Kellerism

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Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did

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Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did

If you know anything about world religions, then you know that Easter is a big deal in Christianity.

In Eastern Orthodox churches, the Big Idea is stated this way, over and over, in rites for Pascha (Easter): “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life” (see this flash mob celebration in Lebanon).

I don’t bring this up as a matter of evangelism or some other #triggerwarning behavior. I am noting that this is an essential fact about Christianity, the world’s largest religious faith. Easter isn’t a “bunny” thing.

This brings us to one of the more unusual “religion ghosts” we spotted several times during the 20-year history of GetReligion. Here’s a case study at Newsweek and another at Facebook news. However, the classic version of this ghost appeared in the holy (in journalism terms) pages of The New York Times in this 2014 feature: “Hoping War-Weary Tourists Will Return to Israel.” Here is the key passage:

On a recent afternoon in the Old City of Jerusalem, while fighting raged in Gaza, Bilal Abu Khalaf hosted a group of Israeli tourists at his textile store in the Christian Quarter — one of Jerusalem’s tourist gems. …

“That’s the first group I’ve had here in more than a month,” Mr. Abu Khalaf said. “There have been whole weeks when no one has been inside the shop. I’ve sold almost nothing the entire summer. Business hasn’t been this bad since the first intifada in 1989, when the Palestinian groups ordered us to shutter our stores.”

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus was buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

Now, what’s unusual about that? Well, it helps to know that the printed version said:

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

It’s all about the word “is,” isn’t it?

Inquiring minds wanted to know: Was there anyone in the editorial chain at the world’s newspaper of record who knew the essential fact that traditional Christians don’t believe Jesus is buried anywhere? It’s that whole “Easter” thing.


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Crossroads: Failing to 'get' religion helped create schism between readers and newsrooms

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Crossroads: Failing to 'get' religion helped create schism between readers and newsrooms

Questions. Yes, we have some final (sort of) questions about journalism and religion news.

One one level, this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in) focused on all those headlines about the red ink and devastating layoffs in elite newsrooms such as Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. For a quick summary of the drama, see this mini-report at Axios.

The news is staggering for people like me who have spent decades in journalism education — encouraging students to seek careers in traditional and online newsrooms at the local, regional and national level.

Thus, it’s hard to cheer about these disasters in the lives of many professionals. However, millions of millions of Americans — especially in red zip codes — have given up on the mainstream press. What about them? Should they cheer as major news organizations implode?

This week’s podcast is the last one that will be featured here at GetReligion, as we close a week from today, on this weblog’s 20th birthday. However, future episodes of Crossroads will continue to be available through the podcast page at the GetReligion.org archive, at my own Tmatt.net, the Religion Unplugged website, Lutheran Public Radio and the Apple podcasts page.

In this (sort of) finale, it was obvious to ask: Does the current newsroom employment crisis have anything to do with decades of journalism leaders failing to, you know, “get” religion when covering one of the most complex religious cultures in the Western world?

After recording the podcast, I had a flashback to a story that Rod “Live Not By Lies” Dreher shared about his years at the Dallas Morning News. Then, lo and behold, Dreher retold key parts of the story in a new Substack post (“Journalism Continues To Crash, Burn”).

A few of his colleagues were worried about the increasingly liberal — in terms of religion, culture and politics — product that the News was producing for the region it served.

“It aggravated us to no end that our readers were mostly conservatives — they really were; we had the audience research to prove it — but too many in the newsroom were bound and determined to act as if that wasn’t true.”


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Why not cover these stories? GetReligion kept asking about attacks on Catholic churches

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Why not cover these stories? GetReligion kept asking about attacks on Catholic churches

There have been many big stories on the Catholic beat since I started contributing to GetReligion in November 2018.

Over the last five years, I have written about Catholicism as it related to doctrinal fights, politics, education and even sports. In between, we had a pandemic. Brother, has it been a busy time.

Over that time, I looked at mainstream news coverage regarding these issues and the growing importance of Catholic news media in the digital age. Catholic media is crucial, in large part, because of the many important religion stories that way too many elite mainstream newsrooms are ignoring.

No story has been bigger — in terms of both importance and reader interest — than church fires.

