Urbana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Podcast: David Brooks is still trying to describe the 'flexidoxy' DNA in American elites

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Podcast: David Brooks is still trying to describe the 'flexidoxy' DNA in American elites

People who spend years riding commuter trains — Baltimore to Washington, D.C., for me — learn that there are community rules. For example: Don’t crack up laughing and make a lot of noise.

I violated that written law several times while reading a snarky, hilarious 2000 book by David Brooks called, “Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.” The term “Bobo” was short for “Bourgeois Bohemians.”

But what is a religion writer supposed to do while reading its “spirituality” chapter, which ended with a vision of "Bobo Heaven.” Brooks offers a tweedy angel of death sentencing an urban lawyer to spend eternity in her chic, “green” summer house, with National Public Radio on every channel. Heaven or hell?

Readers who have been online lately will know where this is going, because of the multi-media firestorm ignited by his New York Times column: “On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy.” That Brooks essay provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). Here’s a sample:

The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession; we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of college students graduate from the super-elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

Now, let’s leave Orange Man Bad out of this. I’d like to focus on the fact that Brooks has been writing about this phenomenon for several decades now.

As you would expect, I appreciated that Brooks dared to mention the ice-blue trends in elite journalism. I started paying attention to that in the late 1970s (hold that thought). However, I have to admit that I wondered why Brooks defined his meritocracy in terms of class (correct), zip codes (correct), resume credentials (correct), but — in this case — ignored the obvious religion themes in this drama.


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Podcast: When is preaching a 'news' story? Ah, the temptation of ChatGPT sermons

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Podcast: When is preaching a 'news' story? Ah, the temptation of ChatGPT sermons

When is preaching newsworthy?

News consumers of a certain age may remember this famous Associated Press headline: “Priest Told Children That Santa Claus Is Dead.”

More recently, a Catholic priest in County Kerry made headlines around the world when he dared to preach a sermon defending centuries of Catholic teachings on abortion, marriage and sex — while reminding the faithful that the concept of “mortal sin” is serious business. His bishop was not amused.

Thus, controversial sermons are news, in part because editors don’t expects sermons to be controversial?

The act of preaching can also become “newsy” when it is linked to a trendy subject in modern life. That’s the equation: Old thing (preaching) gets hitched to hip new thing.

Right now, one of the hot topics in the public square is the rise of artificial intelligence and, to be specific, the ChatGPT website. Thus, this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on several “newsy” angles of the recent Associated Press story that ran with the headline, “Pastors’ view: Sermons written by ChatGPT will have no soul.”

In a way, this whole AI preaching topic is linked to another “preaching that is news” trend that shows up every now and then — plagiarism in the pulpit. Overworked, stressed-out pastors have been known to cut a few corners and use material from other preachers, without letting the faithful know what they were doing. But that’s actually a very old story. See this On Religion column that starts with a case study from 1876.

During the podcast, I riffed on the whole issue that different kinds of technology can shape the content of communications in different ways. If ChatGPT sermons have a sense of “soul,” it would be a “soul” that is defined by the creator of the software and the tech platform.

This made me think back the early 1990s, when I was teaching at Denver Seminary and asking future pastors to think about the many ways that mass-media messages shape the lives of their flocks and, of course, the unchurched people around them (here is an essay on that seminary work).

During that time, I read an article — on paper, alas — about how the creation of studio microphones changed the content of American popular music, even at the level of lyrics in love songs.

Think about Frank Sinatra. As a young big-band singer, he belted out bold, strong, LOUD songs about commitment and romantic love that would never die. He had to be heard over that big band. But give Sinatra a microphone and, well, these songs turned into smooth, soft, seductive messages — urgent whispers of desire.

I wondered: How did microphones affect the style and theological content of preaching?


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Flashback: The late, great Walter Cronkite did some thinking about religion news

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Flashback: The late, great Walter Cronkite did some thinking about religion news

Did you know that the late, great CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, one of the most important news icons of all kind, once worked as a “church editor” for a mainstream newspaper in Houston (apparently the old Houston Press)?

That was a detail from his life that I missed. I had read, long ago, that he was a “cub reporter” after his college years, yet before he broke into broadcasting. But time as a “church editor”? That’s a journalism title from the old, old days, one that is even more condescending than the more common and inaccurate label “religious editor (as opposed to “religion” editor.

