Journalism

Rick Nowlin 10-12-2023

Tens of thousands of people filled downtown Pittsburgh for the city's annual Labor Day Parade, one of the largest in the nation, on Sept. 4, 2023. Roughly 200 unions participated in the event. Credit: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect.

You may be asking: How do I reconcile, on the one hand, identifying as an evangelical Christian but then, on the other hand, striking with organized labor? “Media Christianity” — represented by “The 700 Club” and other television and radio programs — has, over the years, generally opposed organized labor and its work stoppages, often referring to it as “greedy” and decrying it for disrupting the lives of workers and the economy. For me, however, participating in this strike is congruent with my commitment to biblical principles, such as admonitions about not exploiting workers, of which there are numerous references in the Old Testament, most notably in the prophets such as Isaiah, Amos, and Micah.

Curtis Yee 6-29-2023

Photo by Ian Maina via Unsplash. 

When I spoke over video call with CEO and editor-in-chief Jason Woodruff in June, he told me that The Pour Over was founded out of “a lack of better options.”

“Traditional news sources promote obsession, they promote anger, they promote division,” the 28-year-old Iowa resident told Sojourners. “That’s why people either become shaped by those [divisions], or they flee and they become uninformed.”

Branded as a “politically neutral” and “trustworthy news source,” The Pour Over is Woodruff’s answer for Christians looking for facts without the spin. It’s a publication that doesn’t take sides and offers a brief biblical encouragement at the end of each story. It highlights the day’s biggest news, approximately takes five minutes to read, and is purportedly punchy.

12-26-2022
A picture of the cover of the February/March 2023 Sojourners issue titled "The Trouble with Christian Heroes." A headshot of Jean Vanier is split apart by thick red lines and pictures of the L'Arche logo and photos of people in these communities.

Charismatic leaders such as Jean Vanier can inspire and transform us. But when these leaders commit abuse, how do the movements they ignite pick up the pieces?

The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters, edited by Costica Bradatan and Ed Simon

The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters, edited by Costica Bradatan and Ed Simon

Ed Simon is co-editor of the anthology The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters, which explores the New Religion Journalism movement—an offshoot of the New Journalism genre of the 1960s and ’70s that fused news writing with the storytelling techniques of novelists, memoirists, and poets. He discussed his book with Audrey Clare Farley, author of The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt.

AUDREY CLARE FARLEY: You claim New Religion Journalism emerged after 9/11, when it became evident that journalism had “a secularism problem.” Can you explain?

Ed Simon: For a long time a variation of the “secularization thesis” endured in an almost unspoken way. This assumption held that religion was a vestige of an archaic past, and that the future entailed its disappearance. But two decades later we know that religion isn’t going anywhere, and newsrooms had to adapt.

Does the secularism problem persist? Many say the media was blindsided by the rise of Christian nationalism. I think that it has a Christianity problem. By that I don’t mean anything as reductive as saying that journalists are belligerent to Christianity, but the opposite. When many hear the word “religion” they think Christianity, Protestantism, or even evangelical Protestantism. There needs to be a wider scope on what religion means.

Mitchell Atencio 5-28-2021

Professional tennis player Naomi Osaka in action during her 2018 US Open semi-final match at Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York City on September 6, 2018. Leonard Zhukovsky / Shutterstock.

I am no stranger to the ways that sports is often derided in faith and justice circles. But I contend that sports and competition offer valuable insights into what it means to be human.

Mitchell Atencio 5-28-2021

On May 25, 2021, Palestinians sit near candles in a makeshift tent amid the rubble of their houses Israeli air strikes destroyed during the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

My professors in journalism school taught me to avoid passive voice as often as possible. They taught me that passive voice gets in the way of giving readers a clear view of who did what. Passive voice may be innocuously overlooked in many instances (for example, in this sentence, I didn’t tell you who was doing the overlooking), but more often using it risks confusion and obscurity — and these aren’t exactly journalistic values.

