by Judith Weisenfeld

Photographer Charles Moore died on March 11, 2010 at the age of 79.  Although Moore covered a range of events over the course of his career, the powerful images he produced during the Civil Rights era emerge by all estimations, including Moore's own, as his greatest contributions to photojournalism.  

His training prepared him for commercial fashion photography, but his decision to take a different professional path and work for the newspapers in Montgomery, Alabama placed him in the right place at the right time to document the movement from the start. As a white Alabama native, Moore's interest in the movement was not obvious or without personal cost to him, but he attributed his success to the tolerance and compassion his Baptist minister father taught him. 

In an interview for Syracuse University's project on Civil Rights and the Press, Moore spoke of the impact on his career of the decision to work in Montgomery: “So I got a job and it turned my life around. I mean it literally turned my life around. Because I had found something that's more important than fashion or commercial or whatever, or even more important than money. And that is what you can do with a newspaper and what you can do in telling stories.”  

Among the most memorable and affecting of his photographs are those documenting the violence inflicted upon civil rights activists, including the rough handling Martin Luther King, Jr. experienced during an arrest in Montgomery. Moore spoke often of having recognized King's power as a religious and political leader during those early days following him in Montgomery.

Moore's portraits of the religious dimensions of the Civil Rights Movement were not limited to African American church contexts. His photographs for Life of a 1965 Ku Klux Klan gathering in North Carolina make vividly clear the degree to which Christian commitment undergirded some streams of white supremacist ideology.  

Moore's photographs from the Civil Rights era are collected in Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore, and you can hear his gripping accounts of photographing during this period in Daniel Love's 2005 documentary, “I Fight With My Camera.”  He was modest about his contributions to American society, telling those gathered at a 2004 event at Syracuse University on the press and the Civil Rights Movement: “[I]t is about the photographs – it's not about me. It's the photographs that can change people's mind – I can't. If they can change people's minds and make an effect on people where they can look at them and say, 'Gosh, that was wrong,' then the pictures made a difference. I'll be gone one day, but they won't.” 

In considering the intersections of religion and media in a new media age, we should not forget the power of still photographs in shaping interpretations of religion's role in American society. Such images have made and continue to make a profound difference. That's the testimony of the lives of chroniclers like Charles Moore who threw themselves into the fray to make sure we had those pictures.

Judith Weisenfeld is Professor of Religion and Associate Faculty in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author most recently of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (University of California Press, 2007).

Last week when my journalism class visited Israel, we spoke with more Palestinians than some Israeli Jews meet in a lifetime. Observers on all sides of the conflict say that's no accident. Both official Israeli policy and mainstream news coverage collude to isolate, if not negate, “others.”

“A lot of Israelis don't see Palestinians,” said Tamer Massalha, an advocate whose focus is international humanitarian and human rights law. “Or the only time they do see them is if they are soldiers at the checkpoint. And then they see thousands of them. One is shouting, one is crying—and that's not the best way to see people.”

After the second intifada and a series of suicide bombings, Israelis set up checkpoints and built a separation wall to ensure their physical safety. In a nation not much bigger than New Jersey, huge swaths of land have been cut off from each other. Some villages are split in two, and family farms have been severed from their fields and orchards.

West Bank Palestinians who had worked, shopped, and socialized in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other cities inside the Green Line now spend hours trying to cross over into Israel. Many no longer do. Meanwhile Israelis have been forbidden to enter the West Bank unless they are going to Jewish settlements. Compounding the physical separation is an absence of rounded reporting. Arabs are most frequently covered when they resist, rebel and riot. At best, they're enemies; at worst, they're terrorists bent on Israel's destruction.

“Israelis are pathologically afraid of Arabs,” said Lisa Goldman, a Canadian-Israeli journalist. “It's the way the mainstream media portrays them, and then the Department of the Interior prevents Israelis from having anything to do with them.”

While such tactics work to justify an ongoing conflict over apparently insoluble differences, they also deepen and prolong the crisis. But for enterprising journalists, including my students, they also offer an opportunity to seek out alternatives to conventional storytelling.

How do we get beyond “he said, she said” coverage? What frames, besides the conflict, can explain the Israel-Palestine story? What is the journalistic obligation to “balance” in the face of human rights violations? Or, stated more positively, can reporting with a point of view augment coverage that adheres to strict standards of dispassionate objectivity?

