Attack of the Evangelicalists!

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On September 28, we noticed a Time magazine story with some glaring errors. The caption alone managed to misspell and misuse the word “diaconate.” As of this writing — October 11 — the spelling and other errors haven’t been fixed. Reader joye commented on a thread a few days ago:

I can’t believe that not even the spelling errors have been corrected in the previous Time story by Dawn Reiss. The caption on the photo still described Ms. Jacko as becoming “a deaconate”.

I’m not a journalist and my views on the profession are rapidly approaching Kierkegaard’s famous insult, but please, journalists, hear my cry and answer if you can.

Don’t you guys CARE any more?

Reading a news article is increasingly akin to watching a movie where the zipper on the monster’s back is fully visible, or a boom mike floats over the actors’ heads. In B movies, this is because, as Mystery Science Theater 3000 famous put it, “They just didn’t care!” But for such sloppiness to go uncorrected for two weeks in the most prominent newsmagazine in the US? Is that what your industry has sunk to?

I thought of that when another GetReligion reader sent along the caption to this NPR story about the rise of evangelicalism in Cuba. Except, well, this is the headline:

Cubans Flock To Evangelism To Fill Spiritual Vacuum

Clearly this doesn’t sound right — but maybe the story is about Cubans evangelizing. Except once you get to the caption, you realize that the problem runs deeper:

Some 3,000 evangelical Christian Cubans attend an open-air service in Havana to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their public service in 1999. Evangelism is among the fastest-growing religions in communist — and formerly atheist — Cuba.

Right. Now, the story itself has a few holes, but it’s clear that this is a copy editor or copy-editing problem. And certainly the industry struggles to hire editors who are both technologically savvy and literate. But, as the reader who submitted this notes, this is embarrassing. Evangelism is not a religion. Evangelicalism is a movement within Christianity and evangelism is the preaching of the Gospel of Christ.

It’s been a few years since we shared this Christian Smith passage that was published in Books & Culture:

Often in our discussions, journalists refer to ordinary evangelical believers as “evangelists” — as if the roughly 70 million conservative Protestants in America were all traveling preachers like Billy Graham and Luis Palau — or, more to the point, televangelists like Jim Bakker and Jimmy [Swaggart]. Hey, aren’t all evangelicals really pretty much like these last two, or rather as many reporters tend to see them — scandal-prone limelight seekers with ambitions to impose a repressive Christian moral order on all America? Other journalists simply cannot pronounce “evangelicals” at all. They get confused and flustered, and after a few uncomfortable tries at “evangelics” and “evangelicalists” they give up and resort to referring to evangelicals simply as “them.” These are the knowledge-class professionals who are supposedly informing millions of readers about religion in America.

Would editors settle for this kind of work on other newsroom beats? Smith continues:

I find it hard to believe that political journalists call Washington think tanks and ask to talk with experts on background about the political strategies of the “Democrizer” or “Republication” parties, or about the most recent “Supremicist Court” ruling. Surely reporters covering business and markets do not call economists asking 45 minutes of elementary questions about how the business cycle works or what effect it has when the Fed drops interest rates. So why do so few journalists covering religion know religion?

Things really have improved in the last few years, at least when it comes to those who are regularly on the religion beat. But the problem persists among some, particularly those who aren’t used to covering religion, those copyeditors who write captions and headlines.

Not to mention that “communist - and formerly atheist - Cuba” has a pretty strong Catholic presence still.

I’m beginning to wonder if the online versions of stories are considered not “proper” reporting but more along the lines of opinion pieces, and so anything goes - no need to be so nitpicky about mistakes or usage.

After all, Ms. Reiss isn’t the only one who made some elementary mistakes; her phrase about “serving” Communion was repeated by Tim Padgett in his Roman Catholic women priests stories. If they can’t get such details correct - and no, I don’t think I’m being unduly nitpicky about the Eucharist - then it seems to show a lack of care about the content of the story; the mood seems to be more important (these women are so really priests no matter what the mean ol’ Vatican says because they do all the stuff a real priest does).

I thought Evangelicalist was the term of choice in much of the anglophone world outside the US. I’ve used it many times myself to differentiate American Evangelicals from other denominations who can also claim the title of Evangelical - such as Lutherans.

The Time piece could have benefitted from some historical context in addition to savvy copyediting.

During the Castro revolution, evangelical churches gained a leg up because they were people-oriented as opposed to the Catholic Church hierarchy that supported and aligned itself with the corrupt Batista establishment.

Castro’s Cuba was officially atheist but during the revolution evangelicals fought with the anti-Catholic 26th of July Movement and even served openly as evangelicals in the Castro government during its early years in power.

I’m sure some evangelicals were motivated by their concern for the the poor, the community from which Cuban evangelical churches sprang. But I’d guess the revolution’s anti-Catholic flavor was also pay back for some.

Despite subsequently rejecting Castro’s heavy-handed authoritarianism, evangelical churches, or at least those that limited themselves to personal piety issues and avoided politics, fared much better than did the Catholic Church, which because of its international reach remained a potential political threat.

My larger point is simply that evangelical Protestantism has a longer history in Cuba than Time lets on. But of course every journalist knows that it ain’t a story until it appears under your byline.

Folks, I have never heard of the word “Evangelicalist.”

That is not a word, period.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Evangelicalist&hl=en

As a copy editor with almost two decades of daily newsroom experience in “fly-over country,” I can say without any hesitation that very little copy editing like what was the norm 20 or even 10 years ago is happening in newsrooms today. Copy desks have taken the most massive downsizing hits of any department, with the possible exception of photographers (who largely have been replaced by contractors). Folks, I don’t think it’s clear outside the actual for-profit news media industry how seriously gutted all the editing functions are now at any level other than “national” media. What’s flowing into the content management systems from the reporters’ keyboards is basically what’s heading out on the web and in print, maybe after a spell-checker scans it. “Copy editor” is just old speak for overworked paginator. It truly is *that* bad in the trenches.

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