed."

First, a bit of factual information about this wave of feedback:


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While media focus on dangers to gays, anti-Trump mobs tear up the streets

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Every so often, the New York Times gifts us with an article that breaks new ground in being so one-sided, off-the-rails and lacking in even the most elementary sense of fairness that one runs out of words to describe it.

While the Gray Lady runs pieces about how a country under Trump might turn out badly for the LGBTQ crowd, mobs of anti-Trump supporters recreated their own kind of media-friendly, multicultural riots a few nights ago on the streets of Portland, Ore. More on that in a moment. 

What the Times does is museum-quality Kellerism, a term created by tmatt several years ago to portray an attitude among the MSM. In this case, societal persecution of gays and lesbians is the prevailing narrative and other points of view, primarily linked to the First Amendment, don’t deserve space or explanation. It is a term that means that a media outlet that has made up its mind on a certain hot button issue to the point where there is no legitimate other side to the story. See if you can spot the Kellerism factor below:

The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency sent panic through much of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, which for the first time in eight years will face an administration hostile to its civil rights goals and a president-elect who has expressed a desire to reverse many of its political gains.
Jay Brown, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, said its office had received calls throughout the day on Wednesday from frightened people who wanted to know what the election results might mean for them.
Some callers wondered if they should speed up wedding plans so they could be married before the inauguration, in case a President Trump tries to overturn gay marriage, he said. Others worried that the military would reinstate “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the ban on openly gay and lesbian service members that ended in 2011.


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Meltdown update: Does the New York Times want to cover America's heart and soul?

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The leaders of the New York Times have, for more than a decade, known that many of their critics -- loving critics and otherwise -- believe that the world's most powerful newsroom lacks intellectual, cultural and religious diversity.

After all, that was one of the main conclusions in the visionary "Preserving Our Readers' Trust" document (.pdf here) released in 2005 after a sweeping self-study of ethics issues in the newsroom (to state things mildly).

Anyone who wants to understand the back story to the current Times meltdown over Donald Trump and the lives of many Americans who voted for him must read that document. Yes, that document also meshes nicely with the latest pro-journalism sermon ("Want to Know What America’s Thinking? Try Asking") from Liz Spayd, the public editor at the Times. Hold that thought.

After the release of the 2005 self study, then editor Bill Keller released his formal response, "Assuring Our Credibility (.pdf here)." Like the self study, this document was haunted by issues linked to coverage of religious and cultural issues. One more time, let's look at Keller's conclusion:

First and foremost we hire the best reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the business. But we will make an extra effort to focus on diversity of religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class.
Of course, diversifying the range of viewpoints reported -- and understood -- in our pages is not mainly a matter of hiring a more diverse work force. It calls for a concerted effort by all of us to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation.

See the connections to the current debates? #DUH

And finally:

I also endorse the committee's recommendation that we cover religion more extensively, but I think the key to that is not to add more reporters who will write about religion as a beat. I think the key is to be more alert to the role religion plays in many stories we cover, stories of politics and policy, national and local, stories of social trends and family life, stories of how we live. This is important to us not because we want to appease believers or pander to conservatives, but because good journalism entails understanding more than just the neighborhood you grew up in.

Amen. However, note that Keller -- for some reason -- feared that hiring more professionals with training or experience in religion-news coverage might be seen as appeasing "believers" or pandering to "conservatives." That's one way to read that paragraph.

Let's move on.


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10 years of GetReligion: Why we are still here, part II

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Truth be told, your GetReligionistas do not have the power to bust ghosts. However, we have been known to spot ghosts on a regular basis and to sound warnings. Ultimately, only the editors and reporters who work in mainstream newsrooms can do anything about all of the religion ghosts that haunt so many of their news reports.

So what is this “ghost” thing all about and why, for the past 10 years, has this concept mattered so much to us here at GetReligion? Let me explain.

Many of our readers continue to assume that GetReligion.org exists (a) to provide coverage of religion news events or (b) to provide a platform for people who want to argue about religious doctrines and trends in the past, present and future. In response, we keep chanting: This is not a religion-news site. This is a site about how many professionals in the mainstream press struggle to cover — to “get” — religion news.


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