By and large, the American and Israeli mainstream news media report on Palestinians who are official leaders or irksome troublemakers. The former, whether Hamas or Fatah, seem to have a set of talking points binding them to fixed ideological positions. Hamas represents religious terrorists while Fatah is the more moderate alternative—notwithstanding the current contretemps over plans to memorialize Dalal Mughrabi, a Palestinian hero whom Israelis consider a militant terrorist.

Similar to members of the Irgun whom Zionists considered freedom fighters and the British labeled terrorists, Mughrabi embodies diametrically opposed positions. As such, she is a good reporting hook for a deteriorating situation, one in which leaders become more intransigent as their positions are challenged.

But even as these rhetorical showdowns and diplomatic dances fill the news, the voices of everyday people are left out. What do Palestinians really want? We hear about militant leaders, crazed terrorists, rock-throwing teens and old women with keys to homes that no longer exist. But are there men and women with different dreams and alternative agendas?

The Palestinians we met—whether Muslim or Christian, living in Israel or the West Bank—spoke of justice, equality and the chance to live in peace. Most cited UN Resolutions 194 and 242, as well as international law, as the basis for their aspirations. All seemed reconciled to the fact of Israel's existence, and many were surprisingly reverent toward American cultural idols.

Noor Atamny, a 19-year-old student at Al-Qasemi Academy in Baka, an Arab town in Israel, hopes to teach English to middle school students. Soft-spoken and conservatively dressed, Atamny appears to be the embodiment of a traditional Muslim upbringing. In nearly pitch-perfect English, she confessed her feelings for  “Friends,” Britney Spears and, of course, Oprah.
 
“When I was 13, I heard Oprah say, 'Do not wait for opportunity to look for you, you look for opportunity,” Atamny recalled. “This was an inspiration for me.”
 
Atamny, like most young women studying at Al-Qasemi, knows that her professors do not look favorably on political activism. The college seeks to educate mainstream teachers for Israeli schools, and winning the confidence of the state's educational administration is key to their ability to place graduates. When asked about the ongoing conflict, Atamny conceded, “It's complicated.”

Tamer Massalha, the human rights lawyer, is older than Atamny and less circumspect in his opinions.

“There's a lot of Islamophobia in Israel,” he said. “Israelis don't want to frame the conflict as based on justice and injustice. They see it as East versus West or Islam versus the free world.”

Massalha admits that a return to Islamic identity is on the rise in many Palestinian communities. But he sees that as a reaction to the failure of secular politics to prevent the erosion of Israeli Arabs' living conditions and civil rights. Despite their status as tax-paying Israeli citizens, Palestinians receive a disproportionately smaller amount of government services than does the Jewish community. (Palestinian Arabs represent approximately 20 percent of Israel's population.)

But he hasn't given up hope. He edits a literary journal that welcomes Jewish and Arab voices. Cultural Guerrilla is an experimental venture that encourages political activists to engage in a different type of struggle.

Similarly, Nula Deeb—despite ongoing obstacles—continues to work with Jewish colleagues. Deeb runs Kayan, a feminist organization in Haifa that seeks grassroots change. Its most recent campaign was for public transportation in two Arab-Israeli towns.

“The lack of transportation in Arab sectors keeps women and children stuck at home,” Deeb said. “We started in a village of 20,000 where ten out of every twelve women had no driver's licenses and no access to public transportation.”

Kayan won that battle, but there's a larger one that Deeb faces daily. Even as the political climate between Jews and Arabs deteriorates, she continues in coalition with Israeli Jewish women. She refuses to succumb to anger or bitterness.

“It's an individual choice to keep myself sane, to not be a racist,” she said. “I find a few people to work with and to share dreams with. That, for me, is a political act.”

Deeb's political act could have journalistic consequences. Even as some reporters focus on the conflict, others can write about ordinary people whose lives are forfeit to political winds beyond their control. What is their response? Deeb, Massalha and Atamny offer some answers, as do Israeli grandmothers who monitor the checkpoints, progressive Jews challenging the political clout of religious Orthodoxy, and former IDF soldiers critical of the occupation.

These kinds of stories complicate journalists' storytelling, but in a complicated situation that's a good thing.

