According to the stark red-state vs. blue-state narrative that shapes news media coverage of contemporary politics in the U.S., conservative places are becoming redder and progressive places are becoming bluer with each passing election cycle.

But in the tightly interwoven political and religious cultures of the Deep South, a right-wing legislative victory can belie a deeper leftward trend in the region’s zeitgeist.

Take, for example, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill heading to the desk of Republican Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi. The measure—which would allow business owners to discriminate against LGBT customers on religious grounds as well as add the phrase “In God We Trust” to the State Seal—trades on conservative interests like those that motivated a similar piece of legislation recently vetoed by Jan Brewer, Arizona’s Republican governor.

Most mainstream news outlets—including USA Today, TIME, the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times—cast the Mississippi initiative as Arizona manqué (disaffecting the NFL isn’t a big concern in Mississippi, but even the bill’s opponents concede that its fangs are smaller by comparison). That said, enactment into law seems likely, countering a conservative setback in Phoenix with a victory in Jackson.

This analysis is thorough only if news consumers tacitly accept the premise that all politics is national—an expression, even at the state and local level, of the priorities of party officials and their allied lobbyists in Washington. But scratch a little bit beneath the surface of the story and Mississippi’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act looks less like an affirmation of the state’s commitment to the broader conservative movement and more like the scorched-earth strategy of a political faction that sees its fortunes shifting in the trenches.

Since the beginning of the year, three Mississippi college towns—Starkville, Oxford and Hattiesburg—have passed “inclusivity resolutions” affirming the “dignity and worth” of all citizens, including LGBT people. While these resolutions lack the force of law and are therefore unlikely instruments for the undoing of legislation at the state level, they do reflect demographic trends that dim the long-term prospects for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. A Human Rights Campaign poll cited by the Mississippi Business Journal determined that 64 percent of all Mississippians back workplace nondiscrimination policies for LGBT employees, and roughly 60 percent of those under 30 support marriage equality.

As Sarah Goodyear observes in the Atlantic, moves at the local level say much more about where Mississippi is ultimately heading than does the legislation awaiting the governor’s signature in Jackson. If that conclusion isn’t exactly an indictment of the accuracy of other mainstream news coverage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it does expose another instance in which the “liberal media” often elide context and nuance in a way that favors a more conservative angle on the news.

You know you’re a journalism geek when good reporting excites you.

Such was my experience upon reading Sonia Paul’s most recent post for the New York Times’ India Ink blog. I’ve been working with students in Diane Winston’s J585 reporting seminar on issues related to Indian Muslims and the country’s upcoming national elections. Some of the questions in the back of my mind: apart from Salman Khan, is there Muslim support for Narendra Modi and his conservative Bharatiya Janata Party—the primary political expression of Hindu nationalism? If so, what interests motivate those supporters? Does a given community’s collusion with or opposition to BJP’s agenda reflect sectarian tensions within Indian Islam? How do regional politics and class differences figure into the equation?

Paul touches on each of these issues, and she even throws a wry commentator into the mix: Last week, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which Paul describes as “the ideological parent group” of the BJP, arranged a meeting with several dozen prominent Muslims in Lucknow. “’It’s as if the Ku Klux Klan decided to have an interaction with the blacks,’ said Mohammad Rashid, 49, a Sunni activist and writer.”

On the other end of the spectrum is a Reuters piece on megachurches in East Asia. Excited by it I was not. The three focal points of the article—outsized congregations, intimations of clerical corruption and the venal spirituality of the prosperity gospel—are newsworthy only if you’ve not been following the news for the past decade or so. More to the point, the laziness of the reporting actually misleads. It’s true that Christianity is growing quickly in the developing world and Pentecostal movements are the vanguard of that growth, but megachurches are actually in decline, in large part because of the well-reported problems that are repackaged as news in this dispatch. (Yoido Full Gospel Church in South Korea, for example, has lost as much as half its membership as a consequence of schism and restructuring over the past several years.)

The real story is the emergence of homegrown neo-Pentecostal movements in places like the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, China and Brazil. These latest iterations of charismatic Protestant Christianity are outpacing the growth of first-generation denominations like the Assemblies of God as well as second-generation megachurches like Yoido, City Harvest in Singapore and Believer’s Church in India.

And the story within the story: “Progressive Pentecostalism” in places like Indonesia, Nigeria and El Salvador is emerging as a corrective to the increasing formalism of first-generation movements and the insularity and venality of second-generation megachurches.

At this point, probing the finances of scandalized megachurch pastors is ground that has been trod into a rut. A better use of a plucky, globe-trotting reporter’s time might be to inquire whether Pentecostal progressives in, say, Lagos (where pastors have collaborated with Muslims on issues related to healthcare and education) or San Salvador (where evangelical NGOs network with the Socialist-led central government and the fractious Catholic hierarchy) might be willing to temper their country’s Christian animus toward LGBT rights.

The sympathies and sensibilities of leaders in these movements are oriented in that direction. But would their congregations follow them down such a path? Would the political and religious coalitions that are distinct to progressive Pentecostalism collapse, or would the controversy clarify true alliances? These are the sorts of questions a reporter in the mold of Sonia Paul might ask about global Pentecostalism.

The government of Myanmar has forced Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to cease its operations in Rakhine state, home to Myanmar’s tiny Rohingya Muslim minority. Rohingya Muslims constitute one of the world’s poorest ethnic groups—MSF has for years served as the sole healthcare provider to a community of 1 million people, many of whom live in isolated refugee camps—and also one of the most vulnerable. MSF’s response to recent Buddhist-led violence against Muslims in Rakhine, which the government in Yangon denies, appears to have prompted MSF’s censure.

Reuters, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, Voice of America and other Western news media outlets quickly picked up on the story, which follows on the heels of a less widely reported development: the proposal of legislation, prompted by a petition drafted by prominent Buddhist monks, to “protect the race and religion” of the country’s Buddhist majority. The bill would place restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith marriage, ban polygamy and attempt to control population growth—measures squarely aimed at Myanmar’s economically and politically disenfranchised Muslim minority. As of this writing, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, whom Western activists have pressed to speak out more forcefully on behalf of minority Muslims, has declined to condemn the legislation.

In recent weeks, events in Ukraine and Syria have dominated international coverage in U.S. news media, priorities that reflect American anxieties over Russian influence, on the one hand, and stability in the Middle East, on the other. But as the Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this week, the regional refugee crisis spawned by Myanmar’s repression of the Rohingya is complicating Yangon’s efforts to integrate itself into the global market economy, a process initiated through American diplomacy at time when Myanmar’s monks were being valorized rather than rebuked by their Westernized coreligionists.

As with so much else in the era of globalization, no instance of inter-group violence happens in isolation, regardless of whether news consumers choose to direct their attention toward the conflict.

This inattentiveness is largely a consequence of the Myanmar story’s upending of common prejudices and expectations: In news media narratives since the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Muslims are seldom portrayed as victims of repression who need our sympathy and assistance. And Asian Buddhist monks are generally depicted as cryptic but kindly vectors of the therapized form of Buddhist practice that dominates Western spiritual culture.

As I’ve suggested before, reporting on Buddhist violence against Muslims in Myanmar has typically traded on the sensationalism and novelty of the story without generating the kind of sustained coverage that the crisis in Rakhine deserves. The suspension of MSF’s activities, coupled with proposed anti-Muslim legislation and Aung San Suu Kyi’s circumspection in the face of injustice, provides journalists with a chance to change that deplorable inertia.