Media and religion: If people cannot safely say what they think, what effect can media have?

Media watchdog Brent Bozell charges "NPR's Religion Double Standard'" (Townhall, October 27, 2010), in connection with the abrupt firing of Juan Williams, for saying honestly that people in Middle Eastern Muslim dress on airplanes made him nervous:

National Public Radio's firing of Juan Williams tells you all you need to know about the radical, and thoroughly intolerant, left. Williams is a liberal, but still, he isn't liberal enough. The idea that he would acknowledge a mere thought of discomfort at the idea of people in "Muslim garb" on airplanes in a post-9/11 world became a firing offense. It didn't matter that he prefaced it with all the perfunctory and politically correct disclaimers about not being a bigot and we shouldn't blame all Muslims for terrorism.

Fired.

Today's left is void of any principles whatsoever. They can be as astonishingly offensive and insulting as they want toward Christians, and no one gets punished. The indefatigable Catholic League provides the documentation.

Bozell goes on to talk about insults to the Catholic Church that are supported by NPR types.

Fair enough, but the reality is that old atheists and new, and all types in between, have stubbed their toes kicking the Catholic Church for two millennia. So?

A greater concern, in my view, is media that do not seem interested any more in what people actually think. Having bought into the idea that citizens are simply random collections of molecules that can be directed by the will of an intellectual elite (among whom they conveniently class themselves), they think they can simply fix or airbrush everything so that their aggregations do not conflict with each other. And if that doesn't work, they fire someone just to prove they are in charge (in charge, that is, of truckling to the right political correctness icon).

No. We must start by asking people to say - with no fear of editing, censure, firing, or punishment: What do you actually think/feel about this? If we want to solve a problem, we start there and move out from there.

Bozell, and many, want NPR defunded. Hmmm. I'd prefer they be asked to voluntarily revisit what happened here. If they prove arrogant, well ...

Religion and the media: Why it doesn't pay to be just plain vindictive

Last night, the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C. offered a panel discussion on the theme of the book, edited by Paul Marshall, pictured here, Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion.

This subject is more complex than some realize because, as I have discussed elsewhere, modern media people have often seen their role as essentially replacing, marginalizing, or at best patronizing religion. In such cases, not understanding becomes a point of pride. That is, they wouldn't even want to be the person who knew what, say, the "apophatic tradition of mystical language"* is.

For example, Terry Mattingly quotes Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a premier center for media studies:

I don't know the difference between evangelical and charismatic, but I can argue about who has sluttier videos, Britney or Christina. (P. 5)

Remarkably, Clark is a Catholic who attends Mass most Sundays. While he tells us that he recognizes that he has a problem, I don't get the feeling from his comments that he understands how big a problem it is or - and this is the critical point - that at this point it is only his problem, not the religious community's.

That is because, as it happens, media that celebrate ignorance often have the opposite effect from what they intend. In the chapter "Jesus Christ Superstar: The Passion of the Press," Jeremy Lott discusses the curious case of Mel Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. Media people were determined to hate the film, and gave a ready ear to any dirt about it:

With a few notable exceptions - Peter Boyer's profile in the New Yorker being one - news coverage of the movie was bad, the opinion writing was clichéd, and the movie criticism was worse.

But, he notes, it was all so bad that the audience decided to give the movie a chance. Which turned out to be just the ticket for producer Gibson:

Evangelicals might have had serious theological difficulties with this film: the focus on the suffering of Jesus was too intense and unrelenting; the identification of bread and wine with body and blood was so very transubstantial; and the movie drew heavily on the traditions of the Church, rather than relying only on the bare text of the gospels, to determine the content and structure of the story. ... By repeatedly reporting concerns over the movie's literalism, the press did yeomen's work to put these concerns to rest.

Yes indeed, media hatchetmen would have loved to set the Protestant cat among the Catholic pigeons, but they knew so little about the true theological and cultural differences between the two groups that they had no idea that their frantic accusations were reassuring the Protestants that the film was literal enough to be suitable viewing for Protestants.

In the same way, the media-driven uproar over the film's supposed anti-Semitism caused Christians to renew efforts to scrub anti-Semitism away. Thus, when Mel Gibson actually did make anti-Semitic statements (while drunk and under arrest) in 2006, the incident sank without a trace.

That, I believe, is because the accusations of anti-Semitism - not supported by the film as released - sounded pretty stale - and now the film now stood apart from its creator.