Sandi Villarreal 9-23-2020

Illustration by Matt Chase

FOR NEARLY 50 years, Sojourners magazine has taken bold, prophetic stands to fulfill its mission—to articulate the biblical call to racial and social justice, life and peace, and environmental stewardship—by telling stories that uncover injustice and offer solutions. I’ve been drawn to this mission since I was a college student studying journalism in the mid-aughts, and I am honored to be in a position to help build on that rich tradition as Sojourners’ new editor-in-chief.

In August, we revised our policies and procedures to strengthen our editorial independence and renewed our commitment to journalism that “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable" (for more on that change, click here). Amid a racial-injustice reckoning and the most consequential presidential election of my lifetime, this commitment to the Christian mandate of truth-telling drives our work.

Harmeet Kamboj 2-06-2019

While the zeal and strategy of the Religious Right has been well-documented since the movement’s inception in the late 20th century, journalists have lately turned their attention to its alleged left-leaning counterpart. Stories, bearing equal parts documentation and speculation, of an emerging “Religious Left” have decorated the pages of major outlets such as the The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and Reuters since 2016. But the framing of these stories distorts as much as it uncovers.

Sandi Villarreal 4-25-2018

ONE SPACE WHERE I find rest, amid the noise of living and working in Washington, D.C., sits directly in the heart of the hustle: the Newseum, dedicated to the defense of Amendment 1 to the U.S. Constitution.

It may be an odd choice, since it exhibits the front page of 60 newspapers each morning, each listing the harrowing headlines I’m trying to escape. But in this space, dedicated to education on our First Amendment freedoms, I find special solace.

Etched on a large window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol are these words: “Freedom of Press Speech Religion.”

There is not much breathing room between those freedoms inherent to all Americans, nor between those listed separately: freedom of assembly and petition.

It’s a well-placed reminder about freedoms many Americans take for granted. In 2016, 39 percent of Americans could not name a single one of them. Fifty-four percent could name freedom of speech, but only 17 percent and 11 percent could name freedom of religion and freedom of the press, respectively.

When freedoms don’t “feel” threatened, it’s easy to take them for granted.

Enter 2017. Already this year, we’ve experienced attacks on the freedom of religion as evidenced by the surge in Islamophobic and anti-Semitic attacks and the Trump administration’s failure to mention Jews or anti-Semitism in its Holocaust Remembrance Day statement (a stark departure from the previous six administrations). We’ve seen lawyers spill pro bono hours in airports defending the freedom of religion by enforcing legal protections for international travelers in the face of what appeared to be a “religious test” for entering the country.

People of faith across the U.S. and across party lines rightly have been outraged at potential infringement of religious liberty under the Trump administration.

Pope Francis waves as he arrives to lead his Wednesday general audience in Saint Peter's square. Jan. 24, 2018. REUTERS/Tony Gentile

Pope Francis on Wednesday condemned the "evil" of fake news, saying journalists and social media users should shun and unmask manipulative "snake tactics" that foment division to serve political and economic interests.

the Web Editors 4-10-2017

Image via Gil C/Shutterstock.com

On April 10, Columbia University presented 21 Pulitzer Prizes for achievements in journalism, literature, and music. Notables from the list of social justice-oriented works that received a Pulitzer Prize include: New York Daily News and ProPublica receiving the Public Service award for reporting on evictions of mostly poor minorities carried out by police abusing the law —

Image via  Giulio Napolitano/ Shutterstock 

In a powerfully worded message, the pope said he wanted to encourage media professionals to engage in “constructive forms of communication that reject prejudice” and help create a world of “realism and trust.” 

The pope’s message came days after President Trump launched a bitter attack on news media over its reporting on the size of his inauguration crowd. 

In his message, Francis said he was concerned about the focus on “bad news” that included “wars, terrorism, scandals and all sorts of human failure” by a media industry that thinks good news doesn’t sell and where the “tragedy of human suffering and the mystery of evil” easily become entertainment. 

Bill Tammeus 1-15-2016

The cast of Spotlight. Image via Open Road Films/RNS

A few months before Robert W. Finn became bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, I interviewed him for The Kansas City Star about the challenges he might face when he replaced the much-loved Bishop Raymond Boland. Of course, neither Finn nor I had any way of knowing that a decade-plus later he would resign in disgrace, having been convicted of the misdemeanor crime of failing to notify law enforcement authorities about a suspected child-abusing priest in the diocese — a priest who now spends his time in prison.

