by John Adams

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But the pair of images that dominated the media scene over the past week has spawned many more words than that.

“Racist,” “transgender child propaganda” and “media bias” are just a sampling of the verbiage that has been used to describe the pictures associated with a J. Crew promo and a Tea Party activist, Marilyn Davenport. Reporters, however, would be wise to learn more about one word that hasn't yet been attached to photos: Dominionism.

Last week, J. Crew, a popular clothing brand better known for corduroys than controversy, sent a promotional email to its clientele that included a “favorites” section by Jenna Lyons, the company's president and creative director. In the promo, Lyons is smiling at her 5-year-old son Beckett, whose toenails are painted hot pink.

The conservative Culture and Media Institute, whose avowed mission is to “advance truth and virtue in the public square,” condemned the ad as “blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.” By the next day, every major media outlet was all over Toe-gate.

Meanwhile, the O.C. Weekly obtained a copy of a now infamous email sent by Marilyn Davenport, a Southern California Tea Party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party. The missive included an image that shows President Obama's face superimposed on a chimpanzee with the caption, “Now you know why no birth certificate.”  

News media coverage of the doctored photo was adequate, with local outlets giving the story the most play, but it will likely get wider exposure during the president's upcoming SoCal visit. Davenport's non-apology–even after critics within the Republican Party condemned the image as racist, she declared that the dust-up over her likening the African-American Chief Executive to a lower primate was “much to do about nothing”–could also give the story legs.

What links right-wing rage over a little boy's pink toenails with the mindset behind Davenport's impulse to depict a powerful and politically progressive black man as evolutionarily impaired? Answer: Dominionism.

Dominionism, rarely used as a self-descriptor, is a trend in Protestant Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism that encourages believers to engage in the political process in an attempt to dominate the system and shape the country according to “biblical principles.” R.J. Rushdoony, the late historian and Calvinist theologian, is widely acknowledged as the father of the Dominionist movement, which began in the 1970s. Rushdoony's book, Institutes of Biblical Law, was the manual that inspired–or at least greatly influenced–Pat Robertson's presidential run in the 1988.
 
The foundational notions in Dominionist politics–and behind the order / disorder tensions playing out through the aforementioned pictures–are rooted in conservative readings of key passages in Genesis. Specifically, the idea that God gave man “dominion over the animals” and “over all the earth” (Gen. 1:26-27), including the responsibility to “name the animals” (Gen. 2:19-20) and even to “name Eve” (Gen. 3:20), informs the Dominionist belief that they are enjoined by God to impose biblical order on the messiness of a fallen world.

As the conflict between progressive and conservative ideologies increases with the approach of a new political season, Dominionism will creep into the narrative and define key flash-points in the debate: birtherism, exceptionalism, gay marriage, abortion and even global warming. Michael Hamblin, the founder of Evangelical Resources, scoffs at the notion that the priorities of Christian conservatives are implicitly shaped by the Dominionist agenda. “For those who are willing to do fact checking and investigate beneath the surface,” he says, “it becomes quite clear that Dominionism is the creation not of the Religious Right and its fringes, but of progressive secularists looking to portray a caricatured scare-crow of Christianity in the worst possible light.”

Perhaps; in any case, journalists should be willing to take his advice and do some probing. For starters, they might ask why a little boy's pink toenails turned into such a big story–and, on the other hand, why many of Marilyn Davenport's fellow travelers find her depiction of the president so unremarkable.

John Adams worked as a pastor for 12 years before leaving his church to pursue journalism. He earned a master's in online media from USC Annenberg, and is focused on sports journalism and the web world. He works for NBC Los Angeles as a web editor and content producer. He has published articles on SI.com, WSJ.com, USAToday.com, MSNBC.com and TreeHugger.com to name a few.

by Albert Sabaté

The recent banning of the niqab, or full veil, in France is just the latest episode in the West's tumultuous relationship with Islam and its own values of multiculturalism. News media coverage of the ban in France and the United States generally reflects each country's distinct philosophical and political culture: the issue in French media is generally social cohesion, while American coverage tends to focus on the rights of the individual.

