The Narratives of the Media

When I was in journalism school in the early 1970s (still something of the hippie era in universities), I was one of three members of Greek fraternity / sorority system in the program. The other two were members of sororities, and one of them was in advertising, not the news / editorial sequence.  

As a general rule, journalism students did not like the Greek system. This was an egalitarian time in universities, and, by and large, journalism students saw fraternities and as elitist, playgrounds for the children of the well-to-do. There was some of that, of course; but the Greek system actually offered a reflection of the student demographics as a whole. My own family, for example, was not well-to-do; it was about as middle class as you could get.  

The three of us in journalism school who were “Greeks” experienced some derogatory comments from our fellow student journalists but it was not something to file a lawsuit over. But the antagonism was clearly there but it wasn’t overt. The faculty was generally of a similar mind.  

I’ve read the report by the Columbia Journalism Review of the “failure in journalism” by Rolling Stone Magazine in its story about the alleged gang rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia. The editors of Rolling Stone have apologized and retracted the story. A fraternity’s reputation was destroyed. The university’s reputation was damaged. But at least the magazine apologized. That’s something, I suppose.  

The CJR report on the story is long, painstaking and excruciatingly detailed. There was no single failure; the failures were multiple and compounding. I read the report because I wanted to see if the CJR review team identified what was likely the biggest failure and the impetus for doing the story in the first place.  

A statement of it is there, but it’s not identified in and of itself as a cause or contributing factor. 

The fact is that the reporter started with her conclusion. And then went looking for an example to verify it. She found it. The example wasn’t perfect, and it had problems that should have raised red flags. The fact that the alleged victim fingered a fraternity only made it a better story. And it played all the right notes: male supremacy, female victim, sexual crime, elitist school, elitist fraternity. The story was too good not to be true. 

Did the reporter and the Rolling Stone not remember what happened with the lacrosse team at Duke University? That one turned out to be fiction, too.  

I don’t downplay sexual crime and rape. They’re despicable. They’re serious problems, and they’re serious problems on college campuses, as they are in society at large.  

But the media believing and promoting its own narratives without question is also a problem, and destructive in a different way.  

These media narratives – the stories the media believe without question – are tearing the fabric of society apart.  

It was a media narrative that helped demonize police in Ferguson, and my own town’s daily newspaper led the way with its screaming, hysterical editorials. Even the Justice Department, which has promoted plenty of its own narratives, eventually corroborated Officer Darren Wilson’s account of what happened. 

And it was a media narrative that gave us the spectacle of Indiana. You have to stop and ask yourself if any of the people making solemn, grim pronouncements – Tim Cook of Apple, Hilary Clinton, the NCAA, the reporters and editorial writers covering the issue – bothered to read the law in the first place. (No one bothered to ask Tim Cook about Apple’s business connections with China, one of the worst abusers of human rights on the planet, not to mention Uganda, which has the death penalty for people convicted of homosexuality. No, to ask Tim Cook about those issues would have been inconvenient to the media narrative.) 

The media promote individual liberty to the detriment of everything else. Religious liberty isn’t even a concern. Truth and reality aren’t concerns if they get in the way of the narrative. 

But the media should be concerned. Freedom of religion can be found in the First Amendment of the Constitution. It’s the same amendment that houses freedom of speech. And the right to assembly. And the right to petition the government.  

And freedom of the press.  

The media are going to lose it.  

And we will all lose with it.   

We already are. 

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

I have no wisdom to offer

On Monday night, my wife and I sat in our suburban St. Louis family room and watched St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCullough tell reporters and the world that the grand jury did not return a true bill against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In other words, no charges would be filed.

Since the death of Brown in August, I have heard and read much about the case, and early on I understood one thing.

Tell me how you vote, and I will likely be able to tell you your opinion on the Brown case.

I first saw it two days after Brown’s death. A good friend published a blog post, which was as extreme as any I have seen since that time. Anyone who gently pointed out that we didn’t yet know the facts to draw any conclusion was rudely dismissed – this happened because of endemic and institutional racism, and because white police officers are by definition racist.

My friend is an otherwise gentle soul. I like his writing and his books. I’ve reviewed his books, and favorably; in fact, that’s how we introduced ourselves to each other. I wasn’t surprised at his feelings; I was shocked at the absolutist way he responded to even mild criticism. He seethed with anger.

Many people have been writing about Ferguson. The writing is largely predictable, even among most Christians. I’ve seen lots of feelings, beliefs, arguments, and advice. What I have yet to see – from any sector or individual – is wisdom.

And let me say right here I have no wisdom to offer. This is not the time for wisdom.

Yesterday I watched the press conference by the mayor of Ferguson, followed by the press conference by the governor of Missouri trying to explain why the National Guard wasn’t sent into Ferguson last night until after the business district was looted and burned. (Looters hit corporate targets like Walgreens, McDonalds and Toys R Us; they also hit a cake shop, a beauty supply business, a Chinese restaurant, a public storage facility and the convenience store where Michael Brown was filmed stealing cigars minutes before his death). I did not watch the press conference by Attorney General Eric Holder.

It was the Ferguson mayor’s press conference that has stayed in my mind. With the mayor were ministers from local churches, urging calm and an end to the violence. One, an African-American woman whom I bet can blow out the windows when she’s in the pulpit, gave a mini-sermon. None of them offered words of wisdom.

They offered something more: love and hope.

