Posts tagged Journalism
Correction: April 1, 2013 An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.
Pope Francis Calls for ‘Peace in All the World,’ in First Easter Message - NYTimes.com
Hire me, NYT! I will ensure that you don’t make ridiculously dumb errors about major religions!
To be a writer in this market requires not only money, but a concept of “work” that is most easily gained from privilege. It requires a sense of entitlement, the ability to network and self-promote without seeing yourself as an arrogant, schmoozing blowhard. And it requires you to think of working for free—at an internship, say, or on one of those gratis assignments that seem to be everywhere now—as an opportunity rather than an insult or a scam.
This is no longer an industry that rewards working-class values, in other words, and I underestimated how hard it would be to shuck them. It still seems strange to me that people work, unpaid, without a guaranteed job at the end. And I haven’t reconciled myself with the central irony here: that journalism, ostensibly a populist endeavour, is becoming a rarefied practice best suited, both financially and psychologically, to the well-off.
How does one photograph a story that has not yet occurred? How does one evoke a sense of what might happen, or of what could?
This was the challenge for the Afghan-Swiss photographer Zalmaï: to capture the sense of foreboding that, as Dexter Filkins writes in this week’s issue, permeates Afghanistan as American troops prepare to withdraw. “People forget that almost thirty million people live in Afghanistan,” Zalmaï told me from Kabul. “Yet twenty thousand Taliban can completely destroy these thirty million lives. How Afghanistan will avoid falling into civil war again, I just don’t know.”
Zalmaï’s work is currently on display in Kabul as part of Documenta, an internationally renowned exhibition series that occurs every five years. Click-through for a slideshow of his images: http://nyr.kr/KOkx0j
What is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular.” It is this story that I will challenge here. I will do so in two steps. First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories “religious” and “secular” is an arbitrary and incoherent division. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. Second, I ask, “If the idea that there is something called ‘religion’ that is more violent than so-called ‘secular’ phenomena is so incoherent, why is the idea so pervasive?” The answer, I think, is that we in the West find it comforting and ideologically useful.
The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state. We like to believe that the liberal state arose to make peace between warring religious factions. Today, the Western liberal state is charged with the burden of creating peace in the face of the cruel religious fanaticism of the Muslim world. The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and them, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world. Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality.
Does Religion Cause Violence? | Harvard Divinity School. If I could make America’s journalists and pundits read just one book, it would be William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence. (via ayjay)
Yes, read The Myth of Religious Violence. If you want to read the rest of Cavanaugh’s writing, I liked Migrations of the Holy the best.
It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.
American reporting is problematic throughout the third world, but because the American military/industrial/financial/academic/media complex is so directly implicated in the Middle East, the consequences of such bad reporting are more significant. Journalists end up serving as propagandists justifying the killing of innocent people instead of a voice for those innocent people. Our job should not be about speaking truth to power. Those in power know the truth, they just don’t care, and they serve systems greater than themselves anyway. It’s about speaking truth to the people, to those not in power, in order to empower them, or unfortunately, sometimes to leave them feeling bitter and cynical.
