Journalism cancels its moral voice: What does this mean for religion news?
(OPINION) I have always been fascinated with the concept that journalism functions as a moral watchdog on our society. As someone who spent most of his career at two New York tabloids (15 years at the New York Post, two others at the rival Daily News), reportage and story selection revolved heavily around morality.
A lot of it mirrored traditional religious morality.
Editors and reporters never used that language to describe their work, of course.
They still reported both sides of the story and gave people who were the subject of said story the chance to rebuke accusations. Whether it was a news account about an unfaithful politician (former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and former Congressman Anthony Weiner spring to mind), a Wall Street executive who embezzled money or a regular guy who shot and killed a convenient store clerk over a few dollars, if you broke one of the Ten Commandments then you had a very good chance of being splashed all over page one.
ProPublica, one of my favorite investigative news sites, has a mission statement that sums up this philosophy very well:
To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.
Where does this morality come from? It is rooted primarily in Judeo-Christian values, something that helped form American society during what is now called The Great Awakening.
News coverage — be it about politics, culture or religion — is largely made up of crimes (in the legal sense) or lapses in judgement (in a moral one). But the news media has changed in the Internet age, primarily because of social media. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, to name just three, allows users — everyday people — to pump out content. That content can take many forms — from benign observations to what’s called hot takes — for all to read and see.
Truth, fact checking and context are not important. What matters are likes and followers. What we have now is something some have called “The Great Awokening” and it appears to have forever transformed our political discourse and the journalism that tries to report on it.
Mainstream news organizations, in their quest for clicks amid hope of figuring out a new business model, now mirror the content we all see on social media platforms. Newsrooms loaded with a younger generation who grew up in this environment have imposed their own woke politics as their morality thermometer. The recent New York Times/Tom Cotton Op-Ed controversy is the greatest example of this issue playing itself out. Ditto for a Philadelphia Inquirer headline that offended its own reporters. Scholars will be talking about these two events for years to come as a major turning point in American journalism.
Times media columnist Ben Smith put it this way in his latest piece Monday:
But the shift in mainstream American media — driven by a journalism that is more personal, and reporters more willing to speak what they see as the truth without worrying about alienating conservatives — now feels irreversible. It is driven in equal parts by politics, the culture and journalism’s business model, relying increasingly on passionate readers willing to pay for content rather than skittish advertisers.
This takes us to the events of the past few weeks and its implications on covering religion, specifically news around Catholicism.
The pandemic (which has thus far caused over 110,000 deaths in the U.S. alone), followed by shuttered businesses, a high unemployment rate and a spate of high-profile police brutality cases all combined for an explosive powder keg never seen before in American history. Or at least one not seen since 1969. For example, the story of Catholic churches across the country (and houses of worship of every faith tradition) this spring was one of closure. Forced to lock their doors because they were not deemed “essential” by governors, big box stores (as well as liquor stores and marijuana dispensaries) were allowed to stay open. It was ironic that many of these businesses were looted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.
That many people yearned to feed both their families and souls was, well, not a story largely worth reporting. The churches that wanted to open, especially back in March and April during the early weeks of the virus, were endangering others. They were going to kill grandma, remember? They needed to be stopped. And they were — most often by law enforcement.
As a result, Lent and Easter Sunday were transformed into Zoom videos. Add Pentecost Sunday to that list after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 (conservative Chief Justice John Roberts was the swing vote) on May 30 to turn away a request from a church in California to block enforcement of state restrictions on attendance at religious services. Personally, my son’s First Communion and my nephew’s baptism (for which I was the godfather) have been both put on hold, both dates TBD. While the decision would have also allowed Catholic churches to open, the original religious freedom case had been brought by the South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista, Calif. They had argued that Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, had denied them their constitutional rights to freely practice their faith.
Following Floyd’s death, the virus no longer dominated the news cycle and cable TV news. Those counters with updated death tolls now gone, replaced with horrific scenes of police officers beating protesters (and a few journalists). That often spawned looting at night in cities across the country.
Millions of scared Americans, now with no churches to visit, had to watch as houses of worship were desecrated. But the media narrative was a simple one: you’re either a racist and favor law and order (President Donald Trump and most Republicans) or you’re for racial equality and defunding the police (#BlackLivesMatter, etc.).
Large crowds gathering to protest (with many doctors, nurses and health officials cheering them on) were no longer a problem when it came to spreading the virus — while churches remained either off limits or had to adhere to strict, logical capacity restrictions.
This past Sunday, some churches moved their services outdoors in order to make an end run around the COVID-19 restrictions. After all, protests, championed primarily by politicians in Blue State America, were good. Does the news media have a moral obligation to tell its readers/viewers that a contagious virus can still be spread while people also upset about race relations and policing in America?
In New York, the epicenter of the virus, Mayor Bill de Blasio called on the NYPD to go after Hasidic Jews for holding a public funeral back in April (while ignoring many New Yorkers gathered to watch Blue Angel flyovers).
When it came to the blitz of protests, he endorsed those. Asked about the double standard during a recent news conference (by a reporter for Hamodia, an ultra-Orthodox jewish publication), de Blasio said the following:
When you see a nation, an entire nation simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.
Are the rights afforded to Americans by the First Amendment not all equal? In response, Ed Mechmann, director of public policy for the Archdiocese of New York, said the mayor’s June 2 comments revealed that religious liberty was a low priority. He wrote this the following day on the archdiocese’s website:
It is clear that in the eyes of our government officials, the politically preferred viewpoint of anti-racism is favored and allowed, while the unpopular one of religious worship is belittled and denigrated.
