News with Nuance: April 21, 2023

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Hey Readers,

Another big news week, even from my distant vantage point here in rainy Minnesota. I’ve honestly been irritated by the cold temperatures all week, but I know that ultimately this rain means our trees and fields will be green again after a long winter, so I’m waiting for the proverbial clearing after the storm.

Maybe it doesn’t help that I’m also finding myself waiting for a clearing of sorts in America after our week of a lot of dismal news. For much of the week, I’ve found myself overcome with grief and lament at the numerous reports of shootings across the country, aimed often at children and young adults who simply knocked at the wrong door, drove up to the wrong house, chased their basketball down the street to a neighbor’s driveway, or opened the wrong car door in a grocery store parking lot by mistake.

I feel like those stories, especially the racially-motivated shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in Kansas City, and the shooting death of 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, who was just out with her friends in rural New York, affected me more on a gut level than a brain level. These shootings speak to the raw level of anger, suspicion, and lack of trust in America right now - and the solution, in absence of a functional regulatory national legislature who would administer commonsense gun restrictions instead of perpetrating lies that compel people to fear and violence - is for gun manufacturers to flood our neighborhoods and homes with more and more deadly guns.

Because I found my response to those stories to be at such a gut level, I wrote about Ralph and Kaylin in my Tuesday newsletter this week:

Knocking on Heaven's Door

It seemed like those stories reflected something deeper than “news.” But I wanted you to know that while I’m not focusing on gun violence in my News with Nuance this week, these tragedies and the ongoing cost of our American addiction to guns has been absolutely top of mind for me these past few days.

Not to say that there’s not other important, contributing stories to pay attention to this week as well. For our top two stories this week, I’m going to focus, as I often do in this newsletter, on a journalistic angle, looking both at the Fox News/Dominion settlement, as well as at the investigative reporting in rural Oklahoma that led to sheriff’s resignation. I also want to touch on both the fraught experience of reporters who risk their lives to speak truth to power and perform a watchdog role against the government, whether here in the U.S. or in Russia, and I also want to look at the ways in which media organizations themselves have sometimes contributed to the sorry state of fact-based reporting in America today, particularly when it comes to dialogue and misinformation around abortion.

We’ll also look at how Christian Nationalism plays a role in gun violence, affecting the ways white Americans see Black Americans, and we’ll look at the life and witness of 100-year-old Jean Koch, whose commitment to her Christian faith led her down an alternative path of activism and fighting for racial justice.

Let’s get to the news - with nuance …

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace with co-anchors Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier in 2020

Photo from Fox News and the Los Angeles Times

The Headline: Column: It’s not just Dominion. Here are the other victims of Fox News’s lies

This Los Angeles Times column was written prior to this week’s settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems, where Fox paid out $787.5 million but notably was not required to apologize for perpetuating and repeating falsehoods about the 2020 election and Donald Trump’s electoral defeat in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, in particular.

The reason I’m sharing this column on the topic nonetheless is that it brings up several points that are critical to remember in light of this week’s settlement news. The first is the limitation of the courts to bring about justice in the political and ethical arenas. The law is vitally important to a functional democracy, but democracy must also be upheld by social conventions and behavior that goes beyond what is merely legal. Critically for journalists and media companies, dishonesty is not illegal. As we learned in the 2016 election and later during the COVID pandemic and after Jan. 6, 2021, unless the truth is defended and lies are called out, lies will win the day.

The other critical point raised in this article is the inability of money and lawsuits to change hearts and minds. Those who fervently believe the 2020 election was “stolen,” will go on believing that fact, and Fox News will continue to make money by perpetuating lies that benefit conservative politicians. The amount of money made by Fox News for catering to its audience’s preconceived notions dwarfs even this large settlement that Fox will have to pay to Dominion.

Finally, another point of note here is just the corrupting nature of extreme wealth. I don’t know if you’ve been watching HBO’s Succession this season, but my husband and I couldn’t help but notice the cavalier nature in which the Roy kids throw around huge sums of money (meanwhile, we’re budgeting every month to make sure we can afford our mortgage, and in being able to do so, we’re likely better off than a majority of American families with young children). The financial wealth of America’s richest families and corporations has made them nearly untouchable. Like the mob bosses of Hollywood fame, it’s nothing for these families and corporations to pay their way out of accountability. My hunch is that it’s going to take a long time to unwind the cost of enabling such exorbitant wealth within a democracy, and the fix is going to have to come in multiple places, both from economic reforms as well an overhaul of the way money has infiltrated the American justice system.

The Quote:

It’s ironic that one term Fox News hosts like to use against liberals is “anti-American.” What could be more anti-American than a company that cons millions of people into denigrating their democratic institutions?

Whose interest does this propaganda serve? Certainly not Fox’s viewers or the fellow Americans they’re led to despise. As someone who has been a frequent object of derision on Fox News, including by Carlson, I can report that none of their scapegoating seems to improve the lives or well-being of its consumers, who fill my inbox with enraged, tortured, racist emails each time the network mentions me.

