I had the privilege Friday to speak to a Media and Religion class at Harding University. My thanks to Dr. Jim Miller for inviting me. Here is a slightly edited version of my presentation.
– Bobby
By Bobby Ross Jr.
If you want to get people fired up, write about something close to their heart.
Write a not-so-positive story about the candidate they support for president. Or dig into the questionable recruiting practices of their favorite college football coach.
Sports and politics are two areas where the audience is like an unlit match just waiting to be struck.
But if you think folks can get just little a little crazy over their allegiance to the Dallas Cowboys or Barack Obama, try writing about something even closer to their heart — their faith.
For the last 10 years, I have been writing about religion — first for the secular news media and now for The Christian Chronicle.
I got into religion reporting quite by accident. Or a person of faith might dare suggest that God had been preparing me to write about religion my entire life.
Before I tell you how I was dragged kicking and screaming into religion writing, let me share a bit about my personal background.
I was born on a Sunday night in 1967. My dad was stationed at the Air Force base in Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border. He went to worship as usual that night at the Arkansas Avenue Church of Christ. But Mom stayed home because she wasn’t feeling well — and I was to blame.
But before services ended that night, Mom called the church and told Dad to rush home. Less than an hour later, I made my grand entrance into the world at the Air Force base hospital. I don’t know if Mom took me to the church that next Sunday. But at the latest, I was two weeks old the first time I attended a Church of Christ. And I have not forsaken many Sunday morning assemblies in the 41 years since.
My dad later left the Air Force and became a preacher. When I was in elementary school, he worked with small churches in North Carolina. When I was in high school, my parents became house parents at a Christian children’s home in Texas. So suddenly my family had eight to 10 foster children living in the same house as my parents, brother, sister and me.
I wrote my first newspaper story when I took a journalism class my sophomore year at Keller High School. I was assigned to write about the high school jazz band. I jotted down a list of questions and gave them to the band director. Rather than write out replies, however, he told me that if I wanted to be a reporter, I’d need to ask him the questions myself. So despite my shyness, I sat down for the first interview of my newspaper career with my band director, Wayne Tympanick. I ended up serving as editor of my high school newspaper my junior and senior years.
Suffice it to say that I loved seeing my name in print. And I loved the whole process of reporting and writing newspaper stories. Before long, I decided I wanted to major in journalism and become a newspaper reporter. I got a scholarship to attend Oklahoma Christian University and worked on the student newspaper The Talon all four years there.
My favorite story came in 1988 when a group of College Republicans from Oklahoma Christian was recruited to help at a “Bush for President” rally in Oklahoma City. Police arrested two of the students after a woman accused them of tearing up her sign supporting Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. We published a front-page photo of the College Republicans at the rally and a story about the arrests. That didn’t make the newspaper staff real popular with some segments of campus, but we thought it was so cool: We got the scoop on a story that made national headlines. To the credit of Oklahoma Christian’s administrators, they made no effort to censor the story.
After college, I accepted my first full-time job, making $6 an hour and driving 60 miles each way in a Volkswagen bug to serve as business editor at a small daily newspaper. In all, I worked for three small Oklahoma papers in three years after graduating from Oklahoma Christian.
My big break came in 1993 when The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City hired me. The Oklahoman is the state’s largest newspaper with — at that time — about a million readers on Sunday. I started out on the metro desk covering one of the major suburbs. I wrote about zoning fights, school board meetings, shootings, fires and anything else that happened in that growing community.
The Oklahoman’s newsroom is on the eighth floor of a shiny glass office tower in north Oklahoma City. I was getting off the elevator just after 9 o’clock on a Wednesday morning in 1995 when I heard a loud boom. It sounded like a tractor-trailer rig had crashed into our building seven miles from downtown Oklahoma City. But then I looked toward downtown and saw a huge plume of black smoke. Immediately, one of our editors who had served in the military said, “That was an f—ing bomb.” Unfortunately, he was right. For the next few months – and even years – many of us would be consumed with writing about what was then the worst terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil. In all, the bombing claimed 168 victims, many of them children in a day care at Oklahoma City’s federal building.
The bombing was just one of the major stories I covered in my time at The Oklahoman. As a state reporter, I witnessed four executions — including the first black woman put to death by the state in nearly a century. I drove all over the state to report on tornadoes, wildfires and floods. I even traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to tour Graceland and report on the enduring legacy of Elvis Presley 20 years after his death. At Graceland, I couldn’t resist eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich in Elvis’ honor.