On Monday, after the law was approved by French President Nicolas Sarkozy,  dozens of impromptu protests led to the arrest of a few burqa-clad women who had become criminals overnight. French officials said that the niqab contradicts the French values of equality and secularism–an assertion that has the support of 82 percent of the public. They further claimed that radical Islamic elements in society force women to wear the veil, and that the new law will stem increasing influence of Islam.

Still, Sarkozy's center-right brand of “liberté, égalité” and “fraternité” wasn't unanimously endorsed, even among French non-Muslims. Before the law went into effect, a French businessman offered 1 million euros to pay the 150€ fines imposed on women donning the niqab.  And on Tuesday, a government report on racism and xenophobia showed that for the first time in recent years, the French have grown more intolerant.

The women who were arrested after the new law went into affect are surely not surprised by this news.
 
Coverage in French and American newspapers has reflected the broad differences in the way each culture frames the issues at stake in passage of the new law. U.S. coverage has focused on tensions and contradictions in Sarkozy's casting of the debate as an issue of freedom, equality and women's rights. While much of the American reporting lacks the voices of women who can speak to the other side of the issue, editorials in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times nonetheless declared that Sarkozy was taking advantage of a small, marginalized segment of the population to curry favor with a larger portion of the French electorate that is tacking right on immigration issues.
.  
But the story isn't simply about French collectivism versus American individualism. One can also see parallels between the conservative French government's claim of a moral imperative in its curtailing of the rights of marginalized women and the Tea Party's attacks on Planned Parenthood during the recent budget debates. Both the niqab and Planned Parenthood issues involve women's ability to determine their identity and control their bodies.

Moreover, many editorials in French newspapers argued that suppressing an unpopular religious practice for the sake of social cohesion could instead increase division, polarization and even devotion to Islam (something Reza Aslan has been saying all along) in French society.  

One especially insightful editorial in Le Monde looked at how outlets in the U.S. were reporting on the new legislation. The writer pointed out how a law affecting only 2,000 women in France became front-page news in the New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune because of the high value Americans place on individual freedoms. It also compared the U.S. government's timid reaction to Pastor Terry Jones with that of the French government's action against the recent French Koran burner, who was fined 1000€ and sentenced to three months in prison almost the same day the niqab ban went into effect. The piece ends with a thoughtful question: Are the rights of Muslims better defended in France or in the U.S.?

U.S. coverage has generally framed the French law as a curb on individual freedoms. News media in socialistic France have focused on the larger question of how a law aimed at a minority religious practice affects society as a whole. They are more likely to cast the consequences of this ban not as a slippery slope leading to religious suppression but as a wedge between social factions that will increase division and reduce fraternity in French society. In both cases, the takeaway message is the same: It's tough to see how any good will come of Sarkozy's feint to the right.

Albert Sabaté is an M.A. candidate in the journalism program at USC Annenberg.

by Robyn Carolyn Price

Two veiled women were arrested in France last Monday as they protested a law that, effective that day, banned the wearing of burqas and niqabs in public spaces. The law is considered by some – both Muslim and non-Muslim – a direct threat to the freedom of religious expression as well as an attack on Islam as a whole.

The ban was covered by all the major news media outlets in the U.S. and the U.K., including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, CNN and the Wall Street Journal. Although the reports provided the obvious facts – details of the law and the subsequent arrest of the women who defied it – many journalists failed to provide their audiences with thorough sourcing on both sides of the issues or even much in the way of historical context, making it difficult to understand why President Nicholas Sarkozy and the French Parliament would pass this type of legislation.

Security reasons were cited as the main rationale for the law, which prohibits people from concealing their faces in public spaces unless their professions (as in the case of some medical personnel and law enforcement officers) require it. While there is no specific mention of Islam in the legislation, no one doubts that it constitutes a social referendum against the practice of veiling by Muslim women.
 
