Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Terry Mattingly

Home
Religion News
‘Ghosts’ on the God beat

‘Ghosts’ on the God beat

Last updated on: January 30, 2013 at 4:24 pm by tmatt

‘Ghosts’ on the God beat 2013-01-30T16:24:40-05:00 tmatt

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don’t get to see them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

I want to show you an an example — a case study, if you will — of what I am talking about, a ghost in a set of stories that is related to this blog — www.GetReligion.org.

But first let me introduce myself. My name is Terry Mattingly and I am journalist who covers religion news. For the past 15 years I have written the national “On Religion” column each week for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C. I also teach at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Palm Beach County, Fla., where my title is Associate Professor of Mass Media & Religion.

I will be writing for this blog pretty much every day. The actual editor of the site is my colleague Douglas LeBlanc, another veteran journalist who has covered religion in the mainstream and religious press. In recent years, he has been best known as an associate editor of the respected evangelical news magazine Christianity Today.

Between the two of us, we have been covering religion news in secular and sacred media — or trying to convince editors to pay us to do so — for almost 50 years.

We write religion stories and we read religion stories. Lots of them. That’s how we start our days and often that’s how we finish them. We see all kinds of things and so do our many friends out there in the blogosphere.

Here’s that example I was going to tell you about from a few months ago.

Like many people who live far from New York City, my morning email includes the digital newletter version of The New York Times. So I was scrolling along and ran into this.

***

November 12, 2003

Survivors of Riyadh Bombing Pick Up Pieces

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 11 They were neighbors and newlyweds, and late on Saturday night they bumped into each other by chance outside the obstetrician’s office.

That is how Dany Ibrahim and Houry Haytayan found out that the blushing couple who lived next door were also expecting their first child.

***

It was your basic, solid symbolic person story, a snapshot from the age of terror. I was especially interested in finding out who the authorities thought planned and executed this bombing and why.

The details were, of course, sketchy. But the newspaper of record had to find the pattern that would help readers make sense of this.

“Of the 17 dead, 13 have been identified. A Saudi police investigator at the scene on Tuesday said one of the four unidentified bodies might have been that of a suicide bomber inside the sport utility vehicle.

“Mr. Ibrahim, the young Lebanese husband, lived in Beirut through the 1970’s and 1980’s when it was racked by civil war. Somehow this is different. He specifically picked this compound to move into six months ago, after the suicide bombings in May against Western compounds, because he thought it would be safer to live in a place that was almost entirely Arab and Muslim.

It was safer to live in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Arab and Muslim. But it was not safe.”

Note: Arab and Muslim.

This is one of those strange combinations of words. Not all Arabs are Muslims and many Muslims are not Arabs. This strange combination of ethnic and religious identifications puzzled me.

After all, the terrorists themselves keep saying that these bombings target “infidels.” There are, in fact, “infidels” who are Arab. There are even “infidels” who are Muslims. What exactly were we dealing with in this case? Who are the “infidels” and where are they in this story?

So I kept reading and, latter, I found this.

***

Christian Arabs possible attack targets

By ESTANISLAO OZIEWICZ

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

POSTED AT 5:40 AM EST Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2003

Nina Jibran had everything to live for. The Lebanese school teacher was recently married, pregnant and living in a comfortable compound in Riyadh.

There was even talk of her moving to Canada with her husband, an engineer who worked for a multinational advertising agency.

But then, shortly after the couple returned home from an obstetrician’s appointment last Saturday, a suicide bomber ripped through the gates of their residential area, shredding their lives and sparking outrage in Saudi Arabia. Ms. Jibran was among the 17 dead, and her husband, Eliyas, among the more than 120 injured.

***

Scanning down, I found this newspaper’s version of the crucial, defining paragraphs:

“As details emerge about the victims of last weekend’s bombing, many observers believe their profile made them targets for the suspected al-Qaeda attack. Ms. Jibran, like her husband whom she married in July of 2002, was Christian. According to Arabic-language news reports, they had also received documentation to move to Canada.

“Elias Bijjani, a Toronto-based member of the Lebanese Canadian Coordinating Council, said many of the couple’s neighbours were also Lebanese Christians. He speculated al-Qaeda was targeting Christian Arabs, rather than Muslims.”

In fact, the evidence seemed to be that the victims were Arabs, but they were Arab Christians.

The wording in the New York Times story did not eliminate that possibility, but it also did not provide that specific information. In fact, it would turn out that it was hard to explain the location of the attack in any terms other than an attempt to kill a specific form of “infidels” — Arab Christians.