Lott sums up:

In one sense, the story of the success of The Passion of the Christ is really about the press's failure to honestly grapple with broader questions of religion. In another sense, the story is about the estrangement of American journalists from their audience. The movie did not lead to the rise in anti-Semitic sentiment that the critics had predicted. The fact that the predictions were broadcast as widely and loudly as they were (see the "anti-Semitism" chart above) bespeaks a troubling willingness by journalists to believe the worst of religious would-be moviegoers.

In my view, as noted above, the main thing to see at this point is that the estrangement isn't hurting the religious moviegoers; it is hurting the media.

But then, as Aunt Marge has always told us, people who are just plain vindictive end up wishing they had two noses to cut off to spite their face with - but they don't even have that.

*The apophatic tradition? Defining by negatives, as in "no eye has seen, no ear has heard no mind has conceived ... " A form of speech sometimes used by mystics, because of the difficulty of describing experiences involving altered consciousness.

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Psychology: Picture yourself deciding you actually like the way you look!

In "The skinny on why thin is still in" (National Post, October 2, 2008), Joanne Laucius,
summarizes recent news and opinion around the ultra-thin, photoshopped models in magazines.

In one of his studies, Kees and a fellow marketing researcher found that, although female subjects felt badly about themselves after looking at ads with skinny models, they also evaluated the brands the models were selling more highly. The subjects who saw ads with regular-sized models didn't feel bad about themselves, but they also gave the brands a lower value.

It gets worse.

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty got a lot of attention. A 75-second viral film for Dove that showed the fast-motion "evolution" of a live model into a billboard pastiche through the magic of makeup and retouching got more than 1.7 million views on YouTube in 2006.

But empowering women doesn't necessarily sell soap. Sales of Dove bumped up during the first two years of the campaign, then levelled off.

The sad fact is that many women are used to feeling bad about themselves, and they seek out opportunities. They decide that thin is good, and also hard to attain, and the rest is dieting, self-punishment, and eating disorders.

Laucius's informative article documents the conflicting opinions around the question of whether ultra-thin, photoshopped models encourage eating disorders among women of normal body size. I've written about that elsewhere, and, quite frankly - despite all the disclaimers you hear from the fashion industry and its supporters - the answer is, yes, of course they do.

For example, Dr. Janet Polivy, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on eating behaviour, is quoted as saying, "If they're asked to compare themselves, naturally, they feel inferior". (And in the mood for self-punishment, I suspect.)

Recently, Spain banned ultra-thin models from the catwalk, and many supported the move. After all, low body mass index (= serious underweight) is strongly associated with early death. If the fashion industry is going to howl about the use of fur and such, they could at least spare a thought for human skin that dies to be thin.

Historically, thin has not been hard to attain. It is called starvation, and is widely shunned worldwide. That's why most traditional cultures thought plump women were beautiful. And they were right, too.

I am not advocating censorship; my solution is that readers should insist on models with normal body mass index - women who make normal look good.

I sometimes tell younger women, there is such a thing as healthy self-love. Here's one way of looking at it: The great religious commandment "Love your neighbour as yourself" assumes that you do love yourself. And if you don't, you won't be able to love others either. So just accept yourself the way you are today, and make the world a slightly happier - and less commercially driven - place.

See also:

"Hungry men supposedly prefer plump women for "evolutionary" reasons":

Oh? So everyone in the world is and always has been as obsessed with body shape and image as anorexic, white, middle-class American/European girls? ... The article notes the interesting cultural fact that some African women are force-fed milk to fatten them.

"Grandma was right: Just eat and be thankful" (Contrary to the scare stats, only seriously obese people (body mass index over 35) are at greater risk of premature death.)

Pudging the Truth Exercise matters far more to health than dieting

Our weighty obsession - this one should be required reading for teen girls you know. Eating disorders very often begin with a diet. And things have got so bad now that fashion gurus have started throwing emaciated models off the catwalk.

Why stories get hyped in the pop science media

An interesting blog called Neurofuture provides many examples of pop science media discovering the gene or nervous tic or wahtever that does it all for you, always with the refrain, "Perhaps a return to reasonable arguments based on solid evidence would be a wiser course for the future."

Yes, but in popular media, that's not the way to get one's story to the head of the queue. When the editor is setting up her ever diminishing science section for Valentine's Day, which story does she pick:

"Weak correlation between certain blood groups and divorce, study finds"
or
"Infidelity gene discovered!"

Hey, they're the same story actually, it's just that .... the one bleeds and the other leads. And the starving freelancer heeds .. And the wise reader keeps a dish of salt handy.

Hat tip to Stephanie West at Brains on Purpose.