Anyway, a religion-beat friend recently send me a photocopy of a 1994 interview with Cronkite that ran in The Christian Century, the influential mainline Protestant journal. I can’t find it online, although it was quoted by Religion News Service in an a short obit — “And that’s the way he was” — in 2009.

Encountering that “church editor” label reminded me of the old “Lou Grant” show episode that I used as the opening for my graduate project at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, which ran — in a much condensed form — on the cover of The Quill in 1983. The headline on that journal essay was: “The religion beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets.”

The “ghetto”? That was the “church page.” The overture of that Quill piece is long, but it will provide some context for the Cronkite remarks that I will share here:

As was often the case, Lou Grant was working on two problems at once. At first the problems seemed unrelated.

The Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor. City editor Grant had searched far and wide and, of course, no one was interested in the position. After all, what self-respecting journalist would want to be stuck with the religion beat?

Problem number two was how to get rid of lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter Mal Cavanaugh. All through this episode of Lou Grant the management of the Trib had been trying to find a way to get Cavanaugh to resign.

Then, a spark of inspiration. The script is simple:

LOU: Congratulations, Mal. You're the Trib's new religion editor.


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Former NPR CEO visits Jesusland! Returns with sobering media-bias truths for left and right

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Oh my. What's a GetReligionista to do?

There are so many journalism and Godbeat think pieces from the past week that I would like to run in this Sunday slot. Some of them are going to turn into daily pieces, methinks. Some are headed into my large "file of guilt" for later.

But let's start with a very unusual byline atop an op-ed essay at The New York Post. This byline is so strange that the copy desk decided to celebrate it right there in the headline: "Former NPR CEO opens up about liberal media bias."

Then again, it helps to know that former National Public Radio CEO Ken Stern is about to release a major-publisher book with this title: "Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right." An essay in the libertarian Post made lots of sense.

Now, as a non-Republican, I care little about the political language of the book title. As someone who has spent his life studying media bias issues linked to religion coverage, I am interested in the methodology that Stern used.

Brace yourselves. He went out into flyover country (also known as "Jesusland") and talked to people.

Journalists -- hopefully on the left, as well as the right -- will want to know that his stated motive for writing this book was his horror at the current state of public discourse in our nation. This is not a "Yea Trump!" essay. It's an essay by someone who is concerned about the press and its old -- now dying, I fear -- role as a fair-minded middle ground in American life. Here is a key passage:

Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

Now, what does this have to do with religion-beat work?


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The crucial 'M' word -- Methodist -- that needed to be in every Hugh Hefner obituary

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This is how I will remember him: Articulate, witty, with a probing intellect, He was a strong First Amendment liberal, a lover of music, magazines and books. And there was the pipe, of course. He'd look over the top of his glasses, puffing on the pipe, while he was thinking.

I'm talking about Theodore Peterson, of course, the legendary journalism professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign whose class on modern magazines was a rite of passage for thousands of young writers and editors.

Take Hugh Hefner, for example.

If you took Peterson's class (as I did in graduate school), you learned quite a bit about the back-story on Hefner and the class-project dream that years later turned into a magazine celebrating sex and grown-up toys, linking consumerism with moral libertarianism.

Peterson had a theory about modern magazines, which was that -- while providing niche content for readers and advertisers -- they needed to make some kind of statement about the personality and beliefs of the founder. They needed to sell a worldview. Hefner was the perfect example and the key was the Playboy-in-chief's desire to shed his past and escape.

Escape what? That is where morality and religion -- the old Methodism -- is an essential part of the Hefner story and, thus, any obituary that attempts to sum up his life. I'm not joking: Editors may want to consider allowing religion-beat reporters to take part in the coverage of Hef and his legacy. After all, the Sexual Revolution was a new take on a very ancient religion.

As you would expect, the Hefner obituaries are packed with colorful symbolic details. There's speculation on the number of women he bedded. What about the implications of his emotional immaturity, when linked to a 152 IQ? Do the math and you end up with the 2,500-plus volumes of his personal scrapbook, which probably featured images from the $40,000 video-camera system above his 7-foot round bed.

News consumers can expect, in the follow-up coverage, lots of debate about Hefner as feminist or anti-feminist. Was he a figure of liberation, oppression or addiction? Was his fierce support of abortion rights rather self-serving? Someone should ask fake-bunny Gloria Steinem, or perhaps Holly Madison, author of "Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny."

In most of the obituaries, there is some kind of reference to Hefner's parents and their religious convictions. The Associated Press feature, as one would expect, had less room with which to work, but did manage this telling passage:


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