Image via /Shutterstock.com

Rummana Hussain was one of those children whose Muslim parents envisioned her in a white coat with a stethoscope around her neck. Instead, she became a metro editor and reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, where she covers criminal courts and remains the only Muslim member of the editorial staff. She knows “a couple” more Muslims at the Chicago Tribune, the state’s largest paper.

stocksolution / Shutterstock

stocksolution / Shutterstock

IN 1976, STILL fairly early in his epic career, Robert Redford played Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, a tense and ultimately triumphant retelling of the Washington Post Watergate investigation that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Now, near the end of that same career, in the movie Truth Redford plays CBS News anchor Dan Rather, in the story of how Rather stumbled, fell, and was pushed out of big-time journalism in the course of pursuing the truth about George W. Bush’s mysterious Vietnam-era “service” in the Texas Air National Guard.

The great moral test for many men of the baby boom generation was “what did you do about the draft?” Questions about how he had eluded the draft dogged our first baby boomer president, Bill Clinton. Then the campaigns of 2000 and 2004 brought the historic test of the baby boom soul front and center, pitting Bush, a baby boomer born to privilege and pro-war politics, against two Democrats, also born to privilege, who volunteered for the military and actually served in Vietnam. Al Gore had a noncombat role and was only in Vietnam for five months, but still, he was there, in a uniform, sometimes carrying a gun. As a Navy lieutenant, John Kerry was honored for courage in battle.

Bush, on the other hand, joined a platoon of other fortunate sons in the Texas Air National Guard. He trained as a pilot, then stopped flying and didn’t show up for his mandatory pilot physicals. He got permission to transfer to a Guard unit in Alabama so he could work on a Republican senatorial campaign, but only one Alabama Guard member claims to have seen him. Finally, he disappeared to Harvard Business School and may have never completed his required days of service.

There were stories about Bush’s wartime shirking in 2000. In 2004, the irony and outrage were intensified when W.’s opponent, Kerry, a bona fide war hero, was subjected to slander from the notorious “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” PAC.

Dawn Cherie Araujo 4-09-2015
Image via Brian A Jackson/shutterstock.com

Image via Brian A Jackson/shutterstock.com

There’s an old adage in journalism that if it bleeds, it leads. It sounds kind of savage and it’s often that principle people quip when complaining about excessive violence in the news. 

That criticism isn’t wrong. Just watch 10 minutes of nightly news, and you’ll probably see nothing but murders and robberies, as if that’s the only thing that happens on a daily basis.

But what I think we forget when criticizing the bleed/lead principle is the inherent value it places on human life. The way I learned it in journalism school, “if it bleeds, it leads” means that people matter. It means that the loss of human life should never be something we consider a banality and that if there’s bloodshed, we, as journalists, have an obligation to report it.

In a perfect world, that would work. (Well, actually, in a perfect world, there would be no bloodshed for journalists to report, but you know what I mean.) But the problem that Gareth Higgins identifies in “A Newsfeed of Fear” (Sojourners, May 2015) is not so much the excessive coverage of suffering, but the callous coverage of it.

Instead of promoting the sanctity of life as I think it was originally intended, media coverage of crime and violence has been twisted into a formulaic script that serves only to create the must-watch, must-read news that brings in advertising dollars. And it can be hard to stomach that much disingenuousness.

Yet the solution is not a positive-news only model. There are media outlets — largely Christian ones — trying this, but I don’t think this approach adequately addresses what’s wrong with the mainstream media. For one thing, it does nothing to fix the problem of formulaic, disingenuous stories. People can fake happiness, too, you know. Furthermore, there are times when we actually need more bad news — like, for example, when black women disappear or when migrant farmworkers are being abused.

Gareth Higgins 4-01-2015

(Adapted from Uros Tomic / Shutterstock)

I GREW UP terrified, my childhood catechized by the violence in Northern Ireland, each week a litany of murder. I grew used to the idea that killing was the story of our lives. This, of course, was not true—there was also beauty and friendship all around us, all the time, not to mention eventually a peace process that has delivered extraordinary cooperation between former sworn enemies.

