“Do not reward evildoers with notoriety”

At the Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom on July 16, 17 and 18 in Washington, D.C., survivors of religious persecution from around the world offered recommendations for how governments, religious leaders, and civil society could prevent violence against communities of faith and and those without faith.

However, Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had a message for a different section of the community: the media.

“I hold the media responsible for the psyche of all of us,” he said on the first day of the ministerial at the US State Department.

That psyche, he argued, is weighed down by the media’s focus on “murder and mayhem.” 

As a survivor of the October 2018 shooting that claimed the lives of 11 members of the congregations gathered for Shabbat services at Tree of Life, Rabbi Myers held the media accountable for its focus on the perpetrators of violence rather than on their victims and those who come to their aid.

A discussion on the second day of the ministerial, July 17, also highlighted the media’s responsibilities with regard to reporting on religious persecution.

The breakout session, titled “Journalism and International Religious Freedom,” gathered ministerial participants into a conference room in the State Department for a candid discussion on how media professionals should approach issues of religious freedom in their reporting.

The panel featured remarks from Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher of China’s minority policies; Mindy Belz, senior editor of WORLD Magazine; and Shaun Tandon, the State Department correspondent for Agence France-Presse (AFP). The opening remarks from each of the speakers, including the moderator, Johnnie Moore, one of nine commissioners at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), were on the record, while the rest of the discussion was not.

 

A Vital Collaboration

“What role does the press play in inadvertently helping or hurting the cause of religious freedom?” Moore asked during his introduction.

To answer the question, the speakers discussed the various constraints journalists work with when reporting religious freedom stories, including the challenge of finding an angle that will ensure an article gets published.

To that end, both Belz and Tandon highlighted the importance of collaboration with advocates. They both noted that while journalists are not themselves activists, their work complements the work of those advocating for religious freedom.

“We're very interested in these issues [of human rights],” Tandon said, encouraging  advocates to maintain their contact with journalists and help them find ways into stories that might not otherwise be told, such as by profiling interesting people or linking stories to recent events.

He called activists “indispensable” to the work that journalists do “in terms of hearing what's happening, hearing from different perspectives, and getting beyond the official line.”

For Zenz, it is the media that is indispensable to his work. He said that as an independent researcher, he has been better able to make an impact with his research by working with the media to disseminate his findings. Some of his research, including his recent work around the Chinese government’s internment of what UN experts say may be as many as 1 million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, has even occasionally been sparked by media inquiries.

He told the gathered participants that he’d seen journalists pay a high price for their work documenting rights abuses in Xinjiang, saying that many face detainment and police questioning because they valued telling the stories of persecuted communities over their own safety. 

“And I just want to ask, why is it that I do not see that same level of commitment to the values that we supposedly value in academia, in politics — I would make an exception of the State Department; I’m actually very impressed by them —  or on [sic] business?” he asked. “Which incentive structures have we put up, especially on the elite levels of our societies, that reward people who look the other way?”

Belz, who reported from Iraq during the start of the American occupation in the 2000s, seemed to take the journalist’s role in documenting persecution just as seriously.

“Had we paid attention to the bombings the Yazidis endured in 2007, bombings that claimed nearly 800 lives and have been horrifically under-reported, [as well as] the attacks on the Christians in Iraq in 2006, in 2007, in 2008, I believe the Islamic State takeover in 2014 might not have happened,” she said.

For Rabbi Myers, contributing to the prevention of violence is a moral obligation for the media.

He said he believes that the kind of racism and bigotry that led to the loss of many of his congregants’ lives will only be defeated when multiple levels of society do their part to fight it. Media’s responsibility, according to Rabbi Myers, is to “not reward evildoers with notoriety.”

A Focus on Doing Good

His remarks echo calls in the wake of mass shootings, including the March 2019 attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, for the media to refuse to name perpetrators, citing these people’s own admissions that they often carry out their attacks after noticing the media attention paid to other mass shooters. The Christchurch attacker, for example, pointed in his manifesto to the perpetrators of the 2015 shooting at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, and of the 2011 attacks in Norway.

Rather than giving attackers the media attention they want, which research shows may spur on copycat attacks, Rabbi Myers says the media should focus on those who are doing good, including individuals who support the communities targeted in mass shootings.

He said that his congregation has received an outpouring of support since the attack in Pittsburgh, including in the form of unsolicited artwork “from caring people across the globe,” which he shares with his congregation every week during Friday evening services to mark the start of Shabbat. He told the religious leaders, civil society representatives, and government officials gathered at the ministerial that this support reminds him that “there are far more of the good people than the bad people” in the world.

“Alas, the bad get the publicity, while the good frequently toil in anonymity,” he said.

“If the late evening news offered us 20 minutes of the wonderfully amazing acts that good people perform, and hide[s] the depressing news somewhere within the broadcast, I think, for one, that the mood of every nation would improve significantly,” he said.

It’s an approach that won’t be easy, but Rabbi Myers challenged the media to be “brave enough” to try.

 

Also read: 

Survivors of Religious Persecution Encourage Solidarity and Forgiveness