Diane Winston

by Andrea Tabor

In the aftermath of the “euphoria” in Washington today (as John McCain put it), the last stand from Catholic House Democrats won't likely be remembered in Washington for long. But for a group of about 59,000 poor, many previously uninsured, single women, the success of this year's health-care reform initiative may have cost them dearly. The question is—did the huge risk taken by American nuns really influence the Catholic Democrats' decision to pass health care?

Last Wednesday, the nuns released a statement supporting the Senate's health-care reform bill despite concerns that it was soft on language banning the use of federal funds for abortion. The sisters—including the heads of America's largest women's religious orders—delivered their message through Network, a national Catholic social justice lobby. Taking the long view on the “sanctity of life,” a perspective shared by millions of American Catholics, the nuns insisted that the social benefits of expansive health coverage far outweighed concerns about potential legislative loopholes on the abortion issue.

“Despite false claims to the contrary,” the nuns wrote, “the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions. It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments—$250 million—in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.”

Although it was unusual for the nuns to contradict the higher-ranking U.S. bishops, few realized the risk they were taking better than Catholic commentators Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and Mary Ann Sorrentino of Salon.com. Sorrentino reminded us that nuns have not spoken out so strongly since they publicly backed Geraldine Ferraro for Vice President despite her pro-choice view on abortion. Dowd pointed out that the nuns received a “slap on the wrist” for challenging the bishops and that American nuns are already undergoing a “quality of life” inquiry by the Vatican because many believe there's a dangerous liberal tide running through them. For their part, at least one antiabortion House Democrat, Tim Ryan of Ohio, said that his “yes” vote had been directly influenced by the nuns as well as other Catholics working on the ground in Catholic hospitals and clinics.

Still, despite the nuns' best efforts—along with other statements of support from Catholic hospitals and the National Catholic Reporter, one of the country's most respected Catholic publications—many House Democrats refused to budge on the bill. On Sunday, Bart Stupak (D-MI), finally announced an agreement to vote for the measure, carrying with him the 216 votes needed for passage.

It seems that none of the statements was finally responsible for tipping Stupak's scales. The U.S. Bishops never backed down from their opposition to the bill, but Stupak and others ended up breaking from Bishops when they were promised an executive order from President Obama strengthening the measure's antiabortion language.

In an age when the Church's influence is plummeting, with sharp accusations of scandal leading all the way up the chain of authority to the Pope himself, Catholics—including the ranks of women religious—may be taking a more independent view. As Sorrentino wrote, “Catholic health-care scoreboard: Nuns and laity 2, Bishops 0.”

As we turn a new leaf on the health-care issue, it remains to be seen how much deference Catholic politicians will show the bishops in future legislative battles. But as the public's trust in high-ranking Church officials comes crashing down, the nuns may be the ones ready to pick up the pieces. A far cry from their archaic ruler-wielding image, today's Catholic sisters are largely living outside convents—and their commitments, rather than those of the male leadership, may be a better barometer of theological and political trends in the Catholic communities they serve.

Andrea Tabor graduated from USC Annenberg in December 2008 with an M.A. in Broadcast Journalism. She continues to write for Trans/Missions and works full-time as a content manager for Internet Brands, where she oversees the publication of thousands of online articles each month across multiple websites.

JERUSALEM — Reading American news online, the current Israeli “crisis” seems to have started last week, during Vice President Biden's visit here, when the Netanyahu government announced it would build 1,600 settler housing units in East Jerusalem. Since new construction would violate Israeli promises to the U.S.—and chill prospects for resuming peace talks—Israeli-American relations plummeted, said some, to a 20-year low. (Fueling the ill-will, at least for Americans, is the possibility that the Israelis timed the announcement to embarrass their American partners.)

But on the Palestinian street, specifically the main roads through Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah—two additional neighborhoods where residents face eviction—the crisis has a longer time-line.

Faqhri Abu Diab was born a stone's throw from the ancient, and newly excavated, City of David. His home is in Al-Bustan, where 88 houses—home to 1,500 people—are targeted for demolition. In their place, he says, a park that complements the archeological site is to be built.

“I'm not opposed to history,” Diab said recently. “But who is more important: King David and King Solomon who lived here thousands of years ago or me and my children who live here today?”

An accountant, Diab stopped working several years ago to save his neighborhood. The first step was starting a community center—a large, green roadside tent furnished with card tables and plastic chairs. Sitting beneath maps of the West Bank and hortatory posters—”Silwan is our home”—that ring the tarp's “walls,” local residents explain their situation to small groups of tourists and visiting journalists.

