Nothing changed at GetReligion. But basic facts about the journalism business have changed, as I explained in this recent essay for the Religion & Liberty journal: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism.” And see this post a year ago, as I began (privately) to grasp that it was time for GetReligion to close: “It’s just good business? The growing debate about America’s news-silo culture.”
Let me conclude with a few other observations:
* Many times, readers called GetReligion a “conservative” website because we kept stressing the need for the mainstream press to be accurate, fair-minded and even balanced when covering religious groups, on the left and right.
The basic idea we kept hearing from some readers was that there are religious groups that have beliefs that are acceptable and others that do not. There was no need to accurately report the views of believers who were, according to many newsroom leaders, wrong. You could see these tensions in a 2013 post by Bobby Ross, Jr., that ran with this headline: “Yet another one-sided AP same-sex marriage story.” I defended Bobby’s post in the comments by noting:
If the Associated Press abandons the American Model of the Press then that model is, for all practical purposes, DEAD.
So it is false equivalency to deal fairly and accurately with the views of, well, Mother Theresa, Orthodox Judaism, the Dalai Lama, Billy Graham, the majority of African-American church leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Pope Francis and numerous others?
If reporters cannot handle this basic journalistic task then they should of their own free will work for advocacy publications committed to their doctrines on these issues.
* Another word about comments: I would say that we printed about one out of four comments that we received. The problem was that many, not all, readers wanted to yell at us or each other about politics or religion. We printed comments that, in any way, seriously engaged with the journalism issues in a post.
* The basic journalism problem today is that many major players (left and right) want to please their paying customers — the readers. However, they also want to insist that this “preaching to the choir” business model does not threaten old-school values of, yes, accuracy, fairness and balance.
This brings us to that much-used GetReligion term — “Kellerism.” That’s a reference to a 2011 appearance at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library by Bill Keller of The New York Times, soon after he stepped down as editor. He was asked if the Times was a “liberal” newspaper and he replied (this is taken from my “On Religion” column, since the video has since been taken down):
“We are liberal in the sense that we are open-minded, sort of tolerant, urban. Our wedding page includes — and did even before New York had a gay marriage law — included gay unions. So we’re liberal in that sense of the word, I guess. Socially liberal.”
Asked directly if the Times slants its coverage to favor “Democrats and liberals,” he added: “Aside from the liberal values, sort of social values thing that I talked about, no, I don’t think that it does.”
I would argue that “aside from” are the two most important words in the GetReligion archive — out of the 20 million or so words in there (using an estimate by a tech friend of mine).
Keller insisted that his newspaper still offered accurate, fair, balanced coverage on politics and other important news topics. You know, coverage of things that are “real.” But he stated, on the record, that the Times had developed an urban, intellectual, liberal bias when covering moral and social issues. And what are America’s hot-button issues? I noted:
Any list would include sex, salvation, abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, cloning and a few other sensitive matters that are inevitably linked to religion. That’s all.
* Here is another important quote related to that theme, one that helped inspire the creation of GetReligion. It comes from a 1999 feature in the the New York Times Magazine about abortion extremists, written by David Samuels.
“It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy.”
Writing at PressThink, journalism professor Jay Rosen noted:
This struck some people as dogma very close to religious dogma, and they spoke up about it. One was Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist of religion: “This remarkable credo was more than a statement of one journalist’s convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the ‘world that most of us inhabit’ cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages.”
Yet here is the part that intrigued me: “But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward ‘fundamentalists.’ Thus, when listing the ‘deadly sins’ that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world’s most influential newspaper condemns ‘the sin of religious certainty.’ “
The bottom line for many journalists: Why do accurate, fair-minded, balanced coverage of crazy people?
* Over the years, I did hear from readers on the political RIGHT who believed that GetReligion’s goal was to steer coverage in their direction. In the comments pages, that would look like this. A reader said:
NYT has become Pravda and the truth is not in it.
And another added:
Excellent post, Terry! Let’s hope that from this point forward, that the NYT will cater to the average, God-fearing, working American — the same ones who voted for Trump. I am sick of their liberal bias.
I replied:
No one here is interested in CATERING to anyone. We are interested in the viewpoints of people on both sides of crucial debates being reported with accuracy, fairness and respect. The goal, in other words, is journalism (and in a historic sense of the word, actual liberalism).
That was the beach on which we were willing to die.
* In recent weeks, I have been using the following equation to express the niche-news era in which journalists, on the left and right, now live: “Good people can do nothing bad. Bad people can do nothing good.” This is a lie, of course, and it’s dangerous when journalists are asked to live by lies.
Readers of sobering literature will also note that this equation is the opposite of the famous quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.”
* Finally, what can I say about the fascinating and talented team of scribes who have written for GetReligion? Also, special thanks to Fieldstead & Co. for strong support for so many years and the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi for providing us with an academic home a few years ago.
I have been asked many times what we searched for when inviting people to join the team. There have been exceptions — consider the omnipresent political scientist Ryan Burge — but most of the GetReligionistas have had significant news experience covering religion in one form or another.
A few years ago, the team consisted of Richard Ostling, Julia Duin, Ira Rifkin and Bobby Ross, Jr. Add me to that mix and we had a combined total of nearly 200 years of experience in journalism about religion. Consider the resume of Julia Duin (and don’t forget her books). Pause and look at the remarkable background of Ira Rifkin, to name another member of the team.
Some of the GetReligion bylines are better known than others. Mollie Ziegler Hemingway went on to lead The Federalist, contribute commentary on Fox News and write national bestsellers. However, her husband Mark Hemingway was also a valuable (and very witty) member of our team for several years.
I mentioned Bobby Ross, Jr. It’s important to remember the graceful GetReligion contributions of his wife, Tamie Ross, who also had years religion-beat experience. Many know the byline of Sarah Pulliam Bailey, from the Washington Post and elsewhere. However, it’s important to remember the early GetReligion posts by her brother, Daniel Pulliam, who we can hope will someday leave, or expand, his law career and return to journalism.
Then there is the patriarch, Richard Ostling, best known for his decades at Time magazine and the Associated Press. When I began working on the religion beat, I had a handful of heroes and Ostling (and Russell Chandler of the Los Angeles Times) were at the top of that list. It’s hard to believe that, after years of long-distance friendship, the Internet allowed me to write and edit with him for a decade here at GetReligion. Imagine that.
Also, I offer a final word of thanks to my friend (and dare I say, fellow curmudgeon) Doug LeBlanc. He helped create the basic structures of GetReligion, including our antique typewriter-meets-Gutenberg logo. This format stood the test of time, even as we migrated from one software universe to another.
My final word to all of them: Axios.