GetReligion

Not a pretty kind of truck stop

2012-02-10T21:42:07Z

I like to read a good story.

Story, I said.

A story is not the same thing as a report. A report might give you all the facts you need to know (the five W’s and H). But a story tells a tale. A story has characters, details, insight. There’s a beginning, a middle, an end.

A story by CNN Belief Blog co-editor Eric Marrapodi caught my attention this week. Here’s the top of Marrapodi’s story on “The new Christian abolition movement”:

Greensboro, North Carolina (CNN) —The truck-stop hooker is no Julia Roberts, the trucker in the cab with her no Richard Gere, and this truck stop off the highway could not be any farther from Beverly Hills, the staging ground for “Pretty Woman.”

The woman sports baggy shorts, a white T-shirt and frizzy hair. Her fat middle-aged pimp sits in a beat up red Honda, watching as his “lot lizard” moves from truck to truck, in broad daylight. If this pimp has a cane it is for substance, not style.

She moves through the parking lot, occasionally opening a cab’s passenger-side door and climbing in.

The trucker and hooker disappear in the back for 10 minutes.

Danielle Mitchell watches from the other end of the parking lot and shakes her head.

Keep reading, and you learn that Mitchell is (or was) the North Carolina human trafficking manager for World Relief.

The nut graf:

Mitchell is trying to tackle a disaster in her home state. And she is not alone.

Motivated in large part by their religious traditions of protecting the vulnerable and serving “the least of these,” as Jesus instructed his followers to do in the Gospel of Matthew, World Relief and other Christian agencies like the Salvation Army are stepping up efforts and working with law enforcement to stem the flow of human trafficking, which includes sex trafficking and labor trafficking.

“Jesus didn’t just go around telling people about himself. He also healed the blind and healed the brokenhearted, he freed captives, and I think that it would be ridiculous to walk up to someone who is hurting and tell them, ‘Let me tell you about the Gospel,’ and then walk away while they’re still hurting,” Mitchell says.

Up high, the Godbeat pro does a fine job of capturing the religious motivation of the main character. Overall, this story benefits from at least three P’s (none of which is “prostitute”):

— Place: The reporter takes readers to the scene of the action and provides specific, compelling details.

— Personality: The reporter includes gems such as this:

This truck stop is the type you think twice about. It’s grimy and run down.

How badly do I really have to use the bathroom? I bet I could hold out for another 12 miles. That kind of place.

— People: The reporter puts a real human face on the movement, in the form of Mitchell.

However, there is one peculiar aspect to the story (hey, there’s another “P”). After proclaiming up high that World Vision is “stepping up” these efforts, the writer drops this minor bombshell deeper in the piece:

“Victims are not going to self-identify,” says Mitchell, who has since left World Relief and is considering going back to school after a lack of funding threatened to cut her hours to part time. “ They’re not going to say ‘I’m a victim of human trafficking.’ So the burden is really on the service providers and law enforcement and the community.”

Not sure I understand how World Vision can be “stepping up” efforts if it’s cutting back on staff. I’m sure this wrinkle did not make the journalist who’d already invested time in this piece overly jubilant.

My other nitpicky question: According to the story, the number of victims of human trafficking being referred to World Relief for services is up “700% in 2011.” That’s a big jump, yes. But what specific number of victims are we talking about? Is the writer quoting actual verifiable records? Or is that figure coming straight from Mitchell’s mouth?

Alas, this is not a perfect story. But I enjoyed it.

I like to read a good story.

Newsweek covers “The War on Christians”?

2012-02-10T17:19:19Z

For several years now (click here for an early post) I have been asking a rather basic journalistic question: “What is Newsweek?”

By which I mean, of course, “What has Newsweek become?”

It used to be a standard weekly magazine that contained a mixture of hard news and commentary. Readers knew when they were reading news, for the most part, and they knew when they were reading commentary, in part because commentary pieces featured column logos or an “analysis” or “commentary” alert.

It was all so quaint and old-fashioned.

It also seems that fewer and fewer Americans — in the age of Fox and MSNBC — are interested in that kind of publication. Thus, former non-Newsweek editor and theologian-in-chief Jon Meacham announced that he was going to try to clear as many religious traditionalists as possible from the subscriber list and market his publication as an elite, openly liberal, forward-pushing advocacy publication. At the time, I noted that his goal was to create the World magazine for the religious left.

So what is Newsweek today? As a rule, under super-editor Tina Brown, it has been an at times lively but ultimately confusing mixture of commentary, commentary and more commentary. Some of the commentary comes in the form of regular columns by open partisans (surprise, Paul Begala thinks conservatives are mean, stupid or shallow and Andrew Sullivan also thinks they are evil) and somewhat newsy essays by celebrities (“My life with Trigg,” by Sarah Palin).

And the NEWS in Newsweek? That’s the strange part. The goal of the magazine seems to be to handle serious news topics (mixed with entertainment topics, of course) but in a way that it is impossible to take seriously as journalism. Newsweek is becoming the land of the unattributed fact.

To see this process at work, please read the Ayaan Hirsi Ali cover story discussing “The War on Christians in the Muslim World.” In this case, the cover’s zinger quality is provided by the author’s identity as a Muslim apostate, atheist, militant secularist and defender of old-fashioned human rights — such as religious liberty and free speech. Ali is so liberal that she is now considered, by many, to be a conservative.

The result looks like this:

… (A) fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity — and ultimately of all religious minorities — in the Islamic world is at stake.

At this point, Hirsi Ali is offering a pretty straight-forward piece of journalistic analysis. The key, in newsmagazine journalism, is that she is going to have to provide a mountain of evidence to back her blunt conclusions.

Thus, the next two paragraphs state:

From blasphemy laws to brutal murders to bombings to mutilations and the burning of holy sites, Christians in so many nations live in fear. In Nigeria many have suffered all of these forms of persecution. The nation has the largest Christian minority (40 percent) in proportion to its population (160 million) of any majority-Muslim country. For years, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have lived on the edge of civil war. Islamist radicals provoke much if not most of the tension. The newest such organization is an outfit that calls itself Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sacrilege.” Its aim is to establish Sharia in Nigeria. To this end it has stated that it will kill all Christians in the country.

In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011 its members killed at least 510 people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern states. They use guns, gasoline bombs, and even machetes, shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) while launching attacks on unsuspecting citizens. They have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers, as well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem.

Hirsi Ali goes on to provide similar content and analysis about Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other lands in which persecution of Christians, moderate Muslims and other religious minorities is on the rise.

So what is the problem?

First let me state the obvious. I am, of course, a reader who tries to pay close attention to the United States Commission on Religious Freedom, U.S. State Department reports on human rights and other organizations that work in this area. Few of the facts collected by Hirsi Ali surprise me or shock me. Why? Because I know where most of her facts are coming from.

The problem is that the editors at new Newsweek — with its emphasis on opinion over reporting — print this kind of material week after week with little or no attribution that points readers toward the sources of the facts that supposedly support the analysis. This methodology is especially shaky when dealing with this kind of controversy that is rooted in religion as well as politics.

With a few more lines of type, readers would be able to evaluate Hirsi Ali’s statistics, anecdotes and evidence for themselves. It’s called journalism.

These kinds of topics — on left and right — need the kind of intellectual muscle that is provided by solid sourcing and attributions. I have no doubt that Hirsi Ali could have buried the reader in source material, with footnotes, endnotes, attribution clauses, etc. Readers would be more likely to believe her and trust her analysis if they can see and evaluate the sources for her fact claims.

I think readers would be more likely to trust Newsweek, if it printed solid journalism as well as lively opinion. Then again, perhaps I am simply old fashioned when it comes to journalism about religion, human rights and other life-and-death topics.

Frame game: the importance and composition of polling

2012-02-10T20:31:01Z

Tmatt did a rather comprehensive look at how framing will play a big part in media coverage of the Obama Administration’s mandating of what religious institutions should and should not offer in their employee benefits.

I had to point out a rather dramatic example (even if it gets a bit meta) of the role framing played in a San Francisco Chronicle story by Joe Garofoli:

The battle is over how to frame this issue — as an example of a government mandate trampling on “religious liberty,” as conservatives believe, or as a health policy concern vital for women, as liberals contend.