Diab said that after the 1967 War, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinians were told that without permits they could not build new homes or add new construction to the ones they owned. But obtaining a permit proved nearly impossible. When Diab wanted to enlarge the small house where he, his father and his father's father were born, he could not get the necessary permission. Like thousands of Palestinians in the neighborhoods ringing Jerusalem's Old City, he did it anyway.

Now faced with the prospect of losing his stake, he is determined to protect what he and his compatriots feel is basic to their very being and identity.

“Your house is not just a roof over your head,” Diab said, “but also your life and your future. All we want is to stay in our houses.”

When Diab tells visitors about the social and psychological cost of demolishing Palestinian homes, particularly the concomitant radicalization of the young, he does not mention the literal price tag. Before a home is demolished, occupants pay a fine for living in an illegal residence. Then they are charged for the cost of bulldozing it. Rather than allow insult to be added to injury, some Palestinians have organized a campaign to demolish their own homes rather than pay Israel for the privilege.

Although Diab's 40-year plight didn't make the most recent round of reporting in our news media, the troubles of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly did. Over the weekend Netanyahu swung, like a hapless piñata, between the American stick (administered by Secretary of State Clinton) and the one wielded by Israeli hardliners determined to continue new construction. But by Monday, the Israeli PM had found his footing. He announced that Israel would keep building in East Jerusalem, as it has, he said, for 40 years. When his allies in the U.S. Congress boisterously backed him up, the Obama administration's tough talk looked to be the next Middle East casualty.

It's not surprising that the American press tells the region's complicated story through the testosterone-fueled macro-politics of Israeli-American diplomacy. Who's up, who's down, who's out and who's in flips with thrilling intensity. The schadenfreude of seeing Netanyahu twist in the wind or Obama slip into the conflict's sinkhole sure beats watching “The Bachelor.” But it also obscures the human aspects of this longstanding tragedy.

Moreover, the focus on political diplomacy overlooks the situation's deep religious dimensions, which make resolution or even rapprochement elusive. Following the failure of pan-Arabism in the 1960s and 1970s, Islam became a unifying social, political and religious force for many Muslims in the region. The Palestinians, for a variety of social and cultural reasons, were not as prone to religious solutions as some other groups were, but they have embraced Islam for both practical reasons (Hamas began by providing social services) and sociopolitical ones. This is not to discount the spiritual pull of Islam but to acknowledge the complexity of religious commitment. Identifying with Islam can be a personal and communal statement of individual belief and group solidarity. (Not surprisingly, a growing number of Palestinian women now wear the hijab.)

For many Israelis, religion and politics are simply inseparable. Even secularists here admit that the first generation's dream of a secular Zionism is near dead. In the intervening decades, the rationale for creating an exclusivist state on land taken from others has increasingly assumed a supernatural tinge. What other reason besides a divine covenant could justify a harsh occupation, illegal (under international law) land grabs and a historical revisionism that wipes Palestinians from the land? Some Israelis will cite security needs, but it is equally possible—according to other Israelis—that they would be safer if an accommodation to coexistence, along a two-state model, could be sought.

Of course, as an American, I am in no position to throw stones. I, too, live in a country whose founders believed in their divine right to land that others lived on. Those founders, also religious refugees—albeit with circumstances very different than those of 1948—sought to establish a new Israel, a light unto the nations. Evaluating that record merits a look both at the diplomatic machinations that accompany nation-building as well as the struggles and sacrifices of men and women who pay its price.

Diane Winston

by J. Terry Todd

A kabuki press conference at the Utah statehouse?  That's how one journalist described the scene last Monday when members of Patriots for a Moral Utah arrived at the capitol in Salt Lake City with a “Fair Solution Initiative” to solve the state's “homosexual problem.” In front of rolling cameras, a handful of reporters and some protesters, the Patriots introduced their petition campaign that would force Utah's gays into reparative therapy or give them the choice of being shipped out to San Francisco, Portland, New York and other “homosexual havens.”

As a rationale for such draconian action, the group's spokeswoman, “professional housewife” Nora Young, delivered a mash-up speech blending elements of natural law theory, states rights politics, Mormon Zionism and old-school proclamations about decency and morality seemingly stolen from the Eagle Forum playbook. Standing next to Young was Paul Jackson, a self-identified Tea Partier and the group's public relations manager, who the day before had emailed a press release announcing the Patriots' petition drive and kick-off news conference.