But I was not prepared for the assignment that came my way in 1998.
Late that year, one of The Oklahoman’s top editors called me into his office and told me that the paper wanted me to fly to St. Louis that January and cover a much-anticipated visit to the United States by Pope John Paul II. At the time, I had no idea what a diocese was. Honestly, I didn’t know the difference between a bishop and a cardinal. I had heard of the pope.
But my initial reaction was that there was no way I could go write about the pope. After all, I was a faithful member of the Church of Christ. I didn’t support or believe in Roman Catholic doctrine. What would my brothers and sisters at church think about me attending a Catholic Mass?
Looking back, I realize my reaction was a bit naïve – probably too naïve for a journalist with nearly a decade of professional experience at that point.
The first thing I did was call a close minister friend of mine and explain my predicament. His advice was something along the lines of, “Wow, what a great assignment. You better not turn it down.” My friend made the point that I could cover the pope’s visit just like any other assignment — as a trained observer committed to providing a fair, accurate account of what happened. That’s what journalists do, right?
As a result of my friend’s encouragement, I began researching the basics about Catholic faith and hierarchy and preparing myself to cover the pope’s visit. I wrote three or four front-page stories the week of the pope’s visit. My favorite was one about a youth event where Catholic teens jammed to the ear-piercing beat of DC Talk’s “Jesus Freak” before welcoming to the stage a gray-haired pontiff who walked with a cane.
In reporting on the pope’s visit, I was pleased to discover that I could maintain my commitment to the highest standards of journalism while in no way compromising my own faith or beliefs. I found that I could treat the faith of others with respect while in no way endorsing or accepting their beliefs.
Later, when The Oklahoman’s religion editor position became open, I left the state desk and started writing about Mormons, Muslims and many other faiths full time. I covered the Southern Baptist Convention annual meetings and the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandals. I wrote a weekly column where I sometimes explored other people’s faith and often shared insight about my own.
In 2002, ready for a new challenge, I left The Oklahoman and went to work for The Associated Press in Nashville. I later transferred to the AP office in Dallas. With the AP, I wrote about religion for hundreds of newspapers across the nation. I did a story about a Christian in Tennessee who paid children nationwide $10 each to learn the Ten Commandments. That story just about put him out of business, and I had to write another story reporting that his ministry had run out of money!
Another time, an AP photographer and I joined a Pentecostal group from Texas for a week at an orphanage in a violence-ridden Mexican border town. Talk about learning about other people’s faith: We ate and slept for seven nights with people who believed in speaking in tongues and various other incarnations of the Holy Spirit. But the story of what compelled these charismatic Christians from hundreds of miles away to spend a week in Juarez, Mexico, working with orphans made the front page of several newspapers nationwide, including the Los Angeles Times’ early Sunday edition.
In 2005, I was on assignment for the AP in San Antonio working with a photographer who would later be a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina. My cell phone rang, and it was Christian Chronicle president Lynn McMillon, asking if I would meet him for lunch that Sunday.
At lunch, he offered me the managing editor’s job at the Chronicle. He touted the ministry aspect of the Chronicle and its mission of informing, inspiring and uniting Churches of Christ. Believing that perhaps God had prepared me for “such a time as this,” I took a pay cut and went to work for the Chronicle. From my family’s perspective, it didn’t hurt that the job was in Oklahoma City, where we had lived for so long before I left to go to work for the AP.
At the Chronicle, our goal is to be an independent newspaper for the 13,000 non-instrumental Churches of Christ across the nation. We want to maintain the same high standards of journalism in our reporting that a secular publication would. In fact, we aspire to maintain even higher standards.
I know that you have focused in this class on how to be “salt and light” in your future secular journalism careers.
Briefly, I would like to suggest three ways that you might set out to do that.
First, I would urge you to view your reporting as “planting a seed.”
As Jesus shared in a parable in Matthew 13, when a farmer scatters seeds, birds come and eat some of them up. Some fall on rocky places without much soil. Other seeds fall among thorns, which choke the plants. Still other seeds fall on good soil and produce a crop a hundred, 60 or 30 times what was sown.
But the farmer does not control what happens to the seeds. His only role is to plant the seeds.
I hope I am not taking this analogy too far, but I think a journalist’s role is to report facts accurately, fairly and fully — and then plant a seed in the form of a story. You as a journalist can control what you write but not how people respond to it.