Well if that isn’t a scare quote example for the ages.

This is a news story. I made sure to check when I first came across this. I can’t imagine a journalistic argument for scare quoting “religious liberty” and not scare quoting the hot mess on the other side of the equation. The fact is that no scare quotes are needed at all when describing how the two sides are framing a topic.

If I may note a silver lining here — I’m having to focus on silver linings as the media coverage we’re being subjected to is not exactly at a high point this month — this issue is being fought on such drastically different fronts that even casual readers are figuring out that reporters are framing the topic in one way or another (unless they’re playing it straight and presenting the competing arguments well).

I wanted to point out how framing can also be drawn out via the use of polls. I was first interested in this when I read about the wide play received by a Public Policy Polling poll that was commissioned by Planned Parenthood. Some news outlets, believe it or not, forgot to mention that the poll was commissioned by an interested party.

Another poll that received wide coverage was done by Public Religion Research Institute. This is a group with strong ties to political progressivism but most polling outfits are somewhat partisan (although there are, of course, exceptions). Different polling groups tend to come up with fairly different results. But I thought it might just be interesting to look at the questions that this (and another poll on the other side of things) asked and then at the results.

The PRRI poll on the HHS mandate had two sections. The first section had four thing that respondents were asked to “completely agree, mostly agree, mostly DISagree or completely disagree” with. Here they are:

a. American Muslims ultimately want to establish Shari’a [PROUNCIATION [sic]: Sha—REE—uh] or Islamic law as law of the land in the U.S.
b. American Muslims are an important part of the religious community in the U.S.
c. Methods of birth control should be generally available to teenagers age 14 or older without parental approval.
d. All employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception or birth control at no cost. {New}

The second part has two questions to be asked after this statement is read:

There is currently a debate over what kinds of health care plans some religious organizations should be required to provide. Do you think [INSERT; RANDOMIZE] should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception or birth control at no cost, or not? What about [INSERT]?

The two options are:

a. Religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals
b. Churches and other places of worship.

That poll, which was widely covered, was put out with the press release “Majority of Catholics Think Employers Should Be Required to Provide Health Care Plans that Cover Birth Control at No Cost.” The Washington Post reporter who covered the Planned Parenthood campaign against Komen wrote a piece about how the Obama White House senses it’s gambit here is going to work out really well. Here’s a sample:

But while Catholic leadership has blasted the new regulation, polls show that a majority of Catholics are actually more supportive of the provision than the rest of the country. A poll out Tuesday from the Public Religion Research Institute finds 52 percent of Catholic voters agreed with the statement, “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” That’s pretty much in line with overall support for the provision, which hovers at 55 percent — likely because Catholics use contraceptives at rates similar to the rest of Americans.

Now, savvy readers of GetReligion, what do you find most interesting about the polling questions? I’ll weigh in down in the comments.

Now, let’s look at a Rasmussen Reports poll and its questions:

1* Should health insurance companies be required by law to cover all government-approved contraceptives for women, without co-payments or other charges to the patient?

2* If health insurance companies are required to cover all government-approved contraceptives for women, without any charges to the patient, will that increase the cost of health insurance, decrease the cost of health insurance, or have no impact on the cost of health insurance?

3* The requirement to provide contraceptives for women violates deeply held beliefs of some churches and religious organizations. If providing such coverage violates the beliefs of a church or religious organization, should the government still require them to provide coverage for contraceptives?

4* Should individuals have the right to choose between different types of health insurance plans, including some that cost more and cover just about all medical procedures and some that cost less while covering only major medical procedures?

5* Should the government require every health insurance company and health insurance plan to cover the exact same set of medical procedures?

This was pushed out under the headline “50% Oppose Gov’t Mandate for Religious Organizations to Provide Contraceptives.” This poll didn’t receive much coverage, outside of conservative media.

Isn’t it interesting how PRRI and Rasmussen conducted their polling? Does anyone have any idea what PRRI was going for by asking those questions about sharia? Isn’t it interesting how divergent the results were?

Does this make you suspicious of certain polls? And isn’t it interesting that we even put questions of religious liberty up for polling? How does that affect news coverage? For instance, listening to NPR this morning, one got the idea that this issue should be decided based on how many Catholics use birth control. This makes no sense on any level.

On that note, a bleg. I was reading Lisa Miller’s opinion piece in the Washington Post today where she argues with no citation that 99% of all women have used birth control during their lifetime. What in the world does that figure even mean? Assuming that abstinence is included (and how could it not be with a figure of 99%), shouldn’t it be 100%? But where the heck is the citation? It’s nowhere to be found. Later she asserts that 98% of Catholic women have used contraception in their lifetimes. How in the world are we defining contraception? I wanted to find out where that number linked to but the Washington Post citation for it led into an Ouroboros of citation — it merely linked to another article by a Catholic who supports legalized abortion where the figure was cited. Only that time it didn’t even bother an attempt to substantiate. Having seen this figure thrown about in the media repeatedly, could anyone help me find the original study? Not that I don’t implicitly trust everything I read in the paper …

Polling image via ThinkStock.

Americans really are ignorant boobs

2012-02-10T13:58:15Z

Rick Santorum is not a Protestant. He has not called for public schools to teach creationism. Notwithstanding claims made by the Telegraph that the former Senator from Pennsylvania is an evangelical and a creationist — Mr. Santorum remains not guilty of these charges.

I wonder from where they get these things? This Telegraph story oozes contempt for Mr. Santorum. It paints him as a backwoods huckster who seeks to capitalize on the loathsome ignorance and cupidity of the great unwashed.

This pandering to the prejudices of the N1 chattering classes is a shame really, as the article does make a few cogent points about the weakness of Mitt Romney — but the boneheaded mistakes that lead off this article will likely cause a thoughtful reader (one who actually knows something about the candidates and wishes to learn more) to give it up as a bad job.

These mistakes about Mr. Santorum’s religion are not new, of course. And the Telegraph has already claimed the former senator pushed for the federal government to mandate the teaching of intelligent design (which is different from creationism, but I’ll get to that) as part of the No Child Left Behind Act signed by President George W. Bush in 2002. However, repetition of a false story — even by the Telegraph — does not make it true.

GetReligion reader Dr. Terry Tastard alerted me to the latest brick dropped by the Telegraph found in an 8 Feb 2012 article by the newspaper’s American political reporter entitled “US elections 2012: Rick Santorum’s triple win gives yet another twist in Republican race.”

The lede sentence in the Telegraph’s report on Mr. Santorum’s caucus wins in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri states:

With Newt Gingrich’s second coming in South Carolina now a distant memory, Mr Santorum, a fiercely evangelical Christian, is suddenly positioning himself as the only conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, the moderate-liberal front-runner.

Yes and no. Yes, Mr. Santorum is positioning himself as the “only conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.” No, he is not a “fiercely evangelical Christian.” He is an outspoken Roman Catholic.

In his email to GetReligion, Dr. Tastard suggests this mistake by the Telegraph might be explained by the Telegraph’s reliance upon the 2005 Time magazine article that called the senator one of America’s top 25 evangelicals.

“Journalists are frequently unable to tell the difference between evangelist and evangelical,” Dr. Tastard noted. I concur. TMatt at GetReligion has waxed eloquent on this point, and I refer you to his posts as to why it is important for reporters to get this right.

Let’s return to the article. It goes on to state that:

… down-at-home Mr Santorum – who believes in creationism, reviles gay marriage, thinks global warming is a myth and wants to bomb Iran – enthuses hardcore Conservatives in a way that Mr Romney, with his corporate gloss, never will.

If I am not mistaken (apart from the creationism business) I believe just about all of the Republican candidates — leaving Ron Paul to one side — oppose gay marriage, are prepared to use military force against Iran, and are skeptical about the claims of the global warming enthusiasts.

On 4 January 2012, the Telegraph’s assistant comments editor opined that the senator advocated the teaching of intelligent design in public school science curricula.

Mr Santorum pushed the “Santorum amendment”, an amendment to the 2001 education funding bill which attempted to push the teaching of intelligent design in science classes, and questioned the validity of evolutionary theory. He told Hardball’s Chris Matthews that he only believes in a “some amount” of evolution in a “micro sense”.