Trouble was, the whole shebang was a prank, as Troy Williams announced on his Queer Gnosis website. The clue to those with ears to hear? It might have been Young's response to a reporter's question: No, she didn't hate homosexuals, but “I love my country more than my hairdresser.”

While the Salt Lake Tribune ignored the story altogether, other local media outlets, including the ABC affiliate, hastily declared the event a hoax. As if we needed another reminder, the Utah stunt told us something about the viral nature of the Internet and its role in framing (fanning?) controversy. The websites of mainstream LGBT organizations like HRC and NGLTF never mentioned it – nor did Christian Right sites such as the Family Research Council. But word of the Salt Lake new conference zoomed through the blogosphere. Joe.My.God, a popular LGBT blog, jumped on the story, followed soon after by The Daily Kos. Linking to a note about the event in Q Salt Lake blog, someone asked in an on-line forum, “Anyone still deny the gay holocaust is underway??”

City Weekly's Jesse Fruhwirth, suspecting he was being punked, was probably the first to recognize the “news conference” as a spoof, tweeting from the scene: “The forced relocation of homos thing is a joke.” Appalled that the pranksters might have expected him to play along just because he reported for what was once called “the alternative press,” Fruhwirth defended the journalist's bottom line: “Truth first, truth last, truth truth truth. I don't play along with jokes.”

Was the event a hoax? A joke? All these things, and something more?

It's understandably tough for commercial media to interpret satirical romps like the guerrilla theater at the Utah state capitol, especially because for so long media outlets have been the targets of such efforts to disrupt the daily flow of “news.” While the Salk Lake press conference pales in both imagination and impact to the 2004 hoodwinking of the BBC by the Yes Men, it's still notable for its comic intervention into our very serious (and some might argue stale) debates about religion and homosexuality, and also for highlighting questions about how news media interpret satire.

In an article published nearly 20 years ago in the New York Times, the journalist Mark Dery used the term “culture jamming” to describe how rebel artists and activists use deception as a kind of “artistic 'terrorism' directed against the information society in which we live.”

“Cultural jamming, on its most profound level,” Dery wrote, “is about remaking reality.”

Remaking reality was certainly on the minds of the local activists who planned the news conference as a way to call attention to “the intense anti-lgbt climate in Utah.” That motivation continues to unfold on the website of Patriots for a Moral Utah. If you dig deeply enough through the satire, you'll get to the truth Fruhwirth and other journalists were looking for: “We love our community, and hope that our political farce has helped in highlighting what we feel is the ridiculousness and cruelty of some in our legislature and groups like the Eagle Forum, the Patrick Henry Caucus and America Forever.”

Whether trickster-tactics like the news conference succeed in shifting political realities, or whether culture jams simply fuel the fire, are unanswered (unanswerable?) questions. Yet the Utah prank, and many others like it sure to follow in the future, invites interpreters to move beyond the easy calls – It's a fraud! It's a joke! It's a hoax! – and toward an appreciation of satire as a way of deepening our cultural conversations.

J. Terry Todd is Associate Professor of American Religious Studies at Drew University and director of Drew's Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. The author of many articles on religion in 20th-century America, Terry is especially interested in religious conflicts over family life and sexuality, and how Christian ideas and practices shape U.S. politics and mass media.

by Kim Daniels

Atheist Bibles-For-Porn Swap Riles Campus!

Click, click, click. Clicking on a link like the one above is the natural reaction to seeing a headline about pornography being exchanged for religious texts. But after a moment's reflection, you may wonder why a publicity stunt by a college atheist group would be considered newsworthy since only ten spiritual texts were traded for porn at the mid-sized Texas university where the group is based.

When the story broke last Tuesday, online news outlets and blogs picked it up in droves. (And posters on comment boards followed–and fanned–the flames.) It appeared on the front page of the Google news aggregator, and new posts about the event continued throughout the week. There was even a post in the Argentina Star. Who knew that folks in Argentina cared about goings-on at the University of Texas in San Antonio?

So why did the event generate so much online energy? And was it news?