Fox executives might expect me to vilify those people and participate in their vicious cycle of dehumanization. But the real enemies are the billionaires infecting these people with delusions. The trial will determine the damages to Dominion, but the truth is, few people have been more damaged by Fox’s content than its fans. Who will make Fox pay for that broader harm?

Column by Jean Guerrero, Los Angeles Times

The Headline: Oklahoma officials caught on tape talking of killing reporters and making racist remarks

From Fox News and its millionaire pundits like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo (we’ll refrain from calling them journalists, given the recent Dominion case) - we go to a story where the so-called “little guys” break a big story and get an all-too-rare win.

At a time in America where news outlets are stretched financially and constantly teetering on the edge of shutdown, it’s inspiring to read about a small-town newspaper journalist who - despite facing threats of violence and lies told about him by public officials - managed to report truth to power and lead to the resignation of a corrupt sheriff in Oklahoma.

You can’t tell this story without thinking about the long odds facing any of this even happening in 2023 America. McCurtain, Okla., population 360, against all odds had a functioning local newspaper called the McCurtain Gazette-News.

If you google it, it’s not even easy to find a website for the McCurtain Gazette-News, but nonetheless the Gazette-News was still publishing under the behest of longtime publisher Bruce Willingham, who I’m guessing was also its top reporter, editor, photographer, and page designer. That’s the way these things work. It’s not easy out there in the land of American journalism far from national media. The pay is low, the hours bad, and the public reception often nasty. But Willingham kept publishing. And when he suspected that the county commissioners were continuing to meet after the public portion of meetings closed, in violation of Oklahoma law, Willingham left behind a voice-activated recorder, in an inspiring move that reminds me that - all signs to the contrary considered - investigative journalism that holds power to account has not been utterly destroyed by access journalism that courts power and clickbait-y headlines.

Willingham was no neophyte. He consulted with attorneys about the legality of his recording, and then he planted the device, only to hear county officials making oblique death threats to Willingham himself and his son, Chris, who followed his dad into the small-town journalism business. Also during the recording, the county officials made abhorrent racist remarks, lamenting that they could not hang Black people and saying: “they have more rights than we do.”

The Willinghams had been targeted by local officials after their dogged reporting on the police killing of a man in March 2022, and a series of articles about the sheriff’s office.

I put this article underneath the story about Fox News and Dominion because I think it tells a tale of two diverging American media landscapes. On one side, we have powerful pundits and media empires who are ruled by profit motives exclusively. We have so-called journalists, like Carlson, who say one thing on air and another in private, who raise no qualms about perpetuating false stories and not only false stories - but stories that demonize particular groups of Americans, like stories about crime that paint Black Americans and urban dwellers as dangerous, or stories about LGBTQ people that paint them as “groomers” or pedophiles. The end result of these stories results in the very recording that Willingham made: of local officials who have racist and prejudiced ideas about the very people they have been elected to serve, and a tendency toward violence against them. Rather than American media holding the powerful accountable, too often American media builds a fortress around the rich and powerful, only to scapegoat those who are most vulnerable and least able to defend themselves in the public eye.

Ironically, it is perhaps news media organizations and their highly paid pundits who are the ones causing the most damage and threats to small-time, local journalists like the Willinghams. They’re the ones perpetuating violent rhetoric, particularly (and ironically, again) against the press and against anyone who threatens authorities.

I’m so grateful for the brave reporting of the Willinghams in this case. And I fear that stories like theirs are going to continue to be few and far between until Americans decide collectively and decisively to support and defend independent journalism that holds power to account - on both sides of the aisle and anywhere in between.

By the way, if you’re reading this newsletter - you’re already supporting independent journalism via Substack - and your support gives me hope for our country. Thank you!

The Quote:

Glenn Cook, the executive editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, whose reporter Jeff German was stabbed to death in September, said he was “chilled to the bone” after learning about the Oklahoma case.

“What’s almost as troubling as the contents of the recording is the complete absence of shame,” Cook said of the sheriff’s office’s response to the incident. “Sadly, the willingness of government to protect itself at all costs really never surprises me, but in this particular case the kind of digging in that we’re seeing reflects incredibly poorly on the people of Oklahoma.”

A spokesperson for the FBI’s office in Oklahoma City declined to comment on the case. Phil Bacharach, a spokesperson for Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Gentner Drummond, said the agency had received an audio recording and is investigating the incident, but declined to comment further.

Willingham, the publisher, said he believes the local officials were upset about “stories we’ve run that cast the sheriff’s office in an unfavorable light,” including the death of Bobby Barrick, a Broken Bow, Okla., man who died at a hospital in March 2022 after McCurtain County deputies shot him with a stun gun. The newspaper has filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office seeking body camera recordings and other data connected to Barrick’s death.

Story by Ken Miller and Sean Murphy, Associated Press

I wanted to share a few more stories that lift up the bravery of those who are practicing independent, watchdog journalism today - and also stories that show the perniciousness of media outlets that perpetuate lies.