Is this a valid point? Let’s look at the amendment proposed by Senator Santorum.

It is the sense of the Senate that — (1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and (2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject.

If this was an attempt to sneak intelligent design under the edge of the tent, Mr. Santorum failed as he forgot to mention intelligent design in the amendment. Or maybe the crafty senator put one over on his colleagues through a cunning plan (which he has yet to reveal over the past ten years.) The senate adopted the amendment by a vote of 91-8. All of the Democrats voting supported the amendment, while the “no” votes came from Republicans who opposed Federal intervention in education.

While some have said the explicit mention of biological evolution as being a topic of controversy qualifies as a critique, I am not persuaded by this argument. As I read it, the amendment sought to help students understand what is, and what is not, science — t0 discern the difference between the truth claims of the scientific method against the truth claims of philosophy and religion.

The House version did not include similar language, and in conference the following language was adopted and included in Joint Explanatory Statement of the Committee of Conference in Title I, Part A, as item 78.

The Conferees recognize that a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.

After the compromise language was adopted, Senator Santorum spoke from the floor of the Senate thanking his colleagues for their support.

As the education bill report language makes clear, it is not proper in the science classrooms of our public schools to teach either religion or philosophy. But also, it says, just because some think that contending scientific theories may have implications for religion or philosophy, that is no reason to ignore or trivialize the scientific issues embodied in those theories. After all, there are enormous religious and philosophical questions implied by much of what science does, especially these days. Thus, it is entirely appropriate that the scientific evidence behind them is examined in science classrooms. Efforts to shut down scientific debates, as such, only serve to thwart the true purposes of education, science and law. There is a question here of academic freedom, freedom to learn, as well as to teach. The debate over origins is an excellent example.

Can we say that Senator Santorum believes in some form of intelligent design? Yes. Can we say that he does not accept every tenet of Darwinian evolution? Yes. Can we say he believes in creationism? No.

While creationism and intelligent design may be conflated in discussions about critiques of Darwinian evolution, intelligent design posits a role for the deity in the creation of the cosmos, while in the context of Christian religious conservatism creationism is the literal belief in the Genesis account of creation — God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh.

In his email to GetReligion, Dr. Tastard wrote “Why can journalists not go beyond the cliches?”

His point is well taken. Labeling Mr. Santorum an evangelical is an error of fact while the creationist label is tendentious, if not flat out incorrect. However, these mistakes need to be heard in the context of the article as a whole, which seeks to belittle the senator. The bottom line — this article is an advocacy piece masquerading as reporting. For shame.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Democracy simply doesn’t work” are sentiments expressed by fictional news anchor Kent Brockman on The Simpsons. It is dispiriting to find the Telegraph’s reporting on American politics follows this line of thinking. It endorses H.L. Mencken’s view that America is the land of the booboise. Unsophisticated morons fixated on guns, god and gays. The Telegraph really can do better than this.

As an aside, do look at the Wikipedia entry on the Santorum amendment. Here you will see why it is foolish to rely on Wikipedia as an unbiased source for information. The Wikipedia article states the senator’s amendment sought to introduce intelligent design into school curricula and was voted down among its other dubious assertions.

Caricature courtesy of Wikipedia Commons by DonkeyHotey

Addendum: Comments are welcome, but please keep them focused on the journalism. While the issues — scientific and political — are fascinating in themselves, they will be deleted unless they tie into the media questions.

A one-sided account of a general’s withdrawal

2012-02-09T23:47:21Z

Yesterday, a retired general was supposed to speak at a prayer breakfast but withdrew after backlash from various groups. This piece from the New York Times covering Lt. Gen William Boykin’s withdrawal has been sitting in my guilt file because of the complexities involved.

Granted, I haven’t see a lot of Christians backing Boykin, seeing him as someone the military should definitely offer a platform. At the same time, this piece from the Times does little to offer more than one side: the side of those who did not wish for Boykin to speak.

Plans for a talk at West Point by a retired general known for his harshly anti-Muslim remarks were abruptly canceled on Monday after a growing list of liberal veterans’ groups, civil liberties advocates and Muslim organizations called on the Military Academy to rescind the invitation.

What is considered “harshly anti-Muslim,” and who decides whether it was harsh or not? Why not offer one full quote from the general for readers to determine whether they, too, believe his previous remarks were incendiary?

Since his retirement in 2007 and a new career as a popular conservative Christian speaker, General Boykin has described Islam as “a totalitarian way of life” and said that Islam should not be protected under the First Amendment.

How would one measure Boykin’s popularity? How many times a year does he speak? Is he really sought after by Christian groups? If he is so popular, why not try reaching out to groups who might feel differently from the groups that called for his invitation to be revoked?

Lt. Col. Sherri Reed, West Point’s director of public affairs, defended the invitation on Friday, saying that “cadets are purposefully exposed to different perspectives” and that the breakfast “will be pluralistic with Christians, Jewish and Muslim cadets participating.”

The piece makes a small attempt to get the other side, but that side was before the general withdrew from the breakfast. Were there any outside groups that reacted to the decision that were on a different side than the ones cited?

A fourth-year cadet at West Point, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals for breaking military discipline, said in a telephone interview before the cancellation was announced that “people are definitely talking about it here.”

“They’re inviting someone who’s openly criticizing a religion that is practiced on campus,” he said. “I know Muslim cadets here, and they are great, outstanding citizens, and this ex-general is saying they shouldn’t enjoy the same rights.”

One reader suggests, “The anonymous West Pointer should know a lot better than to call Boykin an ‘ex-general.’ Colonels and above keep the use of the rank upon retirement. No one ever called MacArthur an ‘ex-general.’ It makes me doubt the existence of this glib cadet.” I don’t necessarily doubt this cadet’s existence, but the quote was definitely a let down. If you’re going to quote someone anonymously, I expect the quote to be really revealing or say something no one else is able to say. This quote does nothing except that it’s caused some discussion around campus. Could no one else confirm the same sentiments?

Perhaps Christian organizations wouldn’t necessarily defend Boykin, I’m not sure. But the story we’re left with is pretty lopsided.

Lopsided image via Shutterstock.

Religious liberty loses appeal

2012-02-09T23:01:44Z

The front page of Tuesday’s New York Times including a “side bar” by Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak headlined “‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World.”

It’s an analysis piece that argues the “terse and old” U.S. Constitution is too out of date. Liptak mostly relies on a new study by two law professors to argue his case but is bolstered as well by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent comments. She gave an interview in Egypt last week where she said “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended looking at the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

Liptak begins:

The Constitution has seen better days.

Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning …

There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.

He makes his case, pointing out how difficult it is to amend the Constitution (apparently some people think that’s a bug, not a feature) and its general inflexibility “Congress shall make no law …” (ditto). Another sample:

Americans recognize rights not widely protected, including ones to a speedy and public trial, and are outliers in prohibiting government establishment of religion. But the Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect, at least in so many words, a right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and health care.

As you can imagine, there’s been plenty of political response to this analysis piece from the New York Times. And that’s what an analysis piece is designed to do — provoke reaction.

But I highlight it here for the rather obvious ghost. There’s likely a powerful answer to why the U.S. Constitution is less popular among some new governments than, say, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which has come under strenuous criticism from civil libertarians across the spectrum). Certainly the prohibition of government establishment of religion — which is glossed over here not to be mentioned again — is part of it. So would be the other relevant clauses in the First Amendment, including the free exercise of religion.

I’m willing to have someone try to make the case that the reason why Egypt and other emerging Muslim governments don’t want to follow the U.S. Constitution is because it doesn’t enshrine “entitlements” to food, whatever that means.

But help me if I’m wrong, but do you think that maybe Egyptians might put less stock in the free exercise of religion and more in the establishment of a state religion than the U.S. Constitution allows? What about other countries with majority Muslim populations?

It’s just a reminder of how reporters and others fail to understand that the American relationship of church and state arises out of particular religious and political environments and traditions. These aren’t easily translatable to a Muslim environment, although some scholars have made headway on just this point.

But to write about the Constitution’s lack of appeal in emerging governments and to miss this rather glaring point serves no one, even in an analysis piece from the front page of the Times. Just ask the Copts in Egypt whether they’d rather have an enshrined entitlement to education or the freedom to practice their religion without paying the ultimate price. That freedom of religion probably doesn’t seem so “old” and antiquated to the dying Christians as this piece put forth. But to ignore it, is another thing entirely.

