Kelly McBride

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New podcast: Yes, religious issues are part of the great divide in media and, thus, America

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New podcast: Yes, religious issues are part of the great divide in media and, thus, America

When journalism profs talk about “old-school journalism,” we are actually discussing a rather modern phenomenon which is often called the American Model of the Press. It was born when printing presses started speeding up in the mid-to-late 19th century and, as it evolved, it stressed accuracy, fairness and balance when dealing with controversial issues.

What does that mean? At the very least, it meant showing respect for competing points of view — in part to allow newspapers (and advertisers) to reach a broad, diverse audience of readers.

This model replaced, at least in newspapers and wire services, what is often called the European Model of the Press. In this model, accuracy is still emphasized, but newsroom coverage is clearly and honestly based on specific editorial points of view — liberal, conservative, labor, business, etc. It is openly biased.

I offer this journalism history flashback because these terms played a major role in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). The key question this week: How are readers supposed to relate to journalists and newsrooms when they claim to use the American Model, but their news coverage (especially online) is, on most issues (especially topics mixing politics and religion), clearly being crafted to fit a particular cultural or political template? Yes, we are talking about “Kellerism,” a term long used here at GetReligion (click here and then here for background).

In part, host Todd Wilken and I focused on a viral tweetstorm by the Russian-British comedian Konstantin Kisin, instead of dissecting the contents of one or more mainstream news reports.

It’s crucial to note that Brexit — as opposed to Donald Trump-era America — was the first hook for Kisin’s long, long commentary. Also, the ultimate goal here is to understand why so many people are skeptical when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines (whether one agrees with that point of view or not).

(Reminder to readers: As a 67-year-old grandfather with asthma, I got my COVID shots as soon as possible. I also wear a mask when visiting institutions that ask me to do so. As for church, I follow the instructions of my bishop and our priests. It also helps to know that, after decades as a pro-life Democrat, I am now a third-party voter.)

Here is the opening of the Kisin thread. Whether he knew it or not, it is a litany mourning the loss of the American Model of the Press.


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This journalist did her job: Now she hopes that it didn't expose her to COVID-19

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Silvia Foster-Frau did her job.

The 27-year-old San Antonio Express-News reporter hopes her dedication to her profession didn’t expose her to COVID-19.

For more than two years, Foster-Frau has produced sensitive, nuanced coverage of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas — site of a Nov. 5, 2017, mass shooting in which 26 people died and 20 were wounded.

Her journalistic prowess has earned her honors such as Texas AP Star Reporter of the Year in the biggest newspaper category and the national Cornell Award for religion reporting excellence at mid-sized newspapers.

On Sunday, Foster-Frau returned to the rural area southeast of San Antonio to report on the Baptist church continuing to meet, “despite the potential danger posed by the novel coronavirus” — as she put it in her story.

Her news article was excellent. No surprise there. Equally impressive were the compelling images captured by Express-News photographer Josie Norris.

But given the concerns over the possible spread of COVID-19, I wondered about the decision to send journalists into an assembly with 40 worshipers, none of them wearing masks, according to the newspaper’s story.

Foster-Frau was kind enough to talk with me about her experience. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bobby Ross Jr.: You developed some really good relationships with people involved in the massacre and have excelled at covering that. Can you tell me a little about that?


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Poynter takes on Fox News' 'repurposing' of other publications' religion stories without proper credit

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The reporter has become the reported-on.

I complained on social media recently after Fox News’ Caleb Parke rewrote one of my Christian Chronicle stories without doing any of his own reporting. I never could get a response from Parke, whose verified Twitter profile says he covers “faith & values but my favorite stories are #GoodNews.”

After my first complaint, Fox attributed a second quote to my Chronicle story but didn’t deal with the bigger issue of passing off our original piece as its own. And Parke and Fox felt no need to reply to me directly.

That might have been the end of it, except that Kelly McBride, a leading media ethics expert who serves as senior vice president of the Poynter Institute, took an interest in my case.

Today, Poynter published McBride’s lengthy piece calling out Fox News’ “repurposing” of other publications’ religion stories without proper credit.

