President Rodrigo Duterte

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Not every Catholic story today is bad news. Here are two positive ones not to be overlooked

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The Roman Catholic Church has taken it on the chin lately in nations across the globe. Some of its been richly deserved, as in Australia, Chile, Honduras and the United States, where high-level priestly sex-scandals, and cover-ups, have generated a flood of sadly similar stories.

Yesterday’s post by my GetReligion colleague Julia Duin is a great place to catch up with the latest surrounding ex-Washington archbishop, Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the latest high-level American Catholic leader (or former leader) to be outed as a sexual predator. Julia also listed some steps that journalists can take to uncover more of this sordid tale.

Editors, and media consumers, love a juicy sex scandal regardless of who the culprit may be, so I’m sure some reporters -- my bets are on New York Times and Washington Post religion-desk staffers -- are doing just that.

Even the late Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, has prompted some bad press in India. It's not because of a sex scandal but the story is equally bad -- a sister and a staffer secretly selling babies born to women housed at one of the order’s shelters.

It all seems so horrific and terribly bad for the church, from the parish level up to the Vatican, that one wonders whether the church has truly poisoned its well. Where will this end? 

But do not despair, Catholic believers. You may think this an ironic turn on my part, but I’m actually here to praise the church, not bury it, so to speak — and if you’ll allow me to invert the Bard of Avon.

That’s because some of the stories critical of the church are government issue, and they’re of an entirely different sort. The church may be getting slammed in these stories, too. But it's not because of self-generated scandal bubbling up from within; it's for trying to do right.

I’m thinking of the Philippines and Nicaragua in particular. In both nations, the church is locked in fierce opposition to despotic rulers that are not shy about jailing or even physically eliminating their opponents. So it's dangerous for church leaders to be doing what they are.

I’ll say more on the situations in both those nations in a bit.

But first, what’s the journalistic lesson here?


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Transgender Filipinos and playing journalism's conflict card when the conflict's largely settled

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Transgender Filipinos and playing journalism's conflict card when the conflict's largely settled

A tried, true and irrepressible journalistic contrivance to pull media consumers into a story is the widely played conflict card. And by conflict I mean of any kind — two nations in opposition, or two politicians, two ideas, two religions, two siblings; two of anything with strongly differing goals.

Theater, films, novels, opera and other story-telling forms have their own conflict cards, of course. It's the stuff of drama. But since this is a journalism blog we’ll put those others aside for now.

Conflict grabs attention, enabling us to relate to news stories. Pick a side and you’re emotionally engaged and providing your own backstory, beyond what’s been reported. We all succumb.

The problem is that journalists -- brace yourself because the following words will likely rock your understanding of how journalism is practiced -- often overplay the conflict card,  molding mountains from molehills, trying to breathe life into a conflict that’s already been largely settled.

Shocking, isn't it? Why would journalists do that?

Well, how about because we need a hook and we’ve got nothing better? Or because we believe its what an editor and the news consuming public expects? It's our programmed default.

Sometimes it’s done because a reporter is working off assumptions that no longer apply, confusing past with present.

Take the following New York Times story from the Philippines that strives in its lede to portray a hot conflict between the Roman Catholic Church’s historic teachings and influence, and the nation’s widespread contemporary acceptance of homosexuality and alternative gender identities.

It's not a badly constructed story, in my opinion. Opponents and proponents get their say. However, the story is undercut by it's attempt to give oxygen to a conflict that seems largely settled.


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Real fake news: Facebook's role in Buddhist Myanmar's deadly war against its Rohingya Muslims

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Real fake news: Facebook's role in Buddhist Myanmar's deadly war against its Rohingya Muslims

Before I get to the Facebook angle of this post, please indulge me as I note what I believe are two widely held beliefs that we'd be better off dropping. Blame it on a recent The New York Times piece on Buddhist Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority.

The first is that Buddhists are all about peace and compassion. This idea persists in some circles, thanks to how Mindfulness and other Buddhist meditation practices are sold in the West. Well, get over it.

The exiled Tibetan Buddhist religious leader Tenzin Gyatso, better known by his title, the Dalai Lama, is a rare exception. In Myanmar, Buddhist monks are some of the fiercest instigators of nasty anti-Rohingya ethnic cleansing.

Two, we tend to believe that all Nobel Peace Prize winners are saintly advocates for equal justice for all. Well, what about Myanmar’s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the esteemed prize in 1991 while under house arrest for her peaceful opposition to her nation’s dictatorial military government.

These days, as her nation’s prime minister-equivalent, she defends the way the Rohingyas have been treated by her Buddhist brethren. She argues that the Rohingya are simply Muslim Bangladeshis who, in essence, are illegal squatters in Buddhist Myanmar.

So what do you know? Buddhists and Nobel Prize winners can be just as broken as the rest of us.

Now for that New York Times piece out of Myanmar written by the paper’s new Southeast Asia correspondent, Hannah Beech. She’s new to the Times, but certainly not to the region or elite journalism.

What struck me most about her excellent piece, however, were not the naive beliefs cited above. Rather, it was what she reported about the role that Facebook and other social media have played in the conflict. (Facebook and other social media are also the subject of Congressional hearings this week because of how the Russians used them in an attempt to confuse voters in the United States' 2016 president election.)


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