Frame game: Birth control vs. religious liberty, again

2012-02-09T19:10:10Z

At this point, the media storm about Health and Human Services story is growing and becoming more complex.

Once again, the goal here at GetReligion is to focus on the mainstream news coverage of the emerging story lines.

At the moment, the main framing device in the news and commentary in the mainstream press remains the same. It looks something like this:

(1) The White House says this is a story about birth control and women’s health. Thus, this is a story about birth-control debates between a small number of traditional Catholics and the rest of the nation, including most Catholics.

(2) The nasty Catholic bishops and GOP candidates are attempting to frame this story as a battle over the First Amendment and religious liberty — but that’s just politics, not doctrine. In other words, that’s mere right-wing political spin.

(3) Thus, the vast majority of news reports are framing this as a birth-control battle, perhaps with a few conservative voices thrown into the mix. Many journalists, it seems, have decided that even mentioning “religious liberty” and related Constitutional issues is forbidden, since that would raise the issue of whether religious traditionalists in all faiths have a valid point worthy of fair and accurate coverage. The “religious liberty” nuts are sort of the flat-earth people in this scenario.

The problem is, lots and lots of people — liberal Catholics and most Protestants — who are not opposed to common forms of birth control are very upset about these HHS rules. Check out this blockbuster, cover-our-tails piece from Bloomberg.

Then, after reading that, move on to this, which includes some of the most pointed language that I have seen on the Catholic left, care of Michael Sean Winters at The National Catholic Reporter:

Yes, I want a solution to this mess. But, I also want a victory by which I mean I want a really robust conscience exemption. I want any change by the White House not only to work in terms of resolving this issue but to send a clear and unambiguous statement that in this great diverse, pluralistic country of ours, there is room for us Catholics to be Catholic, with all of our quirks, and that the government recognizes that they have no business telling religious organizations what their mission is or how to manage it. I do not want the White House to cry “uncle” for the sake of crying uncle. But, when somebody punches me in the nose, and when someone punches my friends Sr. Carol Keehan and Father John Jenkins and countless others in the nose, I am not going to rush to make nice with them either. There needs to be an apology. And the President needs to go to the pro-choice caucus and explain that their stance imperils the entire Affordable Care Act, both politically and legally, and without that, they would not be discussing extending contraception to anyone.

Make no mistake about it - those who support denying Catholic institutions a more robust exemption have placed their commitment to pro-choice orthodoxy above their commitment to health care reform. Is that progressive? Is that something progressive Catholics, who fought so hard to pass the ACA, want to defend? It is time for so-called progressive Catholics to stop serving as chaplains to the political status quo and recognize a first principle when they see one. It is time for Catholics to insist that a conscience exemption that only applies to religion on Sunday and no help for the poor unless they are also Catholic is no conscience exemption at all.

Of course, it’s easy to ask: Why do religious groups need a conscience clause when they have the First Amendment, when they have a history of church-state law that says the government does not have the power to get entangled in doctrinal issues of this kind? The state does not have the right to say that “religion” is when people sit in pews, but not when they feed the poor, teach children and heal the sick — in institutions that are explicitly and meaningfully connected to religious traditions, laws and doctrines.

As I have said before, this is an argument about the separation of church and state, one rooted in the old liberalism that fiercely defended freedom of speech (and the press, by the way), freedom of association and freedom of religion.

So if Winters, Vice President Joe Biden, Chris Matthews, Cardinal Roger Mahony and flocks of other Catholic progressives — if the old liberals, in other words — see this as a religious liberty issue, what should one call the following point of view from a major journalist who all but dismisses the First Amendment claims?

This aggressive claiming of the moral high ground is close to drowning out the regulation’s supporters, inside and outside of the Obama administration. Maybe I’m missing something, but I haven’t seen a comparably full-throated defense of the regulation, issued last month by the Department of Health and Human Services, except on pure policy grounds. (And there are indications this week that even some in the administration, or at least in President Obama’s campaign apparatus, may be getting cold feet.) While the policy grounds are fully persuasive — the ability to prevent or space pregnancy being an essential part of women’s health care, one that shouldn’t be withheld simply because a woman’s employer is church-affiliated — the purpose of this column is to examine the conscience claim itself, directly, to see whether it holds up.

An obvious starting point is with the 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women who, just like other American women, have exercised their own consciences and availed themselves of birth control at some point during their reproductive lives. So it’s important to be clear that the conscientious objection to the regulation comes from an institution rather than from those whose consciences it purports to represent. (Catholic women actually have a higher rate of abortion than other American women, but I’ll stick to birth control for now.) While most Catholics dissent in the privacy of their bedrooms from the church’s position, some are pushing back in public. The organization Catholics for Choice, whose magazine is pointedly entitled Conscience, is calling on its supporters to “tell our local media that the bishops are out of touch with the lived reality of the Catholic people” and “do not speak for us on this decision.”

That, of course, is the voice of Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times — perhaps the most influential reporter who has ever covered the U.S. Supreme Court.

Is this, perhaps, the voice of the establishment media in the prestigious offices on high? Is this the voice charged with deciding who is a good Catholic and who is a bad Catholic, in the eyes of the government and, almost as important, the Times?

Greenhouse has, of course, spoken out these kinds of cultural, legal and religious issues before. Remember her famous sermon at Radcliffe about the values of the ’60s, which caused heat at NPR and then at the Times? The one that said:

… (We) were absolutely united in one conviction: the belief that in future decades, if the world lasted that long, when our turn came to run the country, we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Our generation would do a better job. I cried that night in the Simon and Garfunkel concert out of the realization that my faith had been misplaced. We were not doing a better job. We had not learned from the old mistakes. Our generation had not proved to be the solution. We were the problem.

And of course my little crying jag occurred before we knew the worst of it, before it was clear the extent to which our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world. And let’s not forget the sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.

My point, again, is not who is wrong and who is right in this journalism puzzle.

Thus, my point is not that the “religious liberty” camp should be covered and the “birth control” arguments ignored. In fact, I will say this again: There is no way to cover this story without hitting the birth-control angle and hitting it hard. There is no way to cover this story without covering its political angles.

From a journalistic perspective, this is not doctrine vs. politics. It’s both-and. This is not “religious liberty” vs. the sexual revolution. It’s both-and. The journalistic framing in this story must take seriously the line (currently) coming out of the White House and the voices of observant Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, evangelical Protestants and others who believe that the U.S. government is trying to punish those who refuse to edit centuries of tradition and law in order to conform to Caesar. (By the way, have any church groups officially spoken out to back the White House on this?)

Now, let’s use the comments pages to share the URLs for hard-news stories and other commentaries that attempt this “both-and” approach to framing this story — an old school, journalistic, old-liberalism approach. You can start right here, with this new essay by the progressive Catholic scribe David Gibson, writing for Religion News Service.

Blind spots breaking out all over

2012-02-09T01:41:50Z

Last night, I pointed out the Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple’s rather odd attempt to defend mainstream coverage of the Planned Parenthood PR and fundraising campaign of the Komen foundation. One of the things he’d said was that Ross Douthat’s New York Times column critiquing bad media coverage was “bunk” because you could find good coverage, too. Specifically, he pointed out, this Dallas Morning News story (“which carefully laid out both sides of the dispute”). How carefully, you ask? This carefully. Here’s the lede:

The backlash Wednesday was swift and strong — coming by phone, email and every form of social networking.

Women were angry, disappointed and worried that Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a Dallas-based foundation, had withdrawn its funding from Planned Parenthood’s nationwide organization.

Yes, that lede carefully lays out both sides of the dispute — not just the women who were angry at Komen but also the women who were disappointed and worried. It may have gotten better if you read beyond the lede (which few readers do, of course) but it’s behind a pay wall now.

Anyway, Wemple’s defense of the Dallas Morning News isn’t even accepted by a member of that paper’s staff. Editorial writer Rodger Jones has a piece headlined “Media’s blind spot on abortion, Obama’s contraceptive edict and church issues.”

He begins by quoting MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe today. He apparently said, “The media has a blind spot on social issues.” Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller might say it’s not a blind spot at all but, rather, an intentional bias on moral, cultural and religious issues.