Churches have been targeted in the United States and around the world in what has easily been one of the most underreported (in some cases not reported at all) stories of the last decade. The problem? When it comes to press coverage, not all religious sanctuaries are created equal.

In my final post here at GetReligion, let’s take a look back at this trend.

In terms of news, the biggest was not an act of arson, according to authorities, but an accident. It was on April 15, 2019 that a structural fire broke out in the roof space of Notre Dame in Paris, a medieval Catholic cathedral and one of the biggest symbols of Christianity throughout the world.

By the time the fire was extinguished, the 12th century gothic house of worship’s spire had collapsed, its famed rose window destroyed, most of its roof wiped out and its upper walls severely damaged.

I was in my office at The King’s College in New York City when I saw the news alerts. I had already filed a post for GetReligion — ironically! — regarding a rash of fires at churches across France during Lent.

That new post — with quick rewriting by me and speed editing by tmatt (who was across the hall on that day) — went online while the fire was still burning. It instantly went viral.

Here’s how that went down, as recounted by a tmatt post the following day:

Here at GetReligion, my colleague Clemente Lisi had, days earlier, written a feature about the recent series of fires and acts of vandalism at French churches. Lisi and I quickly rewrote the top of that post and put it up about 3 p.m. EDT yesterday. The headline: “If churches keep getting vandalized in France, should American news outlets cover the story?”


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If a NFL coaching legend quotes scripture in a press conference, does it make a sound?

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If a NFL coaching legend quotes scripture in a press conference, does it make a sound?

One more time.

For years, Bobby Ross, Jr., and I have written lots of posts about religion-shaped holes in mainstream sports coverage. Apparently, very few GetReligion readers were interested in this topic (as opposed to, let’s say, the American audience for a prime NFL game).

But we soldiered on. This brings me — one last time — to a curious case study involving my Baltimore Ravens (who are still in the Super Bowl hunt, at this point).

Recently, a commentator on one of the dozens of NFL commentary shows asked an interesting question: Why don’t we talk more about the ongoing success of John Harbaugh, the Ravens head coach since 2008? No one had a good answer.

But I will ask a related question: After the Raven’s 34-20 playoff victory over the Houston Texans, which video clip was easier to find? The one (a) with Harbaugh showing his dad-style dancing moves in the joyful locker room or the one (b) in which he opened his press conference, with a very serious tone of voice, with a favorite Bible quote?

Click those Google links and you will see that, once again, the role that Christian faith (Catholic, to be specific) plays in the life and work of this future Hall of Fame coach is a “conservative” news story. Period. The viral dancing moves are much more important.

Which element of these two elements of Harbaugh’s personality is the most important in his life and work? The most accurate answer is “BOTH.”

However, I suspect that Harbaugh would say that his faith is more important. This brings me to the point that Ross and I have tried to make about the faith-shaped hole in most sports news coverage (and Clemente Lisi has noted this in global soccer coverage, as well). We are not stating that it is automatically news when sports personalities talk about their faith. It is new when they consistently cite their faith as a crucial factor how and why they do what they do in their career and life.

In this case, Fox News (naturally) went with the basic facts: “Ravens head coach John Harbaugh recites Bible verse to open press conference after playoff win.”


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Podcast: Carefully entering the hall of mirrors created by the 'God Made Trump' video

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Podcast: Carefully entering the hall of mirrors created by the 'God Made Trump' video

I will not apologize for the fact that this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in) contains lots of questions and few answers.

In a way, the whole “God Made Trump” video ruckus is a house of mirrors full of questions.

Nevertheless, you cannot follow what Americans call “politics” without pondering the role that religious language is playing these days. At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore the role of humor — including brutal satire — in all of this. Put religion and humor together (with a dash of AI) and all hades breaks loose.

The New York Times offered a straight-faced news story about a trend that is a threat to democracy when used by conservatives and, in particular, the MAGA Orange Man Bad team. What about the satire on the other side, which is usually offered by billion-dollar platforms in mainstream media and late-night entertainment? That isn’t relevant. Meanwhile, here’s that double-decker Times headline:

Iowa Pastors Say Video Depicting Trump as Godly Is ‘Very Concerning’

The viral video shows the former president, in starkly religious, almost messianic tones, as the vessel of a higher power sent to save the nation.