Weaving through most of the media reports is the tacit assumption that readers would naturally understand why France–with a rapidly growing and recently restive immigrant population– might be suspicious of burqa-clad women. But this reflexive sympathy for proponents of the law leaves at least a couple of key questions unasked: For starters, are there any statistics that support the French government's contention that veiled women pose a greater security threat than a nurse wearing a face mask or a police officer in riot gear? Perhaps, but few outlets pursued this angle, and evidence was not forthcoming from officials in Paris.

Then there's the issue of the secular paternalism. CNN quotes a government official who says, “Given the damage it [wearing the outlawed clothing] produces on those rules which allow the life in community, ensure the dignity of the person and equality between sexes, this practice, even if it is voluntary, cannot be tolerated in any public place.” The irony that two women were arrested for failing to comply with a law that implicitly singles them out for censure seems to be lost on the official who expressed concern for their dignity and equality.

Which leads to a second question that seems obvious but was largely overlooked by the press: Is there a widespread feeling among burqa-clad women in France that they are wearing the veil against their will? Again, the assumption among non-Muslims–in the French government and in the news media–seems to be that any woman would naturally want to cast aside her head-covering once an enlightened secular government compelled her to come to her senses.

When journalists fail to ask important questions like these, they become the instruments of policies that would silence the voices and trample the rights of the very people who need the advocacy of a free press. Interview women who choose to wear the veil, push government sources to produce hard evidence to justify laws that single out particular groups and practices for punishment. This isn't just about getting the story; it's about doing our job.

Robyn Carolyn Price is an M.A. candidate in the specialized journalism program at USC Annenberg.

by Salman Hameed

Next year is going to be an ordeal for astronomers. We regularly field (or at least endure) questions and claims about astrology, alien abductions, UFOs, crop-circles and beings from other dimensions. But we're bracing ourselves for a bumper crop of pseudoscience over the course of 2012, the end point of the cycle charted by one of the Mesoamerican calendars. Which means…well, probably nothing much.

But if you turn to the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or the National Geographic Channel–or link to one of the thousands of 2012-related posts on the Internet–you'll find that destruction will visit us next year as a consequence of: a) Earth's collision with a black hole, b) extreme solar flares, c) an asteroid strike, d) sudden climate change due to a shift in the planet's magnetic poles, e) our alignment with the black hole at the center our galaxy, or f) a collision or a near-miss with Planet X, sometimes also referred to as Nibiru. If you have a more optimistic personality, you may believe we are headed for a consciousness-transformation event in 2012. Or perhaps all of the above. 

I'm already irked by the propagation of super-bad science on the Discovery and National Geographic channels, but I was even more dismayed last month when I was in Pakistan, where there has been an explosion in the number of cable channels. There are countless talk-show programs on more than ten 24-hour news channels. There are eight music channels and three devoted to fashion and lifestyle. Then there are six 24-hour religious channels, along with three that focus on food and cooking! This is not counting at least ten other stations that only run soaps (see the list of Pakistani cable stations here).

But it seems science is largely missing from the mix. If Americans suffer from a glut of pseudoscience, Pakistanis are in the midst of a science-media famine. Or so I thought.

Just this past Sunday, I saw a locally produced documentary in Pakistan that focused on doomsday scenarios associated with 2012–but with a distinctly Pakistani twist. The program had the same tone, music and pacing of the 2012-related content produced in the U.S., except that it featured Pakistani experts. [Here is a segment that talks about the Mayan calendar. The documentary is in Urdu, but I think you get the sense that it is trying to convey]. Many of the doomsday scenarios are the same, except that the script links the events to predictions in Islamic literature. The show aired on one of the most-watched cable news stations of Pakistan, ARY News. In fact, the station has produced a set of uncritical documentaries on superstitions, paranormal phenomena and various conspiracy theories and airs them weekly.

How will this eschatological narrative play among Pakistani audiences? Will they accept or reject the interweaving of Islamic ideas into a fetishized version of an indigenous mythology from the Western Hemisphere?