UTSA's Atheist Agenda started its “smut for smut” campaign in 2005, when the group formed. New media outlets loved the story even more then. The group's president was flooded with interview requests, including an invitation to debate MSNBC's Tucker Carlson.

So this news isn't even new. But it caused a stir, again, just the same.

Of course, the reason for the online life of the story is obvious: it's an “eyeball catcher,” a “click magnet” if you will. And that's exactly the reason Atheist Agenda pulled the stunt–cheap and easy outrage, by the group's own admission, enabled it to spark heated debate on the topic of religion.

In that sense, the demonstration worked out beautifully. Not only was controversy stirred on the UTSA campus, but web-news stories and blog posts generated hundreds of comments in almost every instance. The threads of the online narratives ranged from an affirmation of faith in reaction to the story to atheists both praising and condemning the aims of Atheist Agenda's campaign.

On several news sites there were also op-ed pieces either supporting or lamenting the group's trickster-like tweaking of cultural tensions. But in an interesting twist, most mainstream media did not pick up this story.

So is this another example of the lively fragmentation of new media vs. the stodgy coherence old media? Is “clickability” really becoming more important than the traditional standards of newsworthiness?

And what does this say about the religious sensibilities and sensitivities of online news media? If things were the other way around–if a church were giving out Bibles in exchange for porn–would that be news?

The two main points in most of the online stories were that some Christian groups protested the event by gathering and reading their Bibles and that UTSA officials hastened to assure people who were offended that Atheist Agenda was doing nothing illegal.

Which brings me back to the question: Is this news or is it just a clickable story?

In moving forward, as new-media journalism distinguishes itself from the old, this will continue to be a question of extreme importance. Is the quality of content suffering for the quantity of the clicks? More specifically, does the quest for clickability mean that stories about religion will inevitably be pigeonholed in the tired and distracting narrative of  “us vs. them” or “them vs. us”?

I hope not. That would mean that the more we click, the less we actually know.

Kim Daniels is pursuing an M.A. in broadcast journalism at USC Annenberg.

by Andrea Tabor

If you were searching the job boards of JournalismJobs.com last November–as many journalists were–you may have come across this ad:

Company: Freedom Magazine
Position: INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER NEEDED
Location: Clearwater, Florida
Job Status: Freelance
Salary: Negotiable

The ad goes on to say that the Church of Scientology seeks experienced investigative reporters for assignments in the Tampa Bay area, just a stone's throw from the Pulitzer-winning St. Petersburg Times. Owned by the Poynter Institute, the Times is one of America's most respected papers, garnering awards for, among other things, hard-hitting investigative pieces slamming the Church of Scientology. They may win again this year for their most recent Scientology expose, which asserts that Scientology president David Miscavige beat his employees (a claim that also appears in a recent New York Times story) and had a direct hand in the care of Lisa McPherson, who died of dehydration during a stay at the Scientology headquarters in 1995.

In November, esteemed journalist Steve Weinberg of Investigative Reporters and Editors said in a comment on a blog post, “More than any other existing organization that comes to mind, the Scientologists have been so hostile to outside journalists that I cannot see crossing the line to accept employment there.”

A new report out last week confirms that indeed the Scientologists, notorious for using scare tactics to silence negative press (termed “entheta”), have hired three very serious journalists to investigate the St. Petersburg Times. Among them, Pulitzer winner Russell Carrollo, Emmy winner Christopher Szechenyi, and the aforementioned Steve Weinberg. (The other two journalists said in a statement that Weinberg's involvement helped convince them to take the job.) The piece was paid for up front, and Weinberg received $5,000 for the job.

When asked about why he took the assignment, one reason Weinberg gave was, “I could certainly use the money these days.”

Of course, it would be easy to come down hard on these three journalists and the Church of Scientology. But as Weinberg puts it, the Church has simply commissioned them to write “a good piece of journalism criticism, just like I've written a gazillion times….For me it's kind of like editing a Columbia Journalism Review piece.”

As for the Scientologists, the strategy appears to be fight fire with fire. Who better to investigate one of the nation's finest newspapers than three of the nation's finest journalists? The Columbia Journalism Review pointed out that $5,000 is “chump change” for the wealthy Church of Scientology, and if the investigation yields nothing to help their case, they can choose never to let it see the light of day. If they do find something worthwhile, it will likely have much more of an impact than the poorly researched and written “exposes” they've run in their magazine Freedom in the past.