If our community is to find our way through this to something better, it won’t be politicians, who have generally made the situation worse, who lead us. It won’t be the anarchists who seem to have arrived by the busload from out of town. It won’t be the media, and it certainly won’t be the editorial writers at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

It will be the church.

Not  churches collectively, but “the church,” the Christians who belong to various denominations and attend various churches. I saw them at the mayor’s press conference, and I recognized them. I see them at my own church, which is still a buttoned-down Presbyterian kind of place. I see them at a lot of churches in St. Louis, and I see some who don’t attend church at all.

In The Cure: What if God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, authors John Lynch, Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall say this: “We’re learning to live with a community of people who trust God and others with what is true about them. We discover we’re part of a destiny bigger than our own. While we have an individual destiny, the community we are part of also has a destiny, and we are intertwined with it.”

It will be the church who leads us, the church led by the Spirit.

Politicians will not be able to do this.

Only the Spirit-led church can do it.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Cure. To see more posts on this chapter, “Two Destinies,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact. This concludes our discussion of the book.

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ferguson: A cycle

Ferguson 1: The wedding

The wedding: I hear

voices , not bells

voices rising in song

joined in song

joined in rejoicing

Outside: war, armies

clashing, wearing

armor, not linen,

linen saved

for afterward

The wedding: ends,

we walk outside

into the destruction

of the darkness. We step

over the slain.

Ferguson 2: The wedding

We step over the slain

as we walk the streets

of iron rusting in moonlight

We hear the music

the music of voices, raised

the music of voices, raged

the shattering of bottles, alight

rubber ping of bullets in flight

the music of shattering glass

scant protection against the burning

the music of alarms splitting

the night

shuffling feet, running past

the slain

The bride and groom gone

the wedding party gone

Ferguson 3: The fusion of narratives

One: walking in the middle of the street

Two: racist police

Three: blood in the middle of the street

Four: police protecting

Five: convenience store robbed

Six: the media, just the media

Seven: Molotov cocktail in memory of the slain

Eight: tear gas

Nine: the out-of-towners

Ten: the pastors speak

Eleven: the media, just the media becomes

             its own narrative

             as always

Ferguson 4: He walks the streets

He walks the streets

of concrete and stone

singing in his words,

the words only he can speak,

understood by all

who can’t speak the words.

He carries a staff of gold

taps it on the street

keeps time to the song.

Wherever he taps on the street

becomes gold on the street

golden street

He looks for the temple

the temple in the city,

to stand in its courts

to hear the cacophony

of its halls and rooms

He looks to see the priests

and servants walking

ban and forth talking

back and forth  watching

the temple’s business.

He looks for the sellers

of sacrificial offerings,

baaing, lowing, chirping

in fear and anticipation.

He finds no temple

only silence in the streets

only silence in the lanes

only silence in the grand boulevards

and avenues

only empty courts

of the temple that isn’t there

He walks down the streets

to see boarded windows

empty sidewalks

burned remnants

signs and bottles left

for trash collectors

to gather

he hears no birds

a rat scurries in the gutter.

The white dove comes

hovers above the madness

He smiles as a white dove

settles in a tree by the street

Ferguson 5: Hope shimmers

Hope shimmers on the horizon

or perhaps hope is the horizon

there, visible a song flying

across the plain stretching

toward hope, the plain that

is not the desert but a promise

a promised land

hope is there

in the promised land

always there

Peggy Rosenthal’s “Praying through Poetry”

A new word entered the country’s consciousness this week. A new word entered our prayers at home this week.

Ferguson.

It’s a suburb of St. Louis, with some 21,000 people, and about 10 miles in a straight line from where we live in St. Louis.

Ferguson entered the world’s consciousness this week. A friend form St. Louis traveled on business to Bangalore, India, turned on the television set in his hotel, and on the screen was a news report from the United States.

Ferguson.

A new word for our prayers. It joined other words, like Iraq and IS. Ukraine and Russia. Ebola.

I found myself reading more in the Bible this week, and reading more poetry.

And I read a small book, 83 pages including three pages of notes: Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times by Peggy Rosenthal. It was published in 2003, although parts of it were published in The Christian Century in 2002. Rosenthal wrote it after another word entered our vocabulary and our prayers.

9/11.

She went looking for hope after the fall of the twin towers, and she found it in poetry.

She takes 10 poems, explains why each leads her to hope, and then suggests several ways each inspires her to pray. The poems included were written by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski; Lucille Clifton; Scott Cairns; Jane Hirshfield; Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish; Denise Levertov; Wendell Berry; Daniel Berrigan; Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; and St. Francis of Assisi. What all of the poets have in common is that they write about faith, belief, doubt, God, and humanity.

Here’s “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children” by Yehuda Amichai:

God has pity on children in kindergartens,

He pities school children – less.

But adults he pities not at all.

He abandons them,

Sometimes they have to crawl on all fours

In the roasting sand

To reach the dressing station,

And they are streaming with blood.

But perhaps

He will have pity on those who love truly

And take care of them

And shade them,

Like a tree over the sleeper on the public beach.

Perhaps even we will spend on them

Our last pennies of kindness

Inherited from mother.

So that their own happiness will protect us

Now and on other days.

Rosenthal says that, for her, the transition from what begins as a rather dark poem to one of hope is the phrase “But perhaps.” At that point, she suggests the poem is like a psalm, some of many begin in darkness, too, and end with hope in God.

It’s small book, now more than a decade old. But Praying through Poetry is still current, and likely will remain current for a long, long time.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.