Next year will probably be no better or worse than any other year. There will be earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, accidents and wars. But if the uncritical media-hype of 2012 continues–and spreads–a large segment of world's population may ascribe exaggerated or improbable meanings to otherwise ordinary events. That in itself could constitute catastrophe. In a world connected by electronic media but still fragmented by age-old differences, the consequences of media-driven phenomena are more profound, and the scale of disaster may be greater, than ever before.

Salman Hameed is assistant professor of integrated science and humanities at Hampshire College. His primary research focuses on understanding the rise of creationism in the Islamic world and how Muslims view the relationship between science and religion. He is currently the lead investigator of a three-year NSF-funded study on this topic, and heads the Center for the Study of Science in Muslim Societies (SSiMS) at Hampshire. He blogs at Irtiqa.

by Mary Slosson

The murder of Palestinian-Israeli actor and filmmaker Juliano Mer-Khamis last Monday highlighted the tragic, ongoing wages of conflict in that part of the world. It also drew attention to the role of film in shaping popular understandings of collective trauma.

Mer-Khamis was shot and killed by “masked gunmen,” who have been identified as Palestinian, outside the groundbreaking Freedom Theatre he helped found in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin.

The theater was the fruit of Mer-Khamis' documentary “Arna's Children,” which told the story of his mother, an Israeli Jew who married a Palestinian Arab and formed a theater group in the West Bank to help children express their feelings about the occupation.

Despite some initial reluctance, Mer-Khamis decided to return to Jenin after the documentary was produced; he said his conscience tugged him back to a place where he could teach children traumatized by occupation about hope and the need to move forward.

“I cannot just do films and go on,” he said. “You do films with the purpose to change reality, at least to have some influence on it.”

Speculation has been swirling since his death that his assailants were uncomfortable with the notion that someone who identified himself as both “100 percent Palestinian and 100 percent Jewish” could truly represent the cause of downtrodden Palestinians eking out an existence in the Jenin refugee camp.

His death, however, has brought new attention to not only his documentary work, but also to his role in a recent Hollywood production. A small number of outlets (for example, here and here) have noted Mer-Khamis' performance in “Miral,” the controversial new film based on Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal's experience growing up during the first intifada.

The film breaks from the constraints that Jebreal normally operates under as a journalist, deploying the greater imaginative possibilities of fictional storytelling to describe oppression, resistance and, ultimately, the possibility of coexistence.

It is perhaps a fitting tribute to Mer-Khamis that the last film with which he was involved struggles with the obstacles to coexistence, much as he did.

“He represented and embodied the possibility of coexistence and forgiveness,” Jebreal said in a statement after Mer-Khamis' death. “Juliano's vision for peace and justice will live on in his work, and he will continue to be an inspiration for us all.”

The film has as many critics among Jewish advocacy organizations–the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and indeed even the state of Israel–as it does supporters –J Street, Jewish Voices for Peace and American Jews for a Just Peace, among others.

But in a media milieu–both journalistic and cinematic–that tends to see the status quo as unalterable, “Miral” is a breakout film that heralds the prospect of coexistence despite seemingly insurmountable barriers, much as did the life of Juliano Mer-Khamis.

Mary Slosson is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles, where she is an Annenberg Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication Journalism. She focuses on international, investigative journalism and multimedia storytelling. She previous reported on international diplomacy, global health and the environment at the United Nations.

by Lee Gilmore

Friday's narrowly averted government shutdown–and the endemic economic and cultural disputes underlying those events–saw women's health care batted about like a cat toy between the nation's dominant political factions. The threatened de-funding of Planned Parenthood was positioned as the key issue by both Republicans and Democrats alike. While a stop-gap agreement keeps the government running in the short term, the ongoing budget battles will likely loom large in the coming months.

For the media's part, this was very much a story of the extent to which media narratives routinely stress conflict in order to create a heightened sense of drama and thus sell papers, airtime and pixels. Casting socio-political conflicts in terms of overly simplistic “either/or” dichotomies reduces complex concerns to divisive, two-dimensional storylines. These framing strategies also tend to serve the needs of the powerful and wealthy by portraying contests largely within terms established by the right-wing and by drumming up public fear. The so-called “Tea Party” continues to proclaim its ascendancy and has proven to be highly effective in demanding the news media's attention. In so doing, their social and economic interests are routinely pushed to center stage, while the religio-political left rarely manages to summon such attention.