Spoiler alert: She says a lot of really cool things about me that my mom will really enjoy, such as calling me a “nice-guy church newspaper editor based in Oklahoma City.” My boss particularly relished that line, given the grumpiness that I occasionally display on deadline.

But for those interested in religion reporting in the news media (that would be you, dear GetReligion reader), McBride’s comments on Fox’s practice of relying on other publications’ hard work will be particularly relevant.

Such as this:

It’s clear that this is about return on investment. Fox could easily have religion reporters out there turning up original stories the way Ross and his team do. But that would mean they would only get one story a day or even a week out of a reporter, not three or four. But fewer stories means a smaller audience.

Alternatively, Fox could subscribe to the Religion News Service, a wire service devoted to creating original stories about religion, as well as sharing content generated by other publications, including The Christian Chronicle. “We do not subscribe to this service,” a Fox spokesperson said by email. “We monitor them like we would any reliable news outlet and aggregate content when we find it compelling and worthy of our standards.”

When you look closely at what news organizations invest resources  in — original reporting vs. simply repeating the work of others — you can get a window into what the company values. 


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Associated Press repeats mantra: Gosh those 'evangelicals' are standing by their man Trump

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Pardon me for a moment while I (just back from eclipse gazing here in New York City) ponder mortality, as in my own.

If I was hit by a bus tomorrow, there are two or three things that I have done in the world of journalism that I think would be worth future discussion. Yes, there's young Bono talking about faith and Africa, Mother Teresa talking about AIDS in Denver and Carl Sagan saying that he no longer considered himself an atheist or even an agnostic.

But I also hope -- in this age in which the word "evangelical" has been turned into a political label -- that a few people remember what happened when I asked the Rev. Billy Graham, back in the mid-1980s, to define that problematic word. Here's a flashback:

"Actually, that's a question I'd like to ask somebody, too," he said, during a 1987 interview in his mountainside home office in Montreat, N.C. This oft-abused term has "become blurred. ... You go all the way from the extreme fundamentalists to the extreme liberals and, somewhere in between, there are the evangelicals."
Wait a minute, I said. If Billy Graham doesn't know what "evangelical" means, then who does? Graham agreed that this is a problem for journalists and historians. One man's "evangelical" is another's "fundamentalist."

Graham said he defines "evangelical" in terms of doctrines, not politics or anything else. If a person believes all of the doctrines in the Apostles Creed, he said, their view of scripture is high enough to be called an evangelical. What about Pope John Paul II? Graham said the two men had discussed that. Yes, there is more to that story.

This brings me to, alas, Donald Trump, his house evangelicals and the Associated Press headline: "Trump’s evangelical advisers sticking with him amid fallout." The overture:

NEW YORK (AP) -- One of President Donald Trump’s most steadfast constituencies has been standing by him amid his defense of a white nationalist rally in Virginia, even as business leaders, artists and Republicans turn away.


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Question for journalists: Where does this hellish Charlottesville story go next (other than Trump)?

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So you are a journalist and you think there is more to the Charlottesville tragedy than political word games. Where to you think this story will go next?

Oceans of ink will, of course, be spilled covering news linked to President Donald Trump and what he does, or does not, say about that alt-right and white supremacy. Political reporters will do that thing they do and, in this case, for totally valid reasons. Please allow me to ask this question: At what point will major television networks -- rather than sticking with a simplistic left vs. right strategy -- spotlight the cultural conservatives who have been knocking the Trump team on this topic from the beginning?

In terms of religion angles, our own Julia Duin wrote an omnibus piece that this this morning and I would urge readers to check it out. Lots of people in social media urged pastors to dig into issues of hate and race in their sermons. Now I'm looking for coverage of that angle. Has anyone seen anything? Just asking.

The latest report from The New York Times -- "Far-Right Groups Surge Into National View in Charlottesville" -- raises some very interesting issues about this event. I came away asking this question: Who were the marchers and where did they come from (and get their funds)? Once reporters have asked that question, they can then ask: Who were the counter-protestors and where did they come from (and get their funds)? I think both angles will be quite revealing, in terms of information about the seeds for the violence.