Jones gives six examples of his paper’s blind spots, including.

1) There has yet to be any news coverage of Bishop Kevin Farrell’s pledge to defy the White House on its HHS mandate.

2) There has been no news coverage of how North Texas Catholics or employees of Catholic institutions think about the HHS mandate.

3) And yet a handful of people who invited the press to their protest at Komen got a front page picture and more inside the paper. But, then again, why didn’t the 8,000 marchers in Dallas at the previous month’s March for Life get even a single mention in the paper?

4) painting the dispute between HHS and religious liberty as a partisan issue.

A sample:

There has been no news coverage about what North Texas Catholics in the pews or employees of Catholic institutions think. I have no doubt that many workers would welcome free contraceptives, and I wonder how they square that with church teachings. That’s a story to approach with sensitivity, and it’s worth the trouble by thoughtful journalists.

Catholics in the pews are not hard hard to find. The typical church has several Sunday masses. At some churches they run from Saturday afternoon to Sunday evening. There’s one to fit any reporter’s schedule. The location of the nearest church is just a click away, on the diocesan website’s Parish Finder. Put in a ZIP code and take your choice.

Within walking distance of our offices downtown are the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe and, even closer, St. Jude’s Chapel on Main Street. Both have noontime masses.

It is easier to wait for the interest groups to call and deliver your points for the story, but Jones is correct that this reporting isn’t that difficult either — even if it does require some knowledge of church teachings and some sensitivity.

In many ways, the coverage we’ve seen in the last week is a powerful reminder of how important the religious and values beat is to covering a story fully and accurately and with added value.

Wasn’t it Chesterton who said “In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.” I would argue that if any beat understood the truth of that quote, it would be people who get to talk to those who know they accept dogma every day. This is one of the many reasons why the religion beat is so important. The errors we saw in the last week could be chalked up to a group of people who accept a particular dogma fervently and just had no awareness that their views weren’t universal.

Anyway, the last week has also seen wonderful comments here at GetReligion (as well as many kind notes from reporters and others). I wanted to highlight this one from Kris D. that made a great point:

Here is a link to an old NYT Magazine column, “The Ethicist”. In it, Randy Cohen states that to support Curves if one is pro-choice is basically an unethical thing to do since your membership dollars support pro-life causes that you don’t believe in. Contrast this with the “apolitical” funding of PP by the Komen foundation as the MSM reported it & you really do have to wonder why the media’s blindspots aren’t recognized. Sauce for the goose apparently isn’t sauce for the gander.

Sometimes you can see the dogma you accept and sometimes you need to have it pointed out to you. If reporters know where their blind spots are, they can work to avoid missteps in the future.

Blind spot image via Shutterstock.

The narrow Prop 8 decision

2012-02-08T19:31:14Z

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” — Mark Twain

That quote is one of my favorite.

In an extremely loose fashion, I think it applies to the two news stories I’m about to review — each of which appeared above the fold on the front page of a different Times today, one in New York and the other in Los Angeles.

I first read the New York Times’ story on a federal appeals panel’s ruling Tuesday throwing out California’s Proposition 8, a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage passed in 2008. I found the coverage confusing, beset with legalese and lacking any real insight on the repeated characterization of the 2-1 decision as “narrowly framed.”

Then I read the Los Angeles Times’ story and was amazed by how much more effectively it explained the judges’ reasoning (on both sides), analyzed the potential national ramifications and clearly made me understand the meaning of “narrowly written.”

The top of the L.A. Times report:

Reporting from San Francisco and Los Angeles — A federal appeals court has declared California’s 2008 voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, concluding that the prohibition served no purpose other than to “lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians.”

The 2-1 ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was narrowly written to limit its scope to California’s borders and possibly even avoid review by the U.S. Supreme Court, legal experts said. Nonetheless, gay-rights advocates hailed Tuesday’s decision as historic, while supporters of Proposition 8 immediately vowed to appeal.

Instead of expanding the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians, the court based its decision on a 1996 U.S. Supreme Court precedent that said a majority may not take away a minority’s rights without legitimate reasons.

The two stories, dare I say, epitomize the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

The N.Y. Times story boils down the decision to two judges on one side who believe Proposition 8 “serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gay men and lesbians in California.” Then there’s the dissenting judge, who “wrote that the court was overreaching in nullifying a voter initiative.” That’s the full extent of the dissent, if all you read is the N.Y. Times.

Contrast that with the L.A. Times’ report, which explains why the 2-1 decision may be seen as narrowly applying to California and not a potentially precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court case:

But other lawyers and legal scholars said the 9th Circuit might have the final word on Proposition 8 because the ruling was so pointedly limited to California, a state where voters stripped a minority of a right that already existed and where the usual justifications for a same-sex marriage ban, responsible parenting and procreation, are undercut by domestic partner laws.

Proposition 8 passed as a constitutional amendment six months after the California Supreme Court struck down a state law that limited marriage to a man and a woman, and an estimated 18,000 same-sex couples married during that time. The initiative also did not affect parenting rights of gays and lesbians, which are protected under other state laws.

“That legal background does not exist in most states,” said University of Minnesota Law School professor Dale Carpenter, who has followed the case.

As for the dissenting judge, whose only rationale was upholding the will of the voters? According to the L.A. Times, there’s a little more to his position:

Judge N. Randy Smith, a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush, dissented, arguing that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples could be justified on the grounds that heterosexual couples are the only couples who can procreate naturally.

“The family structure of two committed biological parents — one man and one woman — is the optimal partnership for raising children,” Smith wrote.

He also noted that states may legitimately prohibit bigamy, incest, bestiality and other sexual relationships condemned by society, as well as impose age limits for marriage or require tests for venereal disease without running afoul of constitutional rights.

Barry McDonald, a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University, called Smith’s arguments “very reasonable.” Whereas the Colorado case barred gays from receiving all sorts of protections from discrimination, Proposition 8 was limited to marriage, McDonald noted.

“It’s going to be tougher to make the case that the voters of California were animated by pure animus alone” in passing Proposition 8 “since they already had done so much in giving gays and lesbians all the rights of marriage,” McDonald said.

Alas, and maybe it’s just me, but the N.Y. Times gave me a chuckle by including a parenthetical statement in one sentence suggesting that “some view” the Ninth Circuit as “liberal.” Actually, “the most notoriously liberal appeals court in the nation” is how a leading evangelical describes the circuit that in 2002 declared the “one nation under God” phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

Even more humorous, given the Ninth Circuit’s notoriety, the N.Y. Times apparently got the circuits confused in its original story. This correction is appended to the online story:

Correction: February 7, 2012

A previous version of this article said supporters of Proposition 8 might ask a larger panel of the 11th circuit to review Tuesday’s decision. It would be the Ninth Circuit.

(A quick Google search reveals that the 11th Circuit is based in Atlanta.)

For its part, the L.A. Times characterizes the two majority judges this way:

Joining Reinhardt, a liberal lion of the 9th Circuit appointed by former President Jimmy Carter, was Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, a former Arizona federal prosecutor and an appointee of former President Bill Clinton.

Both stories, meanwhile, end with a jubilant supporter of gay marriage celebrating Tuesday’s ruling. I guess none of the people (including religious leaders) who rallied on behalf of Proposition 8 were available to express their disappointment?

Those are, of course, just two examples of the coverage of the decision. Have you seen other particularly egregious or exceptional stories? Please provide links in the comments section.

A reminder that GetReligion promotes fair, accurate reporting on religion in the secular media. We’re not here to argue the case or the politics, so please focus on journalism or we’ll be forced to overturn your comment with no appeal.

Photos via Shutterstock

Ghost in the Brendan voyage

2012-02-08T16:18:18Z

Let me admit something right up front.

This lengthy Washington Post sports feature about Matt Rutherford’s amazing attempt to sail — solo, in a small boat — all the way around North and South America had me locked up the minute I read that he had named his boat the Saint Brendan.

This legendary Irish missionary is my patron saint, you see. I do most of my GetReligion.org work under the watchful gaze of an icon of St. Brendan, which hangs just to the right of my keyboard.

The stunning nature of Rutherford’s quest (see solotheamericas.org) is almost impossible to describe, but here is a fact paragraph that takes it on.