But the way we learned to tell the story—from political and cultural leaders, religion, and the media—emphasized the darkness. It’s been a long and still ongoing journey for me to discern how to honor real suffering while overcoming the lie that things are getting worse.

Today, many of us are living with a fear that seems hard to shake. Horrifying, brutal videos, edited for maximum sinister impact, showing up in our newsfeeds are only the most recent example of how terror seems to blend into our everyday lives.

But things are not as bad as we think. What social scientists call the “availability heuristic” helps explain why we humans find it difficult to accurately predict probability. In short, we guess the likelihood of something happening based on how easily we can recall examples of something similar having happened before. Because of this, folk who get a lot of “information” from mainstream media may tend to overestimate the murder rate: Most of us have seen vastly more killing on TV than would ever compute to an accurate estimate of real-world rates of killing.

Ryan Stewart 11-04-2014

Maria Hinojosa, left, speaks with Yolanda Sayres, right, about healthcare and education in Rochester, New York. Photo via ABTN.

“Behind every number, there’s a story.”

That’s what inspires Maria Hinojosa, host and executive producer of NPR’s Latino USA, to investigate the dramatic demographic changes taking place in the United States in her new PBS showAmerica by the Numbers. In a nation that will be majority non-white by 2043, Hinojosa’s storytelling focuses largely on the oft neglected experiences of immigrants and people of color.

Unafraid of what mainstream media too often neglects, Hinojosa’s America by the Numbers brings to life the tensions at the heart of a rapidly diversifying America. She examines not only the unjust treatment of underrepresented communities by the American government but also the cultural conflicts inherent within these communities. For Hinojosa, the conflicts between tradition and progress, community and individuality, white and non-white are not to be avoided, but rather spotlighted.

Last week, Sojourners chatted with Hinojosa about America by the Numbers and the role the media can play in welcoming these demographic changes. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Video courtesy of USA Today.

They’ve done this before.

Once again, John and Diane Foley appeared on national television Wednesday to speak in clear and deliberate voices about their son, conflict journalist James Foley — only this time, it wasn’t to plead for his release from captors but to hail him as a hero who wanted to help people and to thank the public for the outpouring of support that has flooded in since officials confirmed a videotaped beheading of their son was authentic.

Standing in front of the family home in Rochester, N.H., John Foley told reporters in the kind of voice of strength he and his wife have displayed over the years, “We’ve been through this before. Let ‘er rip.”

In years past, the Foleys have taken to television to draw attention to the cause of their son, who was abducted in November 2012 in Syria and also held captive for 44 days in 2011 after being captured in Libya.

Account after account describes the Foleys as determined, faithful Roman Catholics. After their son disappeared in 2012, they launched the FreeJamesFoley.org website to serve as a clearinghouse for information that might lead to his release. In October 2013, they joined Today’s Matt Lauer to wish their still-captive son a happy 40th birthday and to keep his cause alive. Even when interviewers noted that Foley’s career took him to many volatile places, his father was quick to defend him.

Christian Piatt 10-18-2013
 via The Fifth Estate Facebook Page: facebook.com/TheFifthEstateMovie

Still from 'The Fifth Estate' via The Fifth Estate Facebook Page: facebook.com/TheFifthEstateMovie

Am I the only one who finds it deliciously ironic that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange objects stridently to how he is portrayed in the new movie, The Fifth Estate? The film, which hits theaters in wide release today, turns its attention to the organization best known for publicly sharing otherwise confidential information of various governments, including our own.

Assange is clearly a study in eccentricity. From his tow-headed locks to his lock-down work environment, he fascinates as often as he infuriates. To demonstrate their displeasure about the coming film, WikiLeaks actually leaked the screenplay to the public ahead of the movie release and has published numerous corrections they deem necessary to more accurately reflect history. They have also labeled the movie "irresponsible, counterproductive and harmful,” adjectives made that much more poignant, given that similar epithets have been leveled at WikiLeaks for their own work.

But despite this latest round of drama revolving around WikiLeaks and its lightning rod of a front man, the question still remains:

Is WikiLeaks good for America?