IT’S COME TO THIS: New York Times Hiring a Reporter To Cover US Jews.
The New York Times, whose executive editor a decade ago publicly acknowledged, “We don’t get the role of religion in people’s lives,” and which has been afflicted with a series of errors on basic matters of Jewish literacy everywhere from the crossword puzzle to the food section, is now hoping to hire a reporter who knows something about Judaism.
A recently posted Times job listing seeks “an experienced and versatile journalist to join the National desk as a religion correspondent … with a particular emphasis on Jewish life in America.”
The posting indicates that the Times is adding a reporter focused on American Judaism and also another one “on the Muslim experience in America,” kind of a Times-job-listing version of the higher-education-administrator and Democratic-politician tic of adding “and Islamophobia” every time anti-Semitism is mentioned. As even a Times editorial acknowledged, “University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia.” The rise of Islam in America, like the Christian religious revival that is also under way in America, is a newsworthy story in its own right; that Islam-related job listing does not appear to be posted yet, but it could be a promising beat for a reporter skeptical enough to tackle, say, the Minnesota welfare fraud story.
The Times is doubling the size of a religion reporting team that is already double what it was when then-executive editor Dean Baquet lamented, in an NPR interview, “We have a fabulous religion writer, but she’s all alone. We don’t get religion. We don’t get the role of religion in people’s lives. And I think we can do much, much better.”
And how, but of course, the Gray Lady is far from alone among US newspapers when it comes to not getting religion. As Rod Dreher wrote in his classic 2003 article, “The Godless Party:”
True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “This is not a religious city,” he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It’s not that this editor despises religion; it’s that he’s too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what’s right in front of him. There’s a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, “I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”*
In the main—and I’ve had this confirmed to me by Christian friends who labor elsewhere in the secular media—the men and women who bring America its news don’t necessarily hate religion; in most cases, they just believe it’s unimportant at best, menacing at worst. Because they don’t know any religious people, they think of American religion in categories that have long been outdated. For example, to hear journalists talk, Catholics are berated from the pulpit every Sunday about abortion and birth control; reporters think I’m putting them on when I tell them that I’ve been a practicing Catholic for 10 years and I’ve only heard one sermon about abortion and none about contraception. For another, outside the Jewish community, there are no stronger supporters of Israel than among American Evangelicals, and that’s been true for at least a generation. The news has yet to reach American newsrooms, where I’ve been startled to discover a general assumption among Jews and non-Jews alike that these “fundamentalists” (i.e., any Christian more conservative than a Spong-ite Episcopalian) are naturally anti-Semitic.
In a further comment, that New York Post city editor inadvertently revealed something else important to me about the way media people see religion: As far as he was concerned, Catholics and Jews were the only religious people who counted in New York City (he himself is a non-practicing Jew), because they were the only ones who had any political pull. Because journalists tend not to know religiously observant people, they see religious activity in the only way they know how—in terms of secular politics. Thus, when your average journalist hears “Southern Baptist,” she immediately thinks of an alien sect whose rustic adherents lurk in the shadows thinking of cunning ways to manipulate Republican politicians into taking away a woman’s right to choose. The trouble is, she doesn’t think much further, and it is unlikely that anyone in her professional and social circles will challenge her to do so.
If only the New York Times hadn’t run a journalist eminently qualified to write about US Jews out on a rail in 2020. If only.
* That’s a paraphrase of Kael’s legendary moment from 1972: The Actual Pauline Kael Quote—Not As Bad, and Worse.