The extent to which “Tea Party” is synonymous with “religious right” is debatable. The Pew Forum, for example, reported that Tea Party supporters made up 41 percent of voters in the 2010 midterm elections, and that 42 percent of these said they agree with the conservative Christian movement. Most Tea Party supporters also reported conservative opinions on social issues like abortion and gay marriage.

The Pew Forum has also found that just 26 percent of Americans are affiliated with evangelical Christian churches, not all of which are necessarily socially conservative. Thus, while these groups–in whatever combination–do constitute powerful voting blocks, they do not seamlessly represent the views of the nation's majority. Yet over and over again, concerns like abortion and other sexuality-related issues are made to dominate the discourse and drive the national agenda.

The fact is that abortion is not what is actually at stake in efforts to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Others have already pointed out that federal funding for abortion has long been banned and that abortions make up only three percent of Planned Parenthood's activities. Nevertheless, Planned Parenthood has come to symbolize the abortion issue for both the right and the left and thus continues to be used as a political wiffle-ball. Last week's budget disputes were only the latest in a recent string of political attacks on women's autonomy and reproductive rights from various angles.

Why is it that stories from the religious left are not pursued with equal fervor by the news media? One simple answer is that mainstream news organizations are financially controlled by a tiny but extremely wealthy elite, who clearly benefit from the right's fiscal policies. This is not exactly a news flash. But journalists should examine their capitulation to the right's framing strategies and consider the view from the flip side.

If 41 percent of voters in the 2010 elections claimed Tea Party sympathies, that means 59 percent did not. If 26 percent claim evangelical Christian affiliation, that means 74 percent do not. And nearly 22 percent of Americans are not Christians of any variety, including the ever-growing “Nones.” Furthermore, over 14 percent of Americans live in poverty, and a mere 400 Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent combined. Furthermore, the narratives also start to shift when social media enters into the mix. For example, Planned Parenthood quickly capitalized on the attention last week by launching a social media campaign, which garnered over 100,000 virtual signatures (and also added the addresses of thousands of supporters to the organization's database).

But stories such as these are very rarely told on the national stage, and so the political concerns of women, the poor and religious minorities remain disproportionately marginalized. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that the concerns of those groups that are historically or economically powerful are disproportionately centered.

Lee Gilmore teaches in the Religious Studies and Anthropology departments at California State University, Northridge. Her recent book, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press), explores the cultural and religious significance of the Burning Man festival and why many participants describe it as a spiritual and transformational event.

by Christin Davis

In a 5-4 decision on “Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week that tuition payments to religious schools are eligible for tax credits and cannot be challenged on constitutional grounds. The ruling was doubly newsworthy: Elena Kagan, the court's newest justice, wrote the dissent in the case. And, more importantly, the decision removes barriers to proposed legislation in several states where conservatives are eager to provide tax incentives for contributions to religious schools.

The ruling received wide coverage from mainstream outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, NPR and the Washington Post.  The Los Angeles Times' and the New York Times' reporting, which framed the impact of the court's decision in distinctly different ways, offers good signposts indicating the points of contention that will remain in the news and how journalists will most likely cover them.

At the heart of the decision from the court's conservative majority is the determination that taxpayers in Arizona have no legal standing to challenge a state law that gives tax credits for contributions to “student tuition organizations.” This is not an isolated issue. Seven states—Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island—currently allow taxpayers to deduct a portion of their donations to education-related organizations from their income taxes. These tax statutes allow deductions for contributions to both public schools and school tuition organizations, which provide scholarships to students attending private institutions—including those run by religious organizations.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, determined that the incentive is allowable under the First Amendment's establishment clause because it is a “tax credit,” not a “government expenditure.” In her powerful dissent, Kagan rebutted: “Taxpayers experience the same injury whether government subsidization of religion takes the form of a cash grant or a tax measure.”