It is difficult to convey fully the audacity of what Rutherford is attempting to do: sailing some 25,000 miles, through some of the Earth’s most treacherous ocean, on a 36-year-old Albin Vega boat (which he christened the Saint Brendan, in honor of a sixth-century explorer) best suited to weekend sailors who never venture beyond Tilghman Island on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. Already, the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge, England, has recognized him as the first person in recorded history to make it through the fabled Northwest Passage alone and non-stop on such a small sailboat.

I kept thinking of two logical questions as I read this piece: (1) Why in the world is he risking his life to do this? And (2) does it have anything to do with the name of his boat?

When I reached the end of the story, that second question remained unanswered.

The first question — the “why” in the who, what, when, where, why and how equation — was answered. Sort of. The subject was touched, briefly, then released like a sizzling frying pan. And, yes, it appears that the “why” in this story has something to do with religion. Consider it a classic ghost in an otherwise fine news feature.

Here is the heart of it all:

What, then, would compel a 30-year-old Ohio native with a passion for the Cleveland Browns and the history of exploration to climb aboard an old sailboat, loaded with hand-me-down equipment and freeze-dried food, and embark on a mission that more experienced and practical sailors equate to suicide?

The simple answer is charity. Rutherford concocted his idea as a way to raise money for Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating (CRAB), an Annapolis-based organization that aims to provide sailing opportunities for physically and/or developmentally disabled persons. While Rutherford is about 80 percent done with his voyage, he is only about 10 percent of the way to his fundraising goal of $250,000 for CRAB’s projects.

But as one would expect, there is a larger mission at work here, a quest for self-knowledge and inner peace that Rutherford hasn’t always been able to find on dry land. He was born and raised, he says, in a cult, before becoming “angry and confused” as a youth and taking to street life, spending much of his teens going in and out of juvenile detention centers.

The life of adventure that he chose in his 20s as a means of escape has led him, among other places, to a solo bicycle journey across Southeast Asia and a pair of trans-Atlantic sails. His latest adventure makes those seem like child’s play.

So this is a “quest for self-knowledge,” including a heavyweight, to the near-death fight with loneliness on a tiny board. That’s interesting.

So he was raised in “a cult,” a term that certainly raises more questions than it answers. And what kind of cult might that have been? Was there a place? A name? A particular religion that was twisted until it became dangerous?

Sorry, but there are no answers in this piece for any of those questions. In the end, the editors at the Post leave readers with more information about this battered sailing equipment than they do about the contents of this man’s mind, heart and soul. That’s interesting, and sad.

Perhaps Rutherford didn’t want to answer specific questions about that part of this life. Perhaps the answers are hard to explain — in a newspaper. Perhaps this wasn’t a “religious” cult, but merely one centering on a secular, but charismatic, leader. That would be interesting, if that were the case.

But let me state once again: It certainly seems that, when facing questions about Rutherford’s formative years, we are dealing with the WHY that launched this remarkable man onto the high seas seeking healing and inner peace. Is that a key to this story or what?

PHOTO: From the Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating website.

Kurtz: Of course Komen stories were biased

2012-02-08T21:52:09Z

As you poor GetReligion readers know, I’ve been pounding the beat on media coverage of Planned Parenthood’s campaign against Komen. You can read my earlier posts: “Media discover Planned Parenthood is controversial” (which took issue with how media reports told only half the story about how people feel about Planned Parenthood), “Media genuflect before Church of Planned Parenthood” (which critiqued how they were engaged in advocacy on behalf of Planned Parenthood), and “Planned Parenthood and media thank each other” (which cataloged how they thought they’d done good work in advocating for Planned Parenthood). I also wrote a piece for CNN collecting some of these thoughts: “My Take: On Komen Controversy, Media Told Half The Story.”

Now I know from the many emails and comments we’ve received here on this topic that people reacted quite strongly to the way the media advocated for Planned Parenthood and against Komen. My views are well established. There has been a bit of other media criticism in recent days, and I wanted to highlight those, too.

The first is the piece embedded here, by Howard Kurtz. He’s a media writer for the Daily Beast, after years as a star media-beat reporter at The Washington Post. He says many obvious things about how biased most stories about Komen were. He doesn’t even think it’s a bad thing, necessarily, he’s just saying that it was.

So Kurtz says there’s no question that the media drove this story, forced the apology from the Komen foundation and have been approaching the whole narrative from the left. He remarks on how Andrea Mitchell hammered Komen, but adds that most journalists in the mainstream media were doing the same thing. He notes that many in the media simply weren’t interested in telling more than one side of the story, likely due to their strong feelings. But their framing was overwhelmingly similar: that Komen was stupid ever to have thought it could pull funding from such a wonderful and apolitical organization as Planned Parenthood. He points out the obvious double standard of viewing funding of Planned Parenthood as apolitical but no funding as political. A snippet from what might not be a perfect transcription:

I have to call them as I see them. The way I see this, the pressure was so relentless, the publicity so bad, the headlines so negative, the media pressure forced the Komen Foundation (despite its initial insistence that it was just fine) to reverse itself, to restore the funding, to apologize, to seek forgiveness from its supporters. That shows you something about the power, the clout of mainstream media, even in this era of Facebook and social networking. But it also tells you something about the way in which the media frame sometimes these controversial subjects, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps without meaning to perhaps because everyone the reporter knows thinks the same way. But in this case it was clearly framed form the liberal side of the argument.

You don’t say.

For another view, you can read Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple’s haughty retort to Ross Douthat’s column on the media malpractice we saw this last week. He gives “Four reasons why Ross Douthat’s media-bias argument is bunk.” Apparently Ross Douthat could have found stories that weren’t as bad as some of the one he highlighted. Ross also didn’t look at Twitter or other social media when he criticized mainstream media (no, I don’t get it either). The third is that Komen deserved its treatment. The fourth is that Wemple doesn’t buy Douthat’s contention that people such as me exist.

(Confidential to Washington Post: half the readers of GetReligion could do better, more interesting and less conformist media criticism.) Journalists sure love being contrarian until it requires disagreeing with the center-left consensus in which they exist. I could be wrong, but he didn’t even bother doing any media crit of the Planned Parenthood advocacy until he could do the contrarian “backlash to the backlash” approach he took here. And please correct me if I’m wrong.

OK. A better Washington Post response (and to be sure, Washington Post coverage on this story has been better than much of what we’ve highlighted here at GetReligion) came from reporter Sarah Kliff. Kudos to her for responding substantively even if defensively and without enough reflection on where things fell apart with the media:

As one member of the media who spent a lot of time covering this story, I thought I could offer a bit of perspective on this question. Douthat is right that those who supported Komen’s decision to cut ties with Planned Parenthood got significantly less media coverage than those who opposed it. But he’s wrong about why.

As Lena Sun and I reported in yesterday’s Washington Post, Planned Parenthood had a very aggressive media strategy: Within a day of the Komen decision, the organization blasted out the news it had raised $400,000 from 6,000 online donors. On a press call Friday, the group announced it had raised $3 million in 72 hours.

Throughout the past week, I’ve repeatedly called and e-mailed Komen requesting comparable data. So far, nothing. The closest I got came on a Thursday conference call with Komen CEO Nancy Brinker, who said donations were “100 percent up,” although she declined to give specific figures. It was difficult to report anything more extensive than that 100 percent figure, when Komen declined to provide further information on the topic.

This reminds me of when my sister went to the hospital to deliver her first full-term child. She began hemorrhaging as she waited to be induced. My brother-in-law immediately went to get a nurse and was brushed off. He had to make a scene to get help and my niece Sophie was delivered via emergency C-section 15 minutes later, saving the lives of both my sister and her baby.

Sometimes you have to freak out beyond belief to get noticed. I made a point when lamenting the poor coverage of this year’s March for Life that pro-life groups might think less about complaining about the coverage and more about helping reporters. It’s not something I think is particularly good about media coverage, but the fact is that many reporters are slaves to public relations campaigns. As anyone who followed this controversy can figure out, Planned Parenthood broke this news to coincide with a fundraising campaign. It had known for months about Komen’s funding guidelines. It worked with, sure, an unbelievably pliable and servile media, but credit where it’s due: it ran a tight public relations and fundraising campaign. All the ducks were in a row.