A few days later, that led to some creativity on the part of some religious New York communities. Meanwhile, Catholic churches, such an important part of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, have not fared well in recent weeks. Some churches were damaged during the rioting, something that didn’t always get ample news coverage. Even when it did, this was lost in the constantly-changing news cycle. You had to look really deep in your Twitter feeds to find them.
One notable one was the defacing of the iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. Not everyone was upset by what could be considered a hate crime:
Here’s some context to go with the tweet: Gunter is a gynecologist and a New York Times contributing columnist covering women’s health. She has defended abortion rights and written a book called The Vagina Bible.
Lost on her and everyone — both in the press and on social media — was the life of Pierre Toussaint, an 18th century slave who converted to Catholicism and is now being considered by the Vatican for sainthood for his charitable works. He is the only lay person to be interred at St. Patrick’s — a place normally reserved for bishops — as a result of his many charitable works, including turning his home into an orphanage and a refuge for travelers.
Protestant churches and synagogues were also defaced across the country — but the big “church story” focused instead on St. John’s Episcopal Church, across the street from the White House, that was damaged on May 31 during a riot. That got media attention given its location and historic significance. The following day, Trump had law enforcement clear out a crowd of protestors so he could walk over to the church and pose, ham-handedly, with a Bible.
Trump’s actions are often over the top; the media’s response to him equally so. The Associated Press’ media writer David Bauder highlighted the differences in coverage:
Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC poke and prod the nation’s divide on most nights, and each has been amply rewarded in the ratings. Trump’s stern speech and walk to a nearby church after protesters were forcibly cleared out of the way Monday raised the temperature on those networks even higher.
“The president seems to think that dominating black people, dominating peaceful protesters, is law and order,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said. “It’s not. He calls them thugs. Who’s the thug here?”
At the same time on Fox News Channel, Tucker Carlson said that Trump provided “a powerful symbolic gesture, a declaration that this country, our national symbols, our oldest institutions, will not be desecrated and defeated by nihilistic destruction.”
For the most part, the television commentators talked past each other to vastly different audiences. CNN and MSNBC concentrated on peaceful protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police; the Fox News focus was on violence and property destruction in the streets.
The same arguments have animated American politics for decades, but cable news uses megaphones to amplify them.
Amplify them they have, over the past decade.
Frankly, my expectations from the 24-hour news networks is relatively low. However, here’s what The New York Times reported:
As the president began speaking, the police used tear gas and flash grenades to clear out the crowd that had gathered across the street in Lafayette Square so Mr. Trump could walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church afterward and pose for photographs while holding a Bible outside the boarded-up church.
St. John’s, the so-called Church of the Presidents, had been briefly set ablaze as the protests devolved on Sunday evening. After Mr. Trump’s aides spent much of the day Monday expressing outrage over the burning of a place of worship, one of his most trusted advisers, Hope Hicks, worked with others on ideas, eventually hatching a plan to have Mr. Trump walk over to the building, according to an official familiar with the plans.
Bishop Mariann E. Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington said that she had not been told Mr. Trump would be making the trek.
“He did not pray,” she said. “We need a president who can unify and heal. He has done the opposite of that, and we are left to pick up the pieces.”
Not offering a prayer is fair point, but one that also smacked of irony.
Many professionals in the secular press were suddenly worried about prayer, while also not caring about the lockdowns forcing churches to close? If Trump’s aim had been to trigger secularists by holding up a Bible, it largely worked. It also upset many Christian leaders of all denominations. A day later, former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic opponent in November’s presidential elections, delivered a speech in Philadelphia and went after the president’s Bible photo-op or even his visit soon after to the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, DC.
Again, here’s what The New York Times reported:
In his remarks, which lasted around 20 minutes, Mr. Biden urged his opponent to consult the Constitution and the Bible instead of eviscerating the “guardrails" of democracy, one of many times in the speech in which Mr. Biden reached for language that has traditionally had bipartisan appeal.
“The president held up the Bible at St. John’s Church yesterday,” Mr. Biden, a practicing Catholic, said, referencing the photographs for which Mr. Trump posed. “I just wish he opened it once in a while instead of brandishing it. If he opened it, he could have learned something. That we’re all called to love one another as we love ourselves.”
The Times calls Biden a “practicing Catholic” but offers no other context or that he was denied Holy Communion last year. He also officiated a gay wedding while vice president. Context matters here, as well as factual content.
That New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, was able to read from scripture two days later during a news conference to combat Trump’s photo-op was, let’s just say, a little ironic. News coverage made zero mention of the 2019 law he signed that allowed for late-term abortions, essentially codifying Roe v. Wade into state law. The law earned condemnation from New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan and religious organizations across the country at the time.
This would have been a wonderful chance for hard-news coverage that explored Cuomo’s Catholicism. What church does he attend? What’s his favorite Bible verse other than the ones his speechwriters found for him? What did Dolan think of Cuomo’s words? Again, context matters here.
Archbishop Bernard Hebda of St. Paul and Minneapolis, a man whose actual job it is to quote scripture, has been one of the few to strike the right tone in recent weeks.
It’s so important to remember that the Holy Spirit will guide us through this difficult time. As we suffer through the great sorrow that’s in our hearts at the death of a man who should not have died.
A powerful quote for sure. Unfortunately, it was published in only two news outlets — both of them Catholic publications.
The bottom line: Are church leaders only worth quoting when they dump on Trump and other designated opponents? Are Democrats who read Bible verses aloud exempt from context or criticism in news stories?
In the past, journalists needed to give readers both sides of a debate so that they had some chance to fully understood and assess what is happening. Otherwise, they’re only telling half the story. Right?
This post originally appeared at GetReligion.