“Assume,” she wrote, “that a given state wishes to subsidize the ownership of crucifixes…It could purchase them in bulk and distribute them; it could reimburse buyers with a check; or it could pay with a tax credit. Now, really—do taxpayers have less reason to complain if the state selects the last of these three options?”

The critical issue here is whether public funding—however it is defined—should be used for an educational institution that is voluntarily segregated from the public school system. When the institution in question is religious, it inevitably raises the issue of the separation of church and state, which the Los Angeles Times rightly places at the center of its coverage.

Specifically, the Times cast the ruling as an exception to the establishment clause, which forbids the government “to force a citizen to contribute” to religion or from using its taxing and spending power to favor any one religion or to support religion in general. The reporter for the Times points out that in years past, the court has invoked the First Amendment “to strike down a series of state laws that sent public money to parochial schools.” This week's decision, however, puts an “implicit stamp of approval” on similar laws and encourages other states to follow suit “because tax credits are more politically acceptable than public aid to religious schools.” As Kagan wrote in her dissent, the tax credit basically offers a “one-step instruction” for those who seek public money to aid religion.

It is “a major win for those who support the 'school choice' movement and aid to parochial schools, and a potentially far-reaching loss for defenders of strict separation of church and state,” the Los Angeles Times concludes.

Coverage in the New York Times, on the other hand, framed the ruling as less earth-shaking in terms of its significance relative to the First Amendment: “The [Arizona] program itself is novel and complicated, and allowing it to go forward may be of no particular moment.” The bigger problem for the New York Times was the more legally esoteric issue of standing–that is, “closing the courthouse door” to suits claiming violation of the First Amendment's ban on government establishment of religion. To that end, the Times quotes Kagan, saying that the majority opinion had “laid waste” to the doctrine of taxpayer standing, “[W]hich allows suits from people who object to having tax money spent on religious matters.”

Peter Laarman provides a pithy summary of the relationship between both issues in Religion Dispatches: “Petra [a hypothetical Arizona resident] will argue that any tax subsidy for religion, in a closed system where the power to tax is limited, violates the non-establishment clause. Petra will also argue that the principle of taxpayer-supported universal public education is severely undercut if more and more taxpayers begin to get direct credits for supporting sectarian schools. Or rather, Petra would most likely make these arguments—but Petra is no longer allowed through the courthouse doors. She has lost her standing.”

Regardless of whether the problem of legal standing or religious establishment turns out to be the most momentous consequence of the court's decision, this week's ruling will remain newsworthy for months and perhaps years to come, as other states consider and enact similar legislation. In the near term, the decision is a clear divergence from legal precedent—and thus worthy of further examination.

Christin Davis is an M.A. candidate in USC Annenberg's journalism program.

by Maura Jane Farrelly

In December of last year, members of Westboro Baptist Church announced that they would be coming to the Boston metropolitan area. Their purpose was to picket Brandeis University – a school that was founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community – before moving on to harass congregants at a mosque in nearby Wayland, Massachusetts, as well as the students who belong to the Hillel chapter at Harvard University.

The coverage that Westboro's northeastern junket received in the local print and broadcast media was remarkably – and responsibly – subdued. The temptation to do the group's bidding by drawing attention to their campaign was undoubtedly strong; after all, they were showing up at Brandeis – a school founded in the shadow of the Holocaust – to condemn the university's students for being Jews and Americans.

Yet, the Boston Globe confined its coverage to its MetroWest edition, which serves the towns visited by the protesters, but is not distributed throughout the entire metro region.  The article the paper ran included no quotes from the proudly hate-filled group, which is made up of about 70 people, most of whom are related to the church's founder, Fred Phelps. Reporter Megan McKee noted only that the Westboro Baptists are “known for [their] inflammatory beliefs against gays and non-Christian religions.”

Coverage on the local ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates was, perhaps not surprisingly, a bit less restrained. Some of the anchors did detail the group's views on homosexuality, but no sound bites of the Westboro Baptists' hate-mongering were included in the pieces.

