As an undergrad, The Religion Guy took a valuable course titled “Evaluation and Display of News,” an elemental skill for journalists who cope with difficult choices.
Take the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trash-a-thon. Please. Just as car crashes produce rubbernecking, “human interest” justified vast voyeurism that fed the market and stole print space and air time from more substantive stories.
Editors’ tendentious coverage decisions continually erode public trust in the media. Liberal outlets give scant play to the assassination plot against Brett Kavanaugh, harassment of other Supreme Court justices and their families and related attacks on a couple dozen pro-life agencies. Meanwhile, conservatives downplay the near-miss danger to Vice President Mike Pence and other high officials amid the January 6 attempt to block the Constitution’s election process.
The Guy could list other examples from both sides, and so could you.
Let’s leap across the Atlantic to assess neglectful news judgment regarding the important plight facing Christians in Nigeria. Their continual conflict with Muslim jihadi factions has left an estimated 37,500 dead since 2011, says the latest annual report (.pdf here) from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (www.uscirf.gov; contact media@uscirf.gov or 202–523–3240).
The nondenominational watchdog group Open Doors USA says that in 2021“more Christians were murdered for their faith in Nigeria than in any other country,” making up nearly 80% of Christian deaths worldwide. Nigeria is the “most dangerous place to be a Christian” in the world, says the Intersociety for Civil Liberty and Rule of Law, a Nigerian human rights monitor. Christian observers speak openly of “genocide.”
In addition to the deaths, it’s all but impossible to count up the maimed victims who’ve survived, the kidnapped schoolchildren and clergy, forced child marriages and forced conversions or the widespread destruction of Christians' churches, homes, shops and even whole villages.
Sounds like compelling news from here.
The U.S. commission, an independent agency under the State Department, was “appalled” that without explanation the Biden-Blinken administration last November removed Nigeria from America’s official listing as a “country of particular concern” (CPC) on religious persecution. Similarly upset was Nigeria’s Bishop Emmanuel Badejo, the Vatican communications head for Africa.
The many individual horror stories include the shocking 2020 murder of the Rev. Lawan Andimi, the Adamawa State leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria. Earlier this year, a Sokoto State mob beat to death evangelical college student Deborah Emmanuel after she praised Jesus Christ for good exam results and suggested that fellow believers face prejudice.
Why has the alarm over unending atrocities expressed by religious and human-rights media and organizations not broken into the West’s mainstream media in any major way?
Admittedly, some may at least have seen a squib or brief onscreen item about gunmen’s attack on Pentecost Sunday Mass at St. Francis Catholic Church in Ondo State (see this GetReligion post on that topic). Sources tell Agence France-Presse and ABC News that more than 80 worshippers were slaughtered — well above the official government count. This assault is especially unnerving because it occurred in the nation’s southwest while most trouble has been confined to the Muslim north, where 12 states impose Shari’a law, including loosely-defined “blasphemy.”
The situation requires enterprise from a news shop with the necessary resources to examine the big picture the way The New York Times last December exposed the severe persecution aimed at Christians in India, following considerable media attention to long-running peril for Muslims there.
A good starting place for reporters would be the digging into the Nigeria coverage in the London-based www.ChristianToday.com.
It’s important that though Christians in Nigeria are the particular targets, reporters should note that jihadis also destroy mosques and kill Muslims who are Shi’a or resist the terrorists’ reign. The violence is perpetrated by three main factions: Boko Haram (radicalized in 2009), an Islamic State offshoot known as ISWAP (founded 2016) and the recently added threats from roving bands of the politically powerful Fulani herders.
The vacuum in media treatments is easily explained by American audiences’ modest interest in foreign news, much of it currently absorbed by Russia’s raging invasion of Ukraine. Budgets and foreign staffs have gotten smaller. And Nigeria is particularly difficult turf due to danger and logistics.
Is the Nigerian government incapable of countering such criminality, or unwilling?
Listen to the view of Religious Freedom Institute fellow Stephen Rasche, who accuses the government of developing a “culture of impunity” for terrorists the past few years. In a troubled nation that’s 53.5% Muslim and 45.9% Christian, and where both religions are evangelistic, there’s potential for worse to come during the buildup to elections of a new president and Assembly February 25 that would provide a story peg.
FIRST IMAGE: WION report on the Pentecost massacre at St. Francis Catholic Church, posted on YouTube.