As a trained journalist–and, until recently, an unemployed one–the story really hits home. What would I do? Well, these three men will likely have unprecedented access to one of America's most mysterious religions, an opportunity that most religion reporters would kill for. But when they come out on the other side, writing about what they've learned will be near impossible.

The question is–will they ever work in this town again?

As other journalists turn up their noses at the Scientology gig, maybe these three reporters are using it as a chance to expand beyond the traditional news organization. Journalists' skills are valuable in so many different settings, and people are willing to pay much higher fees for their skills outside of the newsroom. Nonprofits and corporations alike routinely post on journalism-focused job boards to draw in such talent.

Still, is there something uniquely icky about working for the Scientologists? Does it really amount to selling out? Or just doing what it takes to stay afloat?

Andrea Tabor graduated from USC Annenberg in December 2008 with an M.A. in Broadcast Journalism. She continues to write for Trans/Missions and works full-time as a content manager for Internet Brands, where she oversees the publication of thousands of online articles each month across multiple websites.

by Jason Ma

In his critique of the Western media, journalist Joris Luyendijk recalls looking for a street battle between Israeli troops and Palestinians in Ramallah, which appeared too peaceful to be the same city he saw on CNN. He asked where to find the fighting and was told to be at the City Inn Hotel around 2 pm. Sure enough, soldiers and stone throwers appeared on cue at that time the next day.

When it comes to covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, journalists are often tourists, and the combatants are like hula dancers putting on a show for them.

But sometimes the show makes its way here. Students disrupting a talk that Israel's ambassador to the U.S. gave last month seemed designed to suck reporters into another staged event.

On February 8, 11 students were arrested after repeatedly interrupting Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's speech at UC Irvine. The students, some of whom were from UC Riverside, have been dubbed the “Irvine 11,” and the incident became news fodder for partisans eager to churn out press releases. In this case, the combatants weren't just the students who got arrested but also the outside groups opining on the incident.

The Zionist Organization of America's call for prospective UC Irvine students to apply elsewhere and donors to stop sending the school money seemed to get the most coverage.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council's call for an investigation into the arrests and the Council on American-Islamic Relations' demand that charges against the students be dropped drew less attention.

Fortunately, there was some analysis of the spectacle itself.

Perhaps the most insightful story about the Irvine 11 appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The article, by Raja Abdulrahim, described a situation where the “loudest voices are being raised far from campus, all but drowning out the sentiments of students.”

A UC Irvine political science professor was quoted as saying, “I'm Jewish, and I only hear about this stuff at UCI when I'm off campus.” A student who heads a pro-Israel group said, “It seems like sometimes people forget that the conflict is over there and not at UCI.”

More than a week before the Academy Awards, the Feb. 26 Times article seemed to hand out Oscars for best performances:

• The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the National Lawyers Guild asked that charges    against the Irvine 11 be dropped, even though the Orange County district attorney hadn't filed any charges.

• The head of the Muslim Public Affairs Council wrote a piece for the Huffington Post a week after the incident demanding that the students be freed. But campus police held the students only until the speech ended and never took them into custody.

• State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore sent a letter to the university's chancellor urging that the Muslim Student Union be banned from campus. He said his opinion mattered because he had studied Arabic and helped secure U.S. support for Israel's anti-ballistic missile system. (The Muslim Student Union has said it wasn't involved in the Feb. 8 incident.)

The Zionist Organization of America also has a dramatic history at UC Irvine. In 2005, it claimed the university was discriminating against Jewish students by not preventing what it considered anti-Semitic speeches on campus. Federal civil rights investigators concluded that the activities opposed Israeli policies, not the national origin of Jewish students. The ZOA has appealed that finding.

Last year, the ZOA filed a complaint with the university, claiming the Muslim Student Union raised money that supported terrorism. The university has said it's investigating whether the group violated school policy by fund-raising on campus and has passed on the terror-sponsoring allegations to the FBI.

This isn't to say all that the claims and accusations swirling around Irvine are frivolous. But with some events in Israel-Palestine being staged for media-only consumption, related incidents here also need careful scrutiny.

Students getting arrested for a protest makes for good drama, but don't confuse the show with the story.

Jason Ma is an M.A. candidate in the specialized journalism program at USC Annenberg.
   