The big question here that the Times team never asks: To what degree is the “God Made Trump” video satire or a wink-wink salute to a certain tribe of Trump supporters in some pews? Hold that thought, because asking that question leads to those hall-of-mirrors questions.

This Times piece is all serious all the time. Here is a key byte of that:

The clip’s authors are members of the Dilley Meme Team, an organized collective of video producers who call themselves “Trump’s Online War Machine.” The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, describes himself as Christian and a man of faith, but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church. He has said that Mr. Trump has “God-tier genetics” and, in response to outcry over the “God Made Trump” video, he posted a meme depicting Mr. Trump as Moses parting the Red Sea.


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Reporters! Seek a variety of 'Internet' priests when covering hot-button Catholic issues

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Reporters! Seek a variety of 'Internet' priests when covering hot-button Catholic issues

The Vatican’s decision to allow priests to bless couples in what they called “irregular relationships” continues to get lots of media attention.

The language in this confusing decree, issued last month, included individuals in same-sex relationships, which unleashed a flurry of news coverage. The issue was kept alive in the news after bishops — primarily from Africa — pushed back. That forced the Vatican to issue a clarification last week aimed at quelling dissent.

Journalists working on this story have largely done a poor job in quoting diverse views about this topic from the very men who are supposed to bestow such blessings — priests. I did that very thing on Jan. 4 at Religion Unplugged, where I serve as executive editor, when the Vatican issued a news release to clarify their original declaration. Here’s what I wrote for those of you who need a refresher:

Three weeks after announcing that Catholic priests could bless individuals in same-sex relationships, the Vatican published a clarification … following backlash — and even widespread confusion in many cases — from prelates across the world.

The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith said in a news release that it wanted to “help clarify” the many reactions to Fiducia Supplicans, a decree issued on Dec. 18. In it, the Vatican urged a “full and calm reading” of the entire document to better understand “its meaning and purpose.”

The original decree had been signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernandez, who serves as the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Dec. 18 document, the Vatican said, was “clear and definitive” in regards to Catholic doctrine regarding church teaching on marriage and sexuality. Again, the Vatican said any blessings are for individuals — not the union — and must not be “liturgical or ritualized.”

“Evidently, there is no room to distance ourselves doctrinally from this declaration or to consider it heretical, contrary to the tradition of the church or blasphemous,” the latest statement added.

Quite of few bishops, especially in Africa, were doing quite a bit of explicit doctrinal distancing, if not outright slamming. That’s a newsworthy development, for sure.


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Podcast: A.M. Rosenthal kept calling for accurate coverage of religion and persecution

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Podcast: A.M. Rosenthal kept calling for accurate coverage of religion and persecution

Does anyone remember fax machines?

This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on a sad, but very old reality in mainstream news coverage — the lack of mainstream news coverage of the massacres that take place year after year in Nigeria at Christmas.

To put this trend in context, I backed up to an “On Religion” column that I wrote in 1996 that opened like this, focusing on a tragedy that was unfolding in Sudan:

It's possible to buy a Christian slave in southern Sudan for as little as $15.

Last year's going rate for parents who want to buy back their own kidnapped child was five head of cattle – about $400. A boy might cost 10 head. An exiled leader in Sudan's Catholic Bishops Conference reports that 30,000 children have been sold into slavery in the Nuba mountains. In six years, more than 1.3 million Christian and other non-Muslim people have been killed in Sudan – more than Bosnia, Chechnya and Haiti combined.

A Jewish activist, Michael J. Horowitz of the Hudson Center, faxed my column to the legendary A. M. Rosenthal, the retired editor of the New York Times and a former foreign correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. This led to many “On My Mind” columns at the Times, including one in which Rosenthal noted that Horowitz “screamed me awake” on the undercovered reality that is religious persecution.

That fax contact led to some conversations — via email and telephone — in which Rosenthal and I talked about the journalism realities behind a global story that was shamefully undercovered then and that remains the case to this day.

When Rosenthal died in 2006, I wrote a column (“Rosenthal refused to remain silent”) that noted:

Some human-rights activists are convinced that one of the reasons he lost his column and was forced to leave the Times was because he wouldn't stop writing about the persecution of religious minorities around the world.