And certainly Komen had no idea it would be up against not just Planned Parenthood’s huge resources but a media that worked in lock-step with the organization that provides 330,000 abortions a year. It may have even believed, due to years of favorable treatment in the press, that the media would give it good or even just fair coverage. It was completely unprepared for the Church of Planned Parenthood and the fervent witness of its members and clergy.

But still. If you have a savvy public relations campaign that just happened to have the perfect sources available to speak at the moment the reporter wants to speak with someone versus just, you know, Americans who are just sitting around and only hear about the story after it’s already been framed as something that no ~~female~~ ~~breast cancer survivor~~ ~~right-thinking person~~ human could ever support … it’s no contest.

I’m not saying that such press release journalism is how the media should work. But it’s how it does work. Yes, much of this story is about institutional bias in newsrooms, but some of it is just about how hard it is to report stories on deadline while competing with tons of other reporters.

Like Kurtz said, perhaps it’s just a function of everyone in the newsrooms having the same view. And few people would argue that such conformity of backgrounds and ideological are healthy. Well, maybe Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, would say it’s healthy. He has essentially argued that the Times is unbiased on politics, but not culture, morals and religion. This would be a fantastic example of what happens when you embrace the bias on the culture, morals and religion beats — and you see how it bleeds over into politics, too.

But what are you going to do? Let’s say you’re a reporter who’s been spoon fed a PR campaign, has gotten Planned Parenthood talking points, gets conference calls pushing the narrative, and everyone you know agrees with them … it will color your perception of the story. How do you even find people (such as me) who gave their first contribution to Komen last week? After we donated, an automatic note went up on my Facebook wall (I took a screen capture here) and those of many of my friends but we don’t know any of the reporters on this story at the Post. We weren’t told to donate by any pro-life group that could collect our stories and have us speak on conference calls and the like. Komen obviously didn’t want to further embroil itself in the abortion wars after the surprise attack from Planned Parenthood — that’s what they’d been trying to get away from in the first place! — so they were no help to countering the narrative.

Anyway, I’m really not trying to blame the victims here but the point is — if you want to play the game, sometimes you have to be a bit more media savvy. There are lessons for many people in this story — public relations professionals, media critics, partisan organizations and breast cancer charities and more.

Bias and balance in Aussie Catholic news

2012-02-07T21:34:21Z

Anti-catholic bias in the press is not new. But I do wonder if fifteen years of abuse scandals has shifted the framework for reporting on the Roman Catholic Church.The default position in the press is that the Catholic Church is guilty as charged — no matter the charge.

I see this in the reporting on the controversy in Australia over the dismissal of a progressive bishop. In May Bishop Bill Morris of Toowoomba left office five years ahead of schedule. He had been subject to an extended investigation by the Vatican and had been criticized for his progressive views — including allowing women to be ordained to the priesthood. The assumptions and inferences that lie behind the reporting appear to be driven by forces outside the story.

Newspaper writing is a craft. Good journalists bring to their work specialized knowledge of a subject and a command of prose styling. Writers improve with time and a few become masters in the art, while most achieve a workmanlike competence. Some should pack it in and explore new career options where leaden prose is a virtue. Politics? Insurance?

Religion reporting in the Melbourne newspaper, The Age, is just about the best there is in Australia and its chief religion reporter is among the masters of the craft. I’ve been reading the work of Barney Zwartz for many years and like what I see. He has a combines a lightness of touch with a wide knowledge of the subject.

However, there are times when narrative skill and professional knowledge are not enough to produce a good story. I want to look at a recent article entitled “Pope ‘wrong’ in sacking Queensland bishop” on the controversy surrounding Bishop Morris — and ask if you see the problem I see.

The story has a great opening:

The Pope acted against natural justice and the Catholic Church’s own canon law when he sacked Bill Morris as Bishop of Toowoomba last May, two expert independent reports have found.

Queensland Supreme Court judge W.J. Carter found that Bishop Morris was denied procedural fairness and natural justice, and that his treatment was ”offensive” to the requirements of both civil and canon (church) law. He wrote about one unsigned Vatican letter to the bishop that ”one could not imagine a more striking case of a denial of natural justice”.

His conclusion was endorsed by a leading Australian canon lawyer, Melbourne’s Father Ian Waters, whose report was made public last week.

He found that Pope Benedict breached canon law and exceeded his authority in removing Bishop Morris without finding him guilty of apostasy, heresy or schism and without following the judicial procedures canon law requires.

This is good stuff. Crisply written — it grabs the reader’s attention and pulls him into the story. The article summarizes the findings of these experts and recounts the dismissal by the pope of Bishop Morris last May. The story closes with the information that the diocese backed its bishop and was distressed by the Vatican’s actions.

So what’s the problem with the article? Balance.

Let me say up front that I am not saying the article should have given equal time or space to the Catholic church to defend its decision to remove Bishop Morris. The article is not about his removal, but about an independent report that criticizes his removal. Given the limitations of space in most broadsheets there is often little room for an extended treatment of the issues or background. And, if my experience is a guide, churches are slow to respond to questions.

However, I would have liked to have seen some response from the institutional church — either a spokesman or an expert voice — about the claims of unfair treatment made in the report. Barring that perhaps a line or two from a canon lawyer who could speak to the general issue of due process in ecclesiastical proceedings. A response to the firing from the church was not necessary in this story, a response to the report was.

As an aside, in the specialist press that rule does not always hold true because they will devote several articles to a story. Story A is the event. Story B the reaction. Story C the response … and so forth.

The arc of the story, its tone and trajectory, suggests an anti-Vatican bias in this story. While we are told in the first paragraph the report was prepared by two independent investigators, it is not until paragraph 5, out of 8, that we learn these independent investigators were commissioned by the dismissed bishop’s friends.

An independent investigator could have been commissioned by the church to review its procedures. We have seen this in some of the abuse cases in the U.S. for example. However, an independent investigator commissioned by the former bishop’s supporters casts a different light on the story. It does not nullify or lessen the importance of their findings — but it does call for the reader to place these findings in perspective.

By waiting until after the beating the church is given by the experts is over, the statement “Both reports were commissioned by Bishop Morris’ supporters in Toowoomba” comes too late in the narrative. It is unfair.

In sum, my concerns are not over the story under consideration — whether Bishop Morris was unfairly sacked is beside point. My concern is with how this was packaged by The Age. The clever language coupled with the manipulation of the plot line fails the reader who is seeking the truth.

Is this deliberate Catholic bashing? Could the sub-editor have cut out a few paragraphs giving the church’s side of the story so as to fit the article into the page? Might the church not have returned phone calls or ignored the reporter—making it culpable in the way the story was reported? Are we hearing echoes of the Catholic Church’s handling of its abuse cases in the shaping of this narrative about unfair dismissal? What’s going on here?

What say you GetReligion readers?

JFK meets Wheaton College (no, not that one)

2012-02-07T17:33:57Z

As you would imagine, the new memoir by former White House intern Mimi Alford about her affair with President John F. Kennedy is causing a lot of buzz, even though the scope of Kennedy’s philandering has long been rumored, documented and then dismissed in Beltway circles.

Face it, JFK was the crown prince of the sexual revolution, you know, and a man’s man has gotta do what a man’s man has gotta do.

However, this particular book does break new ground, in part because it contains a level of candor and detail that is still raising some eyebrows. It seems that the first-person female voice in this work is quite powerful and, thus, shocking. However, there is absolutely no need to go into the macho details in a faith-and-family-friendly weblog such as this one.

Meanwhile, is there religion in the book?

Well, that depends on whether one thinks that morality, decency and religious faith are in any way connected. Other than that, there are two tiny details to mention.

First of all, the standard ID reference in Alford in reports about the book — click here for some examples — is that she is a grandmother and a “retired church worker” in New York City or a former “church administrator.” That’s an interesting combination of words, in and of itself.

So far, I have not found a reference that actually says where Alford worked, during those years. Perhaps readers are simply supposed to assume that she worked in a Catholic parish in New York, since journalists often assume that “Catholic” is the default answer to any questions about newsworthy churches. Then again, perhaps — in New York — one could assume that she worked for an Episcopal parish. Truth is, I don’t know. However, it’s a basic piece of information that reader’s might want to know.

