In a ghastly repeat of campaign coverage, too many national news media are obsessing over momentarily sensational trivia among Donald Trump appointees.
Meanwhile, antisemites, segregationists, white supremacists, misogynists and anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ activists are joyfully linking under the media-sanitized “alt-right” banner as triumphant GOP niche voters.
Enabled by the internet and social media, their alternative to traditional American conservatism is a potentially lethal virus carried by old and new media for which we have found no treatment or vaccine.
Their rising religious, racist and xenophobic violence, vandalism and verbal assaults are news stories that shouldn’t be allowed to die like recent, sensational coverage of Zika and ebola.
And in the odd way journalists connect dots, this new normal moved me to thinking about Christmases controversies I’d covered as a religion reporter in the past half century.
My reverie was awakened by predictable, perennial complaints about a liberal “war on Christmas.” Clearly, some Americans fear that brown waves and alien gods are overwhelming their God-given white Christian ascendency.
Lead villains in their tirades are ACLU lawyers found under the straw in every public creche.
But I found a useful response in a December essay in the evangelical Protestant monthly, CT (formerly Christianity Today). It’s “The Ghosts of Wars on Christmas Past” by Baylor historian Thomas S. Kidd.
He recalls European traditions — many of them alcoholic and riotous — until 19th-century piety started American Christmas celebration as we know it.
Relax, Kidd counsels anxious Christians. No one’s faith should be shaken by seasonal designs on Starbucks cups, perfunctory wishes for a “happy holiday” or “baby Jesus” appearing on the court house lawn somewhere in Middle America.
Kidd’s on to something. Secular expressions can’t touch the core message of Christmas for believers.
In that spirit, whenever someone I’d interviewed wished me a “Merry Christmas, ” I knew it was their sincere religious expression.
Sometimes, it was followed by an ooooops gesture when they remembered or guessed that I am a Jew. They’d say something like “I hope you’re not offended.” God no, I’d respond with my own equally sincere, “Thanks and Merry Christmas to you.”
I knew the season would provoke First Amendment church-state battles. That amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
A couple local cases reflected the ways this 1791 law could play out at Christmas.
Years ago, church-state separatists sought to block the “live” Eden Park/Krohn Conservatory manger scene. They said the use of public property favored Christianity over other beliefs and violated the ban on the “establishment of religion.” Manger supporters won the battle after “war on Christmas” death threats persuaded critics to drop the issue.
Conversely, the city’s official Christmas tree on Fountain Square helped civil rights lawyers argue for more religion, not less in that public space.
The tree was a fixture when Orthodox Jews from the Chabad movement sought to erect a Hanukkah menorah on the square.
Tradition calls on Jews to exhibit lighted Hanukkah menorahs to tell the world about a Jewish military triumph over Syrian/Greek occupiers and rededication of the Jerusalem Temple in 165 B.C.
Eight candles/lights commemorate the miracle of one day’s olive oil lasting eight days until new oil could be purified for the Temple’s great seven-branch candelabrum.
Dim bulbs at City Hall denied a menorah permit. Chabad won in federal court, citing their First Amendment right to free expression and the city’s far-taller tree.
It didn’t end then or there. That menorah bedeviled local klansmen. They fought city permit denials and won court approval for a wooden cross to “put Christ back in Christmas.”
That infuriated other Christians. Klan opponents pulled down the cross. It went up again with a klan guard.
The Fountain Square menorah brouhaha gave The Cincinnati Enquirer an opportunity to explain that the eight days of Hanukkah are not the “Jewish Christmas.” There can be calendar overlap and nightly small gifts for children when the Hanukkah candles are lighted, but the focus is on the Jewish war for religious freedom.
As Enquirer religion reporter, my challenge was to transcend predictable holiday stories. One year I thought it would be fun to write about differing local Christmas celebrations.
Among the people I called was the late Gaston Cogdell, the Clifton Church of Christ minister who’d become a friend. Gaston said his and like-minded congregations did not celebrate the holiday of Christmas because it’s not Biblical.
Oh? I included it even though it was outside my celebratory theme once editors — as surprised as I was — accepted that fact.
Then there was our enduring newsroom battle over my use of “Jesus” instead of “Christ” except in direct quotes.