Why was that information missing? What was the origin of this ghost?

I immediately did what I do several times a day. I sent pieces of these stories and the URLs around to a circle of friends — journalists, human rights activists, politicos, etc. You know, the usual cyberspace circles. We all have these private circles, right? Mine just happen to care a great deal about religion and the news.

Before long, an interesting thing happened. One of these cyber-colleagues — Dr. Paul Marshall of Freedom House, which studies religious liberty issues — took an interest in these two stories. Then he took this case study to another level.

The result was this essay for The Weekly Standard.

***

Misunderstanding al Qaeda

What you weren’t told about their targets in Saudi Arabia.

by Paul Marshall

12/01/2003, Volume 009, Issue 12

AMERICAN REACTIONS to the recent bombing of a foreign workers’ compound in Riyadh reveal multiple misreadings of the Arab world and — more dangerously — of both al Qaeda and the Saudis.

The media seem to equate Arab with Muslim and, along with some in the administration, think that al Qaeda’s war is against Americans and Westerners per se, rather than against all “infidels,” a group al Qaeda defines idiosyncratically and expansively as anyone who is not a strictly observant Muslim. Both mistakes are compounded by reliance on the Saudis’ distorted account of the attack.

The November 8 bombing took place in a Lebanese Christian neighborhood of Riyadh, and of the seven publicly identified Lebanese victims, six were Christian. Lebanon’s newspapers are replete with photographs of Maronite Catholic and Greek Orthodox victims. Daleel al Mojahid, an al Qaeda-linked webpage, praised the killing of “non-Muslims.” The Middle East Media Research Institute quotes Abu Salma al Hijazi, reputed to be an al Qaeda commander, as saying that Saudi characterizations of the victims as Muslims were “merely media deceit.”

If so, the media fell for it.

***

Marshall and I had seen the same ghost. He chased it down and captured it in print.

And that is what we hope to do with this blog. It is an experiment by Doug LeBlanc and myself and, we hope, our friends and new readers. We want to slow down and try to pinpoint and name some of these ghosts.

But I don’t want to sound like we see this as a strictly negative operation. There are many fine writers out there — some believe the number is rising — who are doing an amazing job of taking religion news into the mainstream pages of news, entertainment, business and even sports. We want to highlight the good as well as raise some questions about coverage that we believe has some holes in it.

Most of all, we want to try to create a clearning house of information and opinion on this topic. This is what blogs do best.

So this is why Doug and I are starting this experimental blog. We hope it grows. We hope it forms links with other sites that are digging into the same issues, each with their unique viewpoints and resources. We will point some of those out as well and include them in our links page.

Let’s begin.

NOTE FROM TERRY MATTINGLY: This item ran at www.GetReligion.org on Feb. 1, 2004. I am adding it to the www.Tmatt.net site for a simple reason. Due to a technical error, the copy desk at the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., did not receive my column this week. Thus, it will run a week late. Rather than leave a gap here at the Gospel Communications Network site, I am sharing this opening essay from another web project. I hope you enjoy it.

Previous Post

July 7, 2004

Good news for Orthodox in Turkey?

Next Post

July 21, 2004 Beyond XXXChurch.com

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Academia Anglicanism Announcements books Catholics doctrine evangelicals family life First person Godbeat Islam Judaism Mainline churches Marriage mass media movies Orthodox Politics popular culture religion sex Social issues Uncategorized Web/tech World World religions worship young people

Select a Month July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 January 2002 December 2001 November 2001 October 2001 September 2001 August 2001 July 2001 June 2001 May 2001 April 2001 March 2001 February 2001 January 2001 December 2000 November 2000 October 2000 September 2000 August 2000 July 2000 June 2000 May 2000 April 2000 March 2000 February 2000 January 2000 December 1999 November 1999 October 1999 September 1999 August 1999 July 1999 June 1999 May 1999 April 1999 March 1999 February 1999 January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 August 1998 July 1998 June 1998 May 1998 April 1998 March 1998 February 1998 January 1998 December 1997 November 1997 October 1997 September 1997 August 1997 July 1997 June 1997 May 1997 April 1997 March 1997 February 1997 January 1997 December 1996 November 1996 October 1996 September 1996 August 1996 July 1996 June 1996 May 1996 April 1996 March 1996 February 1996 January 1996 December 1995 November 1995 October 1995 September 1995

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

In order to please God you need …

Select your answer to see how you score.

Houses To go to the Temple Hope Faith