Washington Post columnist Jason Rezaian, who was unjustly imprisoned for 544 days in Iran due to his reporting on that corrupt regime, wrote about the bravery of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been arrested and unjustly imprisoned in Russia due to his role as a journalist reporting critically on Putin and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

In case you missed it, women’s rights to sovereignty over our own bodies continue to be under assault in America in ways that have zero basis in fact or reality. Because of increasingly strict abortion restrictions, doctors are forcing women to carry pregnancies to term that have little chance of a viable birth and carry high risk of death for the mother. Now, conservative anti-abortion activist judges are coming for a medication that not only helps women at risk during pregnancy, but also aids in healing due to miscarriage or other complications. So much of the argument against abortion in this country relies on bold-faced lies and ignorance of reality. And if you’ve ever been a person who has gotten pregnant or - heck - even had a period - you understand the complexity of birth and bodies, and why this is no place where legislators should hold sway. In the absence of fact-based media, though, and perpetuation of labels like “pro-life” and “unborn babies” being applied in this debate, people have been allowed to be blissfully ignorant about the real costs to pregnant people of these so-called high-minded and holier-than-thou religious beliefs about “life.” Just don’t ask these same folks to take the same high view of life when it comes to gun violence victims or death row inmates or people living in poverty or victims of domestic violence or those who died due to COVID.

And finally, here’s sportswriter Kent Babb with an important Twitter thread about an all-too-common issue, where so-called “content creators” or media outlets with larger platforms (paging NYT) swoop in and steal stories and narratives from journalists with smaller platforms or, often, academic researchers who they interview and then fail to cite. I’ve had this happen to me in the past, too, and there’s really not much you can do. It’s another example of a practice in journalism that’s technically legal, but really unethical and just sloppy and lazy. Don’t people want to report their own stories? And why is it so hard to give credit where credit is due?

This Week in Christian Nationalism and Religious Extremism

While this newsletter won’t focus overall on Christian Nationalism, each Friday I will include a brief update from that week, as it’s both a continuing focus of my work and also, I think, a critical threat to both American democracy and the faithful witness of Jesus’ Gospel, which exists independently of the United States!

In one sentence: Christian Nationalism is a version of the idolatrous Theology of Glory, which replaces the genuine worship of God with worship of a particular vision of America, often rooted in a revisionist history of white people in the 1950s, before the Civil Rights movement or the women’s movement. Christian Nationalism supports a violent takeover of government and the imposition of fundamentalist Christian beliefs on all people. Christian nationalism relies on a theological argument that equates American military sacrifice with Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross. It suggests that Christians are entitled to wealth and power, in contrast to Jesus’ theology of the cross, which reminds Christians that they too have to carry their cross, just as our crucified savior did.

This Week: I know I mentioned that I wrote extensively earlier this week about 16-year-old shooting victim Ralph Yarl, but I wanted to include this article in our section on Christian Nationalism, because I see the ways in which Christian nationalist tropes and ideology lead to racist fear-mongering that too often threatens the lives of American Black boys like Ralph. White Christian Nationalism teaches the tenets of a faith that uplifts the powerful. Its imagery is nearly always that of a white, European Jesus - and its rhetoric suggests that only when America goes back to some kind of holier, purer, glorified past will it truly be a “Christian” nation, ignoring that America’s past included atrocities like slavery, lynching, and segregation of Black Americans. I believe that if the 84-year-old man who shot Ralph Yarl had subscribed to a Christian faith that preached Jesus’ gospel of tolerance, justice, and human dignity - he would not have experienced such visceral fear when he merely saw a Black teenage boy standing at his front door, just 5-feet-8 inches tall and not the 6-feet-tall the shooter claimed. Ralph may heal from his wounds, but he will never again be able to see the world in the way he once did. The fact that the shooter is now pleading not-guilty just reiterates my belief that he’s caught up in a Christian Nationalist worldview that suggests violence is justified to maintain human power. Despicable.

And now for some hope. I loved reading about 100-year-old Jean Koch, an activist for racial justice and frequent L.A. Times letter writer who died this past week. Mentioned multiple times in the article was Jean’s connection to her mainline Protestant (UCC) church, and how her Christian faith led her into fighting for racial justice, beginning in the Civil Rights movement. Jean saw her faith calling her to live into action by attending marches and protests against authoritarian leaders and corrupt dictators, both at home and abroad, for which she was at least once arrested. Her minister, a woman, was quoted in the article. And I just found it so refreshing to read about a white American Christian whose faith led her not to the damaging and hateful tenets of Christian Nationalism but instead into the freedom and justice that Jesus’ liberating gospel requires. And hey, this is a woman who also voted for Barry Goldwater at one time - before she was converted, in a sense, by the preaching of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jean Koch’s story reminds me that, yes, all of us fall into prescribed social categories that often determine our religious and social viewpoints, especially those of us who are white, middle-class Americans. And also, yes, we have a choice to step out of those categories and seek to follow where Jesus is leading instead.

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