My editors — all Christians — understood that “Christ” is the English translation of Greek “christos.” I explained that was from the Hebrew for “annointed/messiah.”
That Jesus the charismatic teacher existed is widely accepted as a fact. Whether he is the messiah promised in Hebrew scripture is a question of faith, not fact.
The difference continues to divide Jews from Christians. I won the battle and lost the war. My copy was unchanged but it was “Christ” when someone else wrote a story, photo caption or headline.
Behind Americans’ unresolved Christmas battles of beliefs lies the wisdom of the First Amendment’s authors. They perceived Americans as a nation of Christians but they understood the horrors of European religious wars and persecution in their own colonies.
Agnostics, atheists, deists and conventional believers, they resisted creating an American “Christian nation” with an official church.
That distinction never has been wholly accepted. Efforts to increase Christian dominion over private lives and public institutions ebb and flow.
Someone wielding First Amendment “establishment” and “free exercise” clauses to screw someone else is a perpetual source of news.
We had an immersion course in First Amendment law and church-state conflict recently in Rowan County, Ky. There the county clerk invoked the free exercise of her version of Christianity to deny Kentucky public marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Federal courts said her actions violated the First Amendment establishment clause and breached the “wall of separation” between government and religion.
Often mistakenly cited as part of the Constitution, “wall of separation” is from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association in 1802. However porous, the wall is an enduring legal barrier to the creation of an official religion: Christianity.
Finally, on a personal note, I thought I was inured to Christmas kitsch from singing Chipmunks to Santa-garbed concrete geese.
I didn’t think I’d miss it when we spent a Christmas in South India’s overwhelmingly Hindu and Moslem cultures and invisible Christian minority.
We were talking down a Bangalore commercial street when we heard Christmas carols being piped from a store. In the shop window, a Santa mannequin bowed mechanically in the traditional Hindu namaste greeting: palms together vertically in front of his chest.
It was like being home again.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.
Curmudgeon notes:
• The Enquirer censored itself — or cravenly bowed to pressure — when it cut Peter Heimlich’s criticism of his father, Henry Heimlich, from the physician’s obit last week.
In Cliff Radel’s original online obit, the Enquirer included this:
“Since 2002, the younger Heimlich has called his father, ‘a spectacular con man and serial liar’ and ‘arguably one of history’s most successful — and destructive — medical humbugs.’ Peter Heimlich has also claimed: ‘The only thing my father ever invented was his own mythology.’ ”
That was missing from the print version.
Obits are not meant to be eulogies. They recount the dead person’s life and work, for better or worse.
Then there was the burst of erroneous local pride. The print headline called Heimlich a “Cincy native.” He was born in Wilmington, Del.
• Donald Trump’s casual relationship with facts reminds me of the difference between a lie and bullshit. Liars know what they’re saying is not true and hope to deceive; bullshitters don’t know and don’t care. The task for reporters is to distinguish between the two when he erupts in wildly untrue assertions.
• Trump’s election and appointees created a boom in small donations to nonprofit journalism organizations. The New York Times says donations will help solidify the investigative journalism that so many news media no longer can or choose to do.
“From local public radio affiliates to established watchdog groups to start-ups that focus on a single issue, nonprofit, nonpartisan media is having a moment,” the Times said.
According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, its individual donations are up about 70 percent compared to the same period last year.
The Times said the donor pool for the Marshall Project, a two-year-old outfit that examines the American criminal justice system, is up 20 percent.
At ProPublica, the investigative news organization that pledges to hold the powerful accountable, “the post-election haul, $750,000, has easily eclipsed the total raised from small-dollar donors in all of 2015, about $500,000.”
Support for journalism has not been limited to nonprofit media, the Times added. “The newspaper conglomerate Tronc Inc. (formerly Tribune Publishing) and The New York Times, among others, have reported thousands of new subscribers since the election.”
At the Guardian’s Pulitzer-winning U.S. website, the London-based liberal daily has an overt pitch in the middle of its home page: “Never has the world needed fearless independent media more. Help us hold the new president to account, sort fact from fiction, amplify underrepresented voices and understand the forces behind this divisive election — and what happens next.”