Rosenthal couldn't understand why so many journalists just didn't "get" that story.


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When is Christmas? CBS has no idea how complex that question is right now in Ukraine

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When is Christmas? CBS has no idea how complex that question is right now in Ukraine

Christmas is complicated, if you sweat the details. At the gym I frequent here in Oak Ridge, the management took down all of the Christmas decorations on December 26th.

I asked why. I was told: “Christmas is over.” I asked if they had heard of the “12 days of Christmas.” A staffer said, “Yes,” but assumed that was before the 25th. Another staffer quietly said that she would leave the decorations up until January 6th. It’s safe to assume that she attends the local Catholic parish or another liturgical church.

Hang in there with me. I am working my way toward a stunningly one-sided CBS News report that ran with this headline: “Ukraine snubs Russia, celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25 for first time.”

The key is that America has shopping-mall Christmas and then liturgical-calendar Christmas. Several years ago, I wrote an “On Religion” column noting that when Siri is asked, “When is Christmas?”, an Apple iPhone answered: "Christmas is on … December 25, 2012. I hope I have the day off." Then I asked, “When is Advent?” That led to this “conversation.”

Siri searched her memory and said: "I didn't find any events about 'Ed Fant.' "

Trying again: "When is the Advent season?"

Siri cheerfully responded: "I am not aware of any events about 'advent season.' "

After several more "BEED-EEP" chimes the Apple cloud ultimately drew a blank when asked, "When does the Christmas season end?" Alas, Siri didn't understand the term "Christmas season."

This morning, I asked Siri: “When is Orthodox Christmas.” I was told that Christmas Day is on January 7th.

Ah, but that isn’t accurate in most Orthodox Churches in America. Why? That’s complicated and the fine details are relevant to the CBS News report about Ukraine.

Many people are aware that the Orthodox follow the ancient Julian calendar, instead of the Western Gregorian calendar. However, in many lands shaped by European culture, the Orthodox (this includes my parish) follow a modified Julian calendar that manages to put Christmas on December 25th, but Pascha (Easter) remains on the date that fits the Julian calendar.

Trust me, there is much more that can be said. But here is the key: This is basically a collision between cultures shaped by European culture and those shaped by eastern Orthodox culture.


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GetReligion will close on February 2, the 20th anniversary of this blog's birth

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GetReligion will close on February 2, the 20th anniversary of this blog's birth

Doug LeBlanc clicked “publish” on the original GetReligion website on February 2, 2004, and the GetReligion team has published at least one piece of new content every day ever since.

That streak will end in just over a month, on our 20th anniversary. The website will close, although some of our features will live on — to one degree or another — on other websites. We will share more details before we close, so hold that thought.

The plan is to keep GetReligion.org online as a massive archive of Godbeat life over a stunningly complex 20 years in the news business, as the realities of the digital age have rocked the landscape of hard-news journalism. The goal is to find a reference-materials home with an academic institution that values the study of religion, mass culture and the First Amendment.

We want to keep this archive online as a way of stressing the three goals that led to the creation of GetReligion.org in the first place. We have tried to:

(1) Promote religion-news reporting in the mainstream press, arguing that journalists on this beat deserve the respect given to those covering other complex topics in the public square. If newsroom managers want to improve religion-beat coverage, they can use ordinary journalism logic — hiring experienced (maybe even award-winning) religion-beat reporters and then letting them do their work.

(2) Note that far too many journalists (especially those at political desks) tend to miss obvious religion angles in important stories, often mangling basic facts and history in the process. The result is news coverage “haunted” by what we call “religion ghosts.” Why does this happen? As the liberal journalism icon Bill Moyers once told me, many journalists are "tone deaf" to the music of faith in public life.

(3) Defend the traditional “American Model of the Press,” with its emphasis on professional standards that stress accuracy, fairness and even balance. Many journalists seem to believe that these old-school standards do not apply to coverage of hot-button subjects linked to religion, morality and culture. After all, politics is real. Religion? Not so much.

Why close GetReligion now? I will admit that I have, in recent years, struggling to accept the many ways in which the digital age has changed the business model for the mainstream press. What we have here is a classic example of the mass-media doctrine that “technology shapes content.”


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