A disciple of Hillel, the 1st-century rabbi who founded a dynasty of scholar-sages, exhorted students struggling with a perplexing passage from the Torah not to give up but to “turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.”

Good journalistic narratives are like that—the wider world is revealed in a small story that conveys how lives, cultural trends and social movements converge in a specific time and place.

Take, for example, Carlotta Gall’s recent New York Times profile of a young Tunisian man who swapped the stability of a simple but promising life for the jihadist’s ardor and sense of transcendent purpose.

We learn that 17-year-old Aymen Saadi was good at math, and that his parents—a primary school teacher and agricultural engineer—hoped he would follow his older brother to university.

But Tunisia, cradle of the Arab Spring, remains a restive place. A relatively moderate Islamist government has responded with an iron fist to challenges from orthodox religionists who are waging violent campaigns to impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law both at home and in other destabilized Muslim-majority countries.

Amid this flux of influences Aymen began to find a sense of identity and purpose at a Salafist mosque that reportedly serves as an unofficial recruiting center for militants with ties to like-minded groups in Syria, Libya, Mali and elsewhere.

The article doesn’t pinpoint the Salafi movement in the spectrum of Islamic belief, an omission akin to identifying Opus Dei simply as a Christian sect rather than placing it within the recent historical context of the Roman Catholic Church. And the name of the primary vector for Salafism in Tunisia—Ansar al-Sharia (Partisans of Islamic Law)—begs for some clarification. Under the governing Islamist party, moderate interpretations of Islamic law already shape many aspects of daily life in the country, but as in much reporting on Sharia in Western news media, this important bit of nuance is missing from Gall’s piece.

Still, Gall has performed a valuable service by highlighting the nested relationships among Aymen’s story, social instability in Tunisia, other current conflicts in the Middle East and the broader chronicle of proxy wars in the region. This fine-grained attention to context and history is often absent in stories in which religion shapes the narrative—though having the curiosity and patience to turn such stories even just a little can make the difference between mere filler and a potential Pulitzer.

A century ago, muckraking journalism was in its heyday, Progressive Era religious activists were organizing movements for social justice and a series of legislative initiatives—from Teddy Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913—imposed tight constraints on the power of plutocrats.

These days you would need only to attach an iPhone to one of the tentacles of Udo Keppler’s monopolistic octopus to perfectly represent the retrograde ethos of our new Gilded Age.

Thin coverage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a colossal trade agreement that’s part of the Obama Administration’s pivot toward East Asia—is a case in point. Despite concerns about the intentions of the corporate interests that are shaping the pact, most legacy media, including the New York Times, frame the story in a favorable light. Criticism of the developing trade deal has come mainly from secular, left-leaning online outlets like Truthdig, Huffington Post and Boing Boing—a situation that more closely resembles the partisan-press era of the late 19^th century than the investigative spirit that animated mainstream news organizations in the decades before and after the First World War.

And while Pope Francis has received both praise and criticism for his attention to global economic inequality, the social justice faction in contemporary Roman Catholicism lacks the vigor it had during the time of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Tellingly, the TPP has received no analysis in Commonweal, America or Justice Magazine and only a passing mention in National Catholic Reporter.

Even Sojourners, which supposedly carries the torch of progressive Protestantism, has devoted only scant coverage to a corporatist project that surely would have had the magazine’s Social Gospel forebears pounding on their pulpits.

Among the most prominent left-leaning religious news media in the U.S., only Tikkun seems to be consistently pressing the case against the TPP.

An Episcopal priest, writing to the Seattle Times to praise the newspaper’s critique of the TPP, noted that his denomination had recently passed a resolution advocating social justice principles in international trade. Therein lie so many stories to tell: The flame of a fading prophetic movement flickering in a rapidly shrinking mainline church. A trans-national corporate initiative, conducted mainly in secret, with a onetime community organizer-turned President as it primary champion. And journalistic institutions like the New York Times, once essential in drawing our attention to such trends and ironies, leaving the chronicling of history and the raking of muck to others.