I thought the following was especially interesting:

George Hawley, a University of Alabama political science professor who studies white supremacists, said that many of the far-right members he had interviewed did not inherit their racism from their parents, but developed it online. Many of them had never heard of, say, David Duke, the former Louisiana politician and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. ...

The counterprotesters included members of the local Charlottesville clergy and mainstream figures like the Harvard professor Cornel West. As the rally erupted into violence Saturday morning, the First United Methodist Church on East Jefferson Street opened its doors to demonstrators, serving cold water and offering basic medical care.
Dr. Hawley said he believed the far-left activists, known as antifa, were welcomed by the white nationalists. “I think to an extent the alt-right loves the antifa because they see them as being the perfect foil,” he said.

That drew a response from one of the local organizers -- Laura Goldblatt, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia:


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Disturbance in the Journalism Force? New York Times spikes its public-editor post

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If you are a journalist or a news consumer who is concerned about the survival of old-school reporting and editing in this troubled day and age, then you probably felt a disturbance yesterday in what could be called the Journalism Force.

When I say "old-school journalism," I am referring to what textbooks often call the "American model of the press," which stresses that journalists should strive to honor standards of accuracy, fairness and balance when covering the news. The key: When reporting on hot-button issues, journalists should strive to treat people on all sides of these debates with respect.

This classically liberal approach to news emerged, and evolved, in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The goal was to produce news that was as independent as possible, thus exposing readers to genuine diversity. Citizens could then make up their own minds.

An older, advocacy model built on clear editorial biases -- often called the "European model" -- has remained a crucial part of modern journalism, primarily in magazines and journals of opinion (think The Nation, National Review, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard).

So what happened yesterday? Here is the top of the Associated Press report:

NEW YORK -- The New York Times is ditching its public editor position, created in 2003 as the paper sought to restore its credibility with readers after a plagiarism scandal.
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger wrote in a memo Wednesday that the public editor's role "has outgrown that one office" and that the paper is instead creating a "reader center" to interact with the public and will allow more commenting on stories. The paper's current public editor, Liz Spayd, will leave Friday.
Margaret Sullivan, the well-regarded former Times public editor, now a media columnist at the Washington Post, tweeted that she was not surprised that the Times dropped the role, which she characterized as a "a burr under the saddle for the powers that be" and capable of holding managers' "feet to the fire."


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New York Times seeks another Godbeat scribe: How would Yogi Berra parse the job listing?

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I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that one of the buzz topics in religion-news circles this week was that job posting at The New York Times, the one with this headline: "Change Is Coming to the New York Times National Desk."

It appears the Times is thinking about doing something new on the religion beat, 12-plus years after the 2005 report on its newsroom culture and weaknesses, "Preserving Our Readers Trust." That was the amazing document that urged editors, when hiring staff, to seek more intellectual and cultural diversity -- to help the Gray Lady do a better job covering religion, non-New York America and other common subjects. Yes, I've written about that report a whole lot on this site.

Oh, and Times editor Dean Baquet's recent journalism confession on NPR -- that the "New York-based and Washington-based ... media powerhouses don't quite get religion" -- may have had something to do with this, as well.

The bad news? There is one chunk of language in this job posting that, for veteran Godbeat observers, could cause a kind of bad acid flashback to another religion-beat job notice in another newsroom, at another time. Hold that thought. 

So here is the Times job notice for a "Faith and values correspondent."

We’re seeking a skilled reporter and writer to tap into the beliefs and moral questions that guide Americans and affect how they live their lives, whom they vote for and how they reflect on the state of the country. You won’t need to be an expert in religious doctrine. The position is based outside of New York, and you will work alongside Laurie Goodstein and a team of other journalists who are digging deep into the nation.

Did you see the key sentence? Rod "friend of this blog" Dreher sure did:

Two cheers for them! I’m glad they’re adding this position, and I’m really glad they’re not basing this reporter in New York (I hope they don’t base him or her in any coastal city, or in Chicago, but rather someplace like Dallas or Atlanta). Why not three cheers? That line about how “you won’t need to be an expert in religious doctrine” bothers me. ... 


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