NPR and coverage of religion

[womzilla]

Back in mid-March, it transpired that Jack Kelley, a senior reporter at USA Today, had spent much of the last decade just plain making shit up. One of the reasons that Kelley got away it for so long, according to his supervisors and co-workers, is that as an outspoken self-described Christian, people just assumed that he wouldn't constantly lie about pretty much everything. Kelley has been fired and two of his editors, including one who has been at USA Today since it was founded, have resigned.

When the Jack Kelley scandal broke, Atrios poked around. He discovered that Kelley was associated with the World Journalism Institute, which can charitably be described as a cabal of right-wing Christian journalists who support each other in their efforts to make sure that only right-wing causes are described as "religious". Or, in their words:

The practical need for Christian worldview journalists in our contemporary society is self-evident, but to simply note the obvious, there is the urgent need to provide journalistic "salt" and "light" and "leaven" within the mainstream media as a manifestation of our Christian obligation to lovingly model justice to our society.

For decades, WJI's parent corporation, God's World Publications, has stood against the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual degradation of our society. GWP has placed its focus on reporting from a unapologetic Christian point of view.

The WJI was founded by Marvin Olasky, the Bush policy advisor who came up with the "compassionate conservatism" slogan and the entire "department of faith-based works" approach to Rethuglican charity.

As Atrios notes:

Anyway, I could spend hours having fun with this I'm sure. And, maybe I will. But, at a time when the New York Times has fired a stringer reporter simply because he had worked as an AIDS awareness activist, and the San Francisco chronicle has forbidden two reporters from having anything to do with covering the same-sex marriage story because they got married, I'm a bit confused (And not, sadly, surprised), that a substantial number of reporters doing the religious beat are associated with an explicitly pro-religion pro-conservative Christian organization.

And then elaborates:

Of course, the point isn't that I think all journalists need to be secular. But, this is an organization dedicated to training journalists to push a particular conservative Christian agenda from within mainstream news organizations, and many of their people are covering religion and social issues in top organizations. Including that liberal NPR. From my first pass look at some of the kinds of stories these people crank out, it seems they're quite good at creating fairly innocuous pieces which aren't obviously slanted propaganda, but which inevitably do push the position and emphasize the things you would expect.

The WJI member that Atrios found at NPR is Barbara Bradley Haggerty, who reports on religious, social, and moral issues for the main newsprograms (Morning Edition and All Things Considered).

Yesterday (Friday, April 30), Haggerty had a long piece on Morning Edition which basically boiled down to "moral people are Republicans who oppose abortion, and John Kerry doesn't appeal to moral, religious people". Except that if it had been that overt, NPR would have known not to run it; instead, the article points that way steadily through indirect suggestion, misdirection, sample bias, and innuendo. Atrios annotated a transcript of the piece, which is well worth your time.

I deeply resent the way that in the modern political discourse, "religion" is in the sole custody of the reactionary right-wing, and I want to see the people who promote this false discourse called out on it.

After you're done reading Atrios, I suggest that you might want to let NPR's ombudsman know how you feel about all this. Jeffrey Dvorkin, the NPR ombudsman, can be reached by e-mail at ombudsman@npr.org. A thoughtful, reasoned letter to Mr. Dvorkin expressing your dismay that such an openly biased reporter is NPR's senior voice on religious issues would not be at all out of place, I think.

Comments

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this good info on the right-wing slant at NPR--it's been bugging me for sometime that NPR keeps being considered liberally slanted (by the right and the left allows that definition to stick) when it clearly isn't--another method the right has used to pull the median marker their way.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Update: Roger Ailes has posted (http://rogerailes.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_rogerailes_archive.html#108353783030497062) confirmation of something Atrios suspected, that the three people Haggerty interviewed were all affiliated with a known far-right Catholic publication, First Things.

In other words, known far-rightists think that it's shameful that John Kerry isn't toeing the Catholic line on far-right wedge issues.

This isn't reporting; this is propaganda.

Two points in WJI

[(Anonymous)]

(1) Please note that Barbara Haggerty never spoke at WJI and, once she had learned the identity of the group, she cancelled immediately.

(2) Also note the NPR commentary up at the WWW site by the ombudsman, noting that the only reason she did the weekday morning interviews was a deadline imposed by NPR.

Check out: http://www.npr.org/features/columns/column.php?columnId=2781901

Re: Two points in WJI

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Quoting from the NPR page you cited:

Bradley Hagerty says her name was used without her permission by the World Journalism Institute. She says she has no affiliation with that group despite attempts by certain blogs to link her.

The WJI listed her on their web page because she agreed to teach a course for them. She may well have cancelled "once she learned the identity of the group", but that's not consistent with "no affiliation with that group", and it certainly isn't the fault of "certain blogs" that she was listed on the WJI web site.

On the second point, she had the professions of two of the three anti-Kerry people, but only listed the profession of the Kerry defender ("union leader"). It's quite tempting to see this as a deliberate effort to show that only people who are partisan hacks (unions vote overwhelmingly Democrat) would think that Kerry was defensible.