Newsflash: A Florida pastor didn’t burn Korans last weekend.
Yet during the past month almost 1,000 news stories, opinion columns and letters to the editor appeared in American newspapers about Terry Jones’s plan to heave copies of the Islamic holy book into a bonfire on September 11.
Why all the coverage? Students in the basic news writing class at Penn State should be able to answer that one.
First, you have a guy threatening to do something outrageous. Journalists and other humans are interested in people who do outrageous things. Second, the outrage the guy planned to commit is an expression of religious conflict. Journalists and other humans are also interested in conflict. Third, the outrage the guy planned to commit was part of a surge of anti-Islam anger in response to plans to build an Islamic cultural center a couple of blocks away from Ground Zero. That made the story timely. Novelty (the outrageous), conflict, and timeliness: Those are three of the six or so elements of newsworthiness listed in every journalism textbook. That made the Terry Jones story a no-brainer, journalistically speaking.
No-brainer is right, say the critics, meaning the journalists who flocked to Gainesville when Jones announced his plans were not using their brains.
The critics’ arguments can be summarized in terms of the other elements of newsworthiness: prominence (we’re more interested in the doings of public figures than the doings of private citizens); proximity (we’re more interested in the close-to-home than the faraway); and impact (we’re more interested in events that affect us than in events that do not affect us).
The Terry Jones story doesn’t meet the prominence standard: The guy is a nobody—unless the press turns him into a somebody by paying attention to him. The story doesn’t meet the proximity standard: The idiotic behavior of a guy with such a tiny following is of no interest beyond Gainesville – unless the national press takes a local story and turns it into a national story. The story doesn’t meet the impact standard: Jones’s actions don’t affect anybody outside his tiny congregation—unless the rest of us hear about it from the news media.
In other words, unlike the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the earthquake in Haiti, which would affect many people in significant ways whether the news media reported it or not, Terry Jones’s impact and celebrity are entirely dependent on media coverage —which raises questions about media culpability if Jones’s actions lead to harm.
And harm was easy to foresee: The Koran burning would be deeply offensive and intimidating to Muslims. It could incite Muslim extremists to attack Americans at home or abroad. It could also exacerbate Muslim-Christian tensions.
The journalistic response to all this: Jones may be an outlier, but he is not alone. It’s important to know that there are such religious bigots in America. At the same time, widespread denunciations of Jones’s views made it abundantly clear to the Muslim world that this clown is not representative of the Christian or the American view of Islam. The news media didn’t need to marginalize Jones by ignoring him. Mainstream religious and secular leaders marginalized him by repudiating his ignorant message.
One problem with a debate about whether an occurrence should have been covered is that it drowns out a better question: How should the story have been covered? That gets us into a different conversation about size and placement.
In their book “The Elements of Journalism,” Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach stress the importance of keeping the news in proportion, chiding journalists “who devote far more time and space to a sensational trial or celebrity scandal than they know it deserves.”
A prime example of journalists devoting more time and space to a story than it deserved was USA Today putting a large photo and story about Jones on its front page.
The New York Times tried to have it both ways, publishing a story that raised questions about the excessive coverage —and putting it on page 1.
So how should the Terry Jones story have been covered? A fool of a pastor who intends to burn Korans is newsworthy, but only as part of a roundup of other cases of anti-Islamic agitation that have occurred since the “Ground Zero Mosque” debate heated up. Indeed, cases of suspected arson and vandalism at Islamic centers in Tennessee and California deserved more coverage than something that ultimately didn’t happen in Florida.
More distressing than the overplaying of the Terry Jones story is the way the press, as ever, quoted politicians declaiming the inappropriateness of a mosque “at” Ground Zero, without pointing out the cynicism and opportunism of these pious pronouncements.
Then we see poll numbers showing that large numbers of people, including supposedly tolerant New Yorkers, think the Islamic center ought to go elsewhere. Little wonder, with demagogues whipping up anti-Islamic sentiment.