 

by Zain Shauk

Journalists have seemingly been co-opted into using the Obama administration's all-encompassing rhetoric for “the Muslim world.”

In references to relevant developments in international politics, media outlets appear to have adopted the common phraseology to lump nations whose dominant religion is Islam under a single banner.

But as New York Times op-ed contributor Efraim Karsh, of King's College London, pointed out in his piece Sunday, majority-Muslim countries appear to have far more complex relations than you might think.

From the Crusades—one of the earliest possible chances for a united Muslim front to face off against Christian enemies—to today's emotions of discontent about Iran or Israel, Muslims have had historic divisions, he writes.

In fact, he observes, Muslim nations have often split apart to pursue their own interests, sometimes allying with nations like the United States that other Muslim countries might consider enemies.

In today's media discourse, however, the Obama administration's dealings with nations as diverse as Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and Indonesia are generally all referred to as being a part of its interactions with “the Muslim world,” despite each country's distinctive and nuanced positions on international affairs.

Recent articles ranging from news updates about a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to a feature on an exhibit of author Salman Rusdie's works have adopted the phrase without qualification. And foreign media, even in what some might consider to be the most representative of the so-called Muslim world, have also been guilty of using the blanket tag. For example, an article on Qatar-based Al Jazeera's website about a recent speech from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton uses the term.

But regardless of who is using the label, journalists should be more mindful of how they might be categorizing the world's 1.57 billion Muslims as one united entity with a uniform focus.

When describing President Obama's famed speech to the Muslim world or Clinton's diplomatic meetings with leaders in Muslim countries, for example, journalists should portray such efforts for what they are: an attempt to reach out to a diverse set of countries who happen to share a common religion, but have varied concerns.

Even simply referring to “Muslim countries” or “Muslim leaders” rather than “the Muslim world” would better inform readers that the community comprises independent actors rather than one united bloc. While some brief elaboration on the range of majority-Muslim countries and their concerns would be ideal, any subtle indication of their diversity could potentially avoid perpetuating the erroneous perception that all Muslim countries and perhaps all Muslims share common goals and interests.

Simplified views of world affairs are based on similarly inaccurate descriptions that have often led to negative stereotypes about large and misunderstood world constituencies, including communists, Hindus and Muslims. Journalists do a service to news consumers by portraying these groups in all their complexity.

Zain Shauk is a Los Angeles-based journalist and a graduate of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

I love Nicholas Kristof's columns. He's good on religion, great on gender and thoughtful on politics. He reminds New York Times readers that most of the world's population—lacking food, freedom and financial resources—isn't gaga over next week's Oscars.

But sometimes he takes us to task for things that he might also lay at his employer's doorstep. In a recent column, he rightfully noted that many Americans are unaware that evangelicals are making important contributions to international relief efforts.

Instead of appreciating the selfless work that many committed Christians do to feed the hungry, tend the sick and shelter the homeless worldwide, some liberals want to stop providing American aid through faith-based organizations. (Liberal concern about an evangelical “agenda” is unfounded, Kristof says. Some groups do push the party line—abstinence, for example—but most put material assistance ahead of orthodoxy.)

The real problem is not liberal hostility toward evangelicals but rather widespread ignorance about who is doing what, where and how. It's a reporting problem that arises from cash-strapped news outlets cutting back on foreign reporting as well as the journalistic bias against good news. If relief efforts are controversial, that's a story. If they're doing on-the-ground outreach that helps in small yet significant ways, it's not.

Just to check, I did a quick search on World Vision, the largest U.S-based international relief and development organization. It's also a Christian group that, according to Kristof, “[B]ans the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.”

During the last few months, the New York Times has used World Vision workers as experts on articles about international relief; it has mentioned World Vision in stories about faith-based initiatives; and Kristof has cited the groups in several columns. Googling World Vision, I found lots of references to the earthquake in Chile and other recent catastrophes. But I can't recall the last time I saw an in-depth news feature that looked at the organization's work outside emergency situations. That's a shame not just because it would be good to read about unsung heroes, but also because it's important to know how American aid supports relief and development efforts.

There is liberal bias against faith-based relief efforts, and some of that wariness has historical basis. However, the problem is not just ideological. In today's global and interconnected world, we need more, not less, international news. Likewise, at a time when religious organizations are major political, cultural and social players, we can't ignore them—even, and especially, when they're doing a good job.
 
Diane Winston