Second, there is another reference at the very top of the following Daily Beast report on this book that I think should have been fleshed out just a bit, for the sake of clarity. Pay close attention and think “religion.”

Uncertain and all of 19, tall and striking Marion “Mimi” Beardsley rode the train from Trenton, N.J., down to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1962 to intern at the White House. The Wheaton College undergraduate was puzzled as to why she’d been chosen for the internship — she hadn’t applied. Beardsley had, however, written an article for her all-girls boarding school, Miss Porter’s School, about one of its most famous alumnae, the first lady. A trip to the White House had led to a chance meeting with the president. And a year later, there she was, on her way to one of the cushiest posts available to a young woman whose parents frequently consulted the Social Register.

What happened over the next week — and continued for the following year and a half — forms the body of Once Upon a Secret: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath. Alford, now 69 and a grandmother of seven, reveals that from the first week of her internship in the summer of 1962 through November 1963, she conducted an affair with President Kennedy, spending nights with him in his private bedroom, traveling to be with him at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and seeing the president for the last time shortly before his fateful trip to Dallas. In this memoir, part confession, part hagiography, Alford divulges the intimate details of the time she spent with one of America’s most beloved presidents.

Alford remembers being overwhelmed by the glamour of the White House in her first week, being greeted by Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, and being put to work among the secretaries in the press office. “The men were in charge,” Alford writes. “The women assisted them.”

Now, did anyone spot a reference in there that will seem a bit out of place for many, if not most, readers who live outside the elite power corridors of the Northeast?

You see, there is Wheaton College and then there is Wheaton College.

To be more specific, when you get into online search engine results, there is the very well known Wheaton College in Illinois — think alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham — and then there is the Wheaton College that is located near Boston, Mass.

I think it is safe to say, from the context, that Alford is from the former seminary for women in Norton, Mass., and not from one of the most famous schools in Evangelical Protestantism.

In a story that pushes as many hot buttons as this one, I think the leaders of that famous school in the heartland would have appreciated the addition of some kind of clarifying reference — such as Wheaton College (Mass.) — in the report.

Just saying.

A vague resurrection

2012-02-07T02:17:30Z

With books like “Heaven is for Real” on the New York Times bestseller list, it’s no wonder reporters might gravitate toward stories of death, resurrection, heaven and everything else that touches the topic. A reader sent us a piece that neglects to mention quite a few details in trying to retell a resurrection-like story.

A local Knoxville television station reports on a man who died — or appeared to have died — in a church service but woke up 10 minutes later.

On January 22nd, Fred McAfee attended a morning worship at Covenant Life Worship Center in Lake City. He got out of his chair to give an offering, and collapsed suddenly.

“No breath, no heartbeat… just completely collapsed,” remembers Pastor Tony McAfee.

Several people attempted to revive Fred McAfee, and an ambulance was called. While the congregation waited, they prayed.

“Its an amazing story, really, about the power of prayer,” said the pastor. “And that miracles still do happen.”

The reader who sent it in also sent a list of questions the story left her with:

Has this ever happened in the history of the church? Is this a church or denomination that typically looks for miracles and charismatic events?
How has this experience affected the man’s faith? How has it affected his church?
Is the pastor related to the man who collapsed? They have the same last name.

You would think these kinds of questions would come up in the editing process. Otherwise, the story is rather thin on substance or background. The reporter took the time to interview some doctor (not the one who practiced on the man) to explain the science behind it, but didn’t bother to take the time to explain some of the underlying religious themes.

The pastor told the reporter, “It isn’t unusual for people to be healed, but it is unusual for people to be resurrected from the dead.” Could the reporter have asked, “What do you mean when you say people have been healed?” Does he mean spiritually, literally, or something else? Could he provide examples?

The reporter finds a cutesy way to end the piece without bothering to dig for more of the details. “He had been participating in a religious fast. His wife assured me, it could be his last.” So what is this religious fast, you ask. Too bad, the story’s over and the anchors moved onto something else.

That missing church-state angle in NYC

2012-02-06T22:16:31Z

The clock is ticking in New York City for the many churches that face eviction under the court ruling that states that churches — unlike other non-profits — cannot rent space in public schools. Why? Because worship in a government space fundamentally and, one must assume, supernaturally, changes the nature of that space. Click here and here to revisit that situation.

As one would expect, The New York Times continues to cover this legal tussle. Thus, we read, concerning the crisis affecting the Park Slope Presbyterian Church:

The issue of using public schools for religious services has been a matter of debate for decades. Because of a recent federal court ruling that upheld a city policy of not allowing religious services in public schools, dozens of congregations throughout New York have been told that they must move; next Sunday will be the last time they will be allowed to rent space in schools for services.

The Park Slope church got a head start when space at a nearby parish became available. Nonetheless, congregants expressed mixed emotions on Sunday about having to leave the only place the church has called home since it started eight years ago.

The Rev. Matthew Brown, the church’s pastor, described his feelings after the service as “sadness, disappointment.” But he quickly injected a bit of Christian optimism: “There’s a part of me that’s excited.”

As you would expect, the very next thing offered in this hard-news report is a summary of the controversy behind the scenes.

The debate over churches in schools has been passionate and has provoked harsh exchanges.

Opponents say that the congregations are violating the separation of church and state, causing confusion among children who attend the schools, and that they are trying to impose their beliefs on others in a city known for its religious and cultural diversity.

Supporters argue that they use the schools only when students are not around and that the buildings represent nothing more than a physical space in which they can gather.

Some churches are holding out hope that the Legislature will intervene.

Now, if you read that passage carefully it is hard not to think that the Times assumes that this story has two sides.

On one side are those who favor the separation of church and state. On the other side are people who — it’s hard to be specific about this — want to rent government space instead of space elsewhere.

So this is a fight between those who favor church-state separation and those who, apparently, do not.

The problem is that people on both sides are concerned about the separation of church and state. The legal teams behind the churches and their claims are arguing that the New York school executives are, through their actions, becoming unnecessarily entangled in religion by singling out religious worship as a uniquely dangerous form of speech and symbolic activity. The schools are thus violating the “equal access” principles that have been upheld in other parts of the nation. These legal guidelines were produced by a massive coalition of liberal and conservative religious leaders back in the right-wing days of the Clinton White House.

As I wrote for Scripps Howard not that long ago:

At the heart of the debate is a 2001 Supreme Court decision — Good News Club vs. Milford Central School — that instructed educators to offer religious groups the same opportunity to use public-school facilities as secular groups. School leaders can elect to close their buildings to secular and religious groups alike, thus avoiding discrimination.

Now, the Second Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals has challenged this status quo. In a 2-1 decision, it backed New York City school board attempts to ban regular worship services in its facilities, while allowing for some other forms of religious expression by religious groups.

In other words, if would violate church-state separation for school officials to treat religious groups BETTER than other non-profits. However, it would also violate church-state separation for school officials to treat religious groups WORSE than other non-profit groups by acting as if religious speech and religious actions are more dangerous than other forms of speech and other actions by comparable groups (think labor unions, chess clubs, art classes, book circles, etc.).

The goal is to avoid “viewpoint discrimination” and to treat various non-profits the same. The goal is equality before the law, in other words.

Thus, it would behoove the Times to attempt to treat both sides of this story in a similar manner in its coverage. Church-state issues are very complex and, in this case, there are church-state concerns on both sides. It would help if the world’s most powerful newspaper used an accurate and balanced manner in covering this story. The bottom line: This is not a story of pro-church-state-separation people vs. anti-church-state-separation people.

You can see echoes of these arguments in this passage of the story, as well.

City officials have said that many congregations that worship in schools are in affluent neighborhoods and have members who are working professionals. And despite the rule against worship services, “religious congregations are able to use public school space for after-school programs and a host of other activities and events,” Jane Gordon, a lawyer for the city, said in a statement.

Once again, the point seems to be that, in worship, the words and actions of religious worship are uniquely dangerous in comparison to the words and actions of other groups. Who is making that claim? The state.

Am I saying that the Times should FAVOR this competing church-state argument? Of course not. I am saying that this is a debate in which church-state concerns are found on both sides. It would help if readers were allowed to know that.