Would that Bill Weir and the producers of ABC News had been similarly restrained late last week, when word broke that angry Muslims in Afghanistan had been rioting and murdering in response to the news that a non-denominational pastor in Florida had burned a copy of the Koran.

Terry Jones is an abhorrent human being. He is not “responsible,” however, for the deaths of the seven United Nations workers and five others who have been killed, thusfar, in Mazar-E-Sharif. The men who did the killing are the ones who are responsible. Still, Jones' despicable actions were a convenient excuse for their rampage, so in that sense journalists do need to mention the Koran-burning to provide context for the recent violence. This restrained contextualization is exactly what Enayat Najafizada and Rod Nordland provided in the article they filed for the New York Times within hours of the murders.

The world, however, does not need to hear Terry Jones' “take” on the violence; he has already made it abundantly clear that he is not an expert on Islam. Yet, the 59-year-old college dropout's evaluation of the grisly scene unfolding in Afghanistan is exactly what viewers of ABC's Nightline got last Friday.

As University of North Carolina Religious Studies professor Sean McCloud has pointed out, sometimes journalists are too willing to label religious groups as “fringe” simply because those groups espouse values that challenge the existing power structure and threaten hierarchies that have defined social relations for multiple generations.

But sometimes certain religious groups need to be labeled as “fringe,” as Andrew Khouri has argued on this blog, because that is exactly what they are. Alas, when it comes to Terry Jones, many American journalists – particularly in the broadcast arena – have been having too much fun being sanctimonious in their enlightened liberalism to acknowledge that Pastor Jones leads a religious movement with approximately 30 members.

It was unnecessary for ABC to give Jones the platform that they gave him. Even allowing that he has a right to defend himself against the ridiculous allegation that he is the one who “pulled off the bloody stunt” in northern Afghanistan, a six-minute story that gives Jones and his followers an opportunity disparage the faith of a billion and a half people is wildly inappropriate.

Laura King of the Los Angeles Times handled the situation far better when she ended her 700-word story with a simple paragraph consisting of just two sentences: “The Florida pastor at the center of the controversy expressed no public regrets over the violence triggered by last month's mock 'trial' and subsequent torching of a copy of the Muslim holy book,” King told her readers. “The Rev. Terry Jones instead called for retribution against those who carried out the attack.”

By studiously avoiding sensationalism, King mirrors the accomplishment of Megan McKee, who covered the Westboro Baptist story for the Boston Globe: She makes it clear to her readers that demons can cloak themselves in the mantle of any religion.

Maura Jane Farrelly is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University. In the past, she was a reporter Voice of America and Georgia Public Radio. Her first book, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity, will be published by Oxford University Press later this year.

by Andrew Khouri

Last month, the incendiary Florida pastor Terry Jones served as judge in a “trial” in which he convicted the Koran of capital crimes. Jones then ordered that the Muslim holy book should be burned, and another pastor complied.

Many Americans were unaware that a copy of the Koran went up in flames until reports of deadly protests in Afghanistan began turning up on their computer screens last week. As of Monday morning, the death toll was at least 24, the New York Times reported.

There was a very good reason for the lack of warning: The U.S. news media largely downplayed the March 20 burning, a sharp contrast to the media firestorm ignited when Jones previously threatened to burn the Koran in a similar but aborted stunt last year. Both events sparked violent protests in Afghanistan, and the differences in coverage, then and now, bear close examination.

Slimmer coverage this go-around was better because it denied the attention-hungry but religiously marginal Jones the more prominent platform he had last September. Still, some outlets failed to ask important questions relating to Jones' religious beliefs. Case in point: A profile of Jones that the New York Times ran on Sunday should have pressed the pastor on how he reconciles his Christian faith with his hateful messages.

Now to last year, when the news media truly struck out.