• Shameless pitch: nonprofit WVXU-FM, Cincinnati’s premier news radio station, is trying to erase a $400,000 hole in its 2016 income with a fund drive now. See above.
• Traditional news media increasingly are being ignored by savvy politicians and lackeys who understand the ever-greater impact of internet sites and social media. If you doubt that, look at Trump and his choice for national security adviser: two men with no shame tweeting and retweeting lies.
As Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-founder of factcheck.org, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., election coverage fostered a dark and perhaps even dangerous evolution in political discourse in the United States.
• Did National Enquirer kill a kiss-and-tell story about a former Playmate Karen McDougal’s claim to a 2006 adulterous affair with Donald Trump?
The Wall Street Journal says the supermarket tabloid backed Trump’s presidential bid and paid for exclusive rights to the story it never published.
American Media Inc., which publishes National Enquirer, told WSJ, “AMI has not paid people to kill damaging stories about Mr. Trump.”
WSJ quoted an AMI statement, saying it wasn’t buying McDougal’s story for $150,000, but rather two years’ worth of her fitness columns and magazine covers as well as exclusive life rights to any relationship she has had with a then-married man.”
Trump campaign people denied that the affair occurred.
• Timothy Shenk in the Nation suggests how pre-election polls — and reporting of their results — went so wildly wrong:
“Predictions and the complex mathematical models that generate them are sterling examples of a new kind of political
journalism and analysis that has flourished as newspapers across the country have shut down.
“Where the old school prizes shoe-leather reporting — interviews with voters, scoops from campaign staffers, leaked documents from party elites — this new generation looks for truth in numbers, supplementing qualitative musings with quantitative rigor.
“Drawing inspiration and data points from the more statistically inclined branches of the social sciences, these writers aim to dive beneath the froth of endless anecdotes to expose the underlying forces that drive our politics.”
Except when they don’t.
• Here’s the kind of debunking story that only news media with adequate resources can produce: “genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.”
The New York Times relied on its own analysis of UN data, saying, “The United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany.
“Also, a recent National Academy of Sciences report found that ‘there was little evidence’ that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops.
“At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States, even as major crops like corn, soybeans and cotton have been converted to modified varieties. And the United States has fallen behind Europe’s biggest producer, France, in reducing the overall use of pesticides, which includes both herbicides and insecticides.”
• Fox News’ Sean Hannity echoes Trump’s attacks on the news media. AP quoted Hannity, saying, “Maybe Donald Trump should rethink how he deals with media: Why should CNN have a seat in the White House press room? Why should NBC have a seat there? Why should The New York Times have a seat there, or Politico? They all think they’re journalists, they’re all full of crap, and they’ve all been exposed.”
He added, “Until members of the media come clean about colluding with the Clinton campaign and admit that they knowingly broke every ethical standard they are supposed to uphold, they should not have the privilege, they should not have the responsibility of covering the president on behalf of you, the American people.”
But AP said a brief cursory review of major media outlets — “including the ones Hannity called out” — will show a slew of negative stories about the Clinton campaign. These include the former secretary of state’s use of a private email server, her paid speeches to Wall Street and the FBI’s decision to reopen her investigation days before the election. Media outlets were actually criticized for focusing on the latter piece of news, which turned out to be not much of a story at all.”
• My editor at the Rome Daily American never believed that Yuri Gagarin beat America into outer space and orbited the earth on April 12, 1961. He was convinced that Soviet images were created in a TV studio.
I wasn’t at the RDA when Alan Shepard became the first American in space but I can only imagine that editor’s sense of triumph even if Shepard didn’t orbit the planet.
As far as my editor was concerned, John Glenn was the first person to orbit the Earth. I was at the Rome Daily American that day, Feb. 20, 1962, when he circled Earth three times. I wish I still had that edition.
• Obits often reflect the source as well as the subject. That came to mind twice in recent days. There was unanimity on the virtue of John Glenn, the breadth of his service and richness of his marriage. Not so Fidel Castro obits. The leftwing Nation still saw him as an anti-imperialist hero. The neoconservative Weekly Standard offered Castro as a lying, blood-splattered Communist revolutionary.
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Dec 21-28, 2016.
