Bonus podcast: 'What's next in Afghanistan?' Warning: this news topic involves religion

Here is a truth claim that, over the years, I have heard (or seen) stated in a number of ways by journalists and mass-media professors: Without strong, or at least adequate, visual images a story doesn’t exist in television news.

Yes, there are exceptions. But the exceptions almost always take place when big stories break in print media and television producers are highly committed to getting them on air — somehow.

Now, in the smartphone era, there are lots of ways for visual images to emerge (ask Hunter Biden). However, in our era of partisan, niche news, it may not matter if images exist. What citizens cannot see (or read) will not hurt them?

This brings me back to a subject I addressed in this recent GetReligion essay: “What's next in Afghanistan? Press will have to face issues of religion, culture and gender.”

The big question: Where does the Afghanistan story go next and, frankly, will elite American media cover the religion elements of this story?

That question was at the heart of a recent Religion Unplugged podcast discussion that I had with a friend and, long ago, a former religion-beat colleague — Roberta Green. In recent decades, she is better known as the philanthropist and fine arts-maven Roberta Green Ahmanson (click here for a typical arts lecture).

This new podcast is entitled, “How Will Afghanistan's Next Chapter be Written?” Click here to head over to iTunes to tune that in. Meanwhile, here is a key chunk of the GetReligion essay linked to our discussion about religion, journalism, culture, politics and “nation building”:

Viewed through the narrow lens of Taliban doctrine, it doesn’t matter if Western governments were forcing open doors for the work of Planned Parenthood or Christian missionary/relief groups, the work of LGBTQ think tanks (or the American corporations that back them) or Islamic thinkers and clerics whose approach to the faith clashed with their own.

EDITOR”S NOTE: This weekend’s think piece is a kind of time capsule, written and published earlier this month as the coronavirus crisis appeared on the horizon in the city of Rome.

This piece was written by the veteran religion writer previously known as Roberta Green, best known for her work at The Orange County Register. She was living in Rome for several months, as she will explain, while researching and writing a book on art, faith and the importance of beauty. That’s the kind of topic that sends a writer to Rome. She returned to the United States on one of the last flights out.

This was published on March 9th at Religion Unplugged. I have made no attempt to update it, in terms of the COVID-19 statistics. I find it kind of sobering to read this essay and then think of all that has happened in the relatively short time that has passed since this was written. (tmatt)

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ROME — When my husband and I decided to move to Rome for the first half of this year to escape distractions and try to write books we’ve been working on for years, we had no idea that we’d be living in one of the centers of a global epidemic.

At the time we left California in January, coronavirus had surfaced in China and the World Health Organization was yet to name the disease it caused COVID-19. We didn’t expect to encounter it in Rome. But we did.