More than a month before Jones planned to burn the holy text, CNN ran a story that simply announced the event (scheduled for Sept. 11) and Jones' views on Islam–nothing that placed Jones in context. The intense coverage over the next month and a half turned a non-story into a global controversy that ultimately caused people to lose their lives. That was the news media's “original sin” last year: sensationalizing a marginal story.

The burning of a Koran by the leader of a small, fringe religious group only becomes worthy of coverage when people begin to protest en masse. But those protests and the subsequent deaths occurred last September only after the news media made Jones a more significant figure than he actually is.

Jones' flock at the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville is minuscule, according to a recent Washington Post story. And fewer than 30 people showed up to watch the Koran cast as the “defendant” two weeks ago, according to AFP. This time–at least until Afghan President Hamid Karzai mentioned Jones in a speech last Thursday–the news media rightly framed Jones as an outlier and his actions as unworthy of closer scrutiny.

A Google News search turned up scant coverage prior to the violence that erupted after Karzai's speech. A religion news wire service and CBS were among the few outlets that covered the burning prior to Friday's outbreak of violence, and both stories relied on second-hand sources. The only outlet that appears to have had a reporter at the “trial” was Agence France Presse, a French news service.

Unfortunately, now that protests and deaths are occurring in Afghanistan, Jones cannot be ignored. But journalists must still make clear where Jones stands: on the fringe. The aforementioned Washington Post article points the way, giving voice to former parishioners who describe the church as a cult.

In general, the news media handled the recent burning much better than last year's threatened action. As journalists we frequently make choices about what to cover in depth and what to acknowledge with a simple brief–or what to ignore altogether. The next time a fringe group decides to use our hunger for sensationalism to grab headlines, journalists should, from the outset, resolve to be very sparing with their ink.

Andrew Khouri is a second-year graduate journalism student at USC Annenberg. A Southern California native, he enjoys reporting on politics, business and issues of social justice.

by Janine Rayford

When a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Christian activist Jim Wallis and two other religious leaders held a press conference last week to announce a religious fast to protest the deep cuts that congressional Republicans are proposing in the new foreign aid budget, the news media ate it up. Clips from the conference aired on CNN, and mainstream outlets from the Huffington Post to Yahoo News covered the story.

Though it was refreshing to see a religion angle on the budget negotiations make its way into political coverage, most reporters lost an opportunity to make some important distinctions for their audiences. Specifically, almost all of the reports failed to note that the fast highlights differences between conservative and progressive evangelical Christians, a politically important divide that has not received adequate coverage.

Rather than offer this bit of background, most of the stories opted for misleading sensationalism with headlines like “Religious Leaders Go On Hunger Strike.” Actually, the action the religious leaders are taking is a fast (the group is called Hungerfast). By calling the fast a hunger strike, news organizations soft-pedaled the religious component of the event in favor of the political angle, which allows them to play up conflict but also obscures some of the more interesting aspects of the story.

For example, evangelical Christians are usually associated politically with Republicans and the Tea Party movement, but in this instance they are protesting moves proposed by congressional conservatives. (Wallis' ad on Politico asks, “What would Jesus Cut?”) What's more, this group of Christian evangelicals has partnered with Muslim organizations, a point few if any news organizations analyzed in depth. On the Hungerfast website, groups like the Islamic Relief and the Islamic Society of North America are listed alongside Wallis' Sojourners Church and other Christian organizations. At a time when Christians and Muslims are usually framed as adversaries in the news media, this instance of politically significant collaboration is getting far less coverage than it deserves.

Though several bloggers delved further into the organization and the various religious motivations that converged to support the fast, few mainstream news organizations told the full story–or, in calling the event a hunger strike, even bothered to get the story right. That's a shame; there's a lot here that upends or complicates standard religious and political narratives. In other words, it's news.

Janine Rayford is a freelance journalist and graduate student in Los Angeles, CA. Rayford obtained her bachelor's degree in English from UC Berkeley and is currently pursuing her Master's degree in print journalism at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her writing covers both news and entertainment and has appeared in 944 magazine, LAmag.com, Neontommy.com and in international newspapers such as the Cape Times of Cape Town, South Africa.