I traveled to New York City last weekend and was privileged to interview Lester Holt. Lester is the weekend host for NBC’s “Today Show” and the weekend anchor for the “NBC Nightly News.” He’s also a faithful member of the Manhattan Church of Christ.
Lester and I talked about his role as a Christian and as a news reporter. In a previous Chronicle interview, Lester described his approach this way:
I cannot separate my faith from who I am any more than I can the color of my skin. Both give me greater sensitivity to certain types of stories and also allow me to bring an insider perspective on some issues.
Yet, at the same time, my place as both a Christian and a journalist is not to judge. My success as a journalist is based on respecting the opinions and thoughts of those whom I cover. If I give voice to all relevant sides of an issue or debate, with proper context and perspective, then the viewers can formulate their own opinions.
While it would be disingenuous to suggest I don’t hold strong opinions on the issues of the day, I do not believe my newscast should serve as a bully pulpit.
I would suggest that we as journalists could say “Amen” to brother Holt’s perspective and adjourn right now. But we won’t.
I wrote a freelance story for Christianity Today recently on evangelical megachurches starting their own seminaries to train pastors. A well-meaning Church of Christ minister saw the story when I posted it on Facebook and sent me a private message raising concerns about it. That brother wrote:
I know of you as a reporter for brotherhood news, so I was surprised to read an article about pastors and seminaries. I inferred from the journalistic tone that you have no issue with these issues from a doctrinal perspective.
I was surprised by his reaction because, from my perspective, I wrote a pretty straightforward news story with no personal opinions whatsoever. But realizing my initial reaction to that papal visit assignment a decade ago, I understood where someone who is not a journalist might misconstrue my role.
I explained that my purpose — with the Chronicle and with my freelance assignments — is to fairly report news and events in such a way that clearly communicates them to the reading audience. Just as if I were reporting on politics, sports, the economy or a new movie, my goal – unless I am writing a column or editorial – is to write stories in a way that avoids reflecting personal biases, preferences and beliefs.
In my Chronicle reporting, that sometimes means I use terms and refer to activities and ministries that some brethren might find disagreeable – for example, a female children’s minister, an instrumental assembly, Winterfest, et cetera. My purpose is not to debate the titles or merits of the events, but merely to accurately report on them.
I explained that while the brother in question was not comfortable with terms like pastors, seminaries and praise bands in the Christianity Today piece, he understood the terms precisely as I used them and comprehended the article accurately. Mission accomplished. Agreement or disagreement with the items and viewpoints contained in the article was entirely up to him. (My thanks to a special Christian friend and brother who helped me frame my response.)
If you have strong opinions about gay rights, abortion, national health care or any one of a hundred different national political issues, that is fine. But if you can’t be fair to all sides in reporting on such topics, if you can’t leave your personal opinions at the door when you write about these issues, then journalism probably isn’t the best career choice for you.
Besides “planting a seed,” I would urge you as a journalist to “shine a light.”
One of my journalistic heroes is Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the daily newspaper in Jackson, Miss. Jerry also happens to be a Church of Christ deacon and a journalism graduate of Harding University. In 2006, his reporting work earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
For years, Jerry has been digging into what one leading journalist called Mississippi’s “sins of the past.” Jerry’s pursuit of justice has led to trials and convictions of a number of Ku Klux Klan members in Civil Rights Era murder cases. Newsweek recounted how Jerry has published “story after meticulously sourced story … uncovering decades-old, secret documents that shine light on the darkest corners of Mississippi’s past.”
And what motivates this journalist? Jerry believes in a God of justice.
At some point in your journalism career, you are likely to run into a religious person who urges you not to report a negative story because it could hurt God’s work or the church. It’s the kind of crazy argument that says let’s hide cases of priests sexually abusing children because of the bad publicity for the church. Listen to reasonable concerns about stories you pursue, but don’t give in to flimsy excuses. God can survive a newspaper story just fine.
Soon after my arrival at the Chronicle, we received a flood of criticism from many readers when we reported on the front page about a leading national ministry head fired amid allegations of sexual misconduct with teenage boys. The critics said the brother had gone forward and repented of his sins and that we should not have reported the story. We felt we had an obligation to shed the light on this story in hopes of keeping it from happening again – either at the hands of this particular person or someone else.
In my time at The Oklahoman, I did an investigative story on Christian affinity businesses that promised to devote a certain percentage of their earnings to ministries. In fact, the businesses were getting rich and not giving a whole lot to ministries. They were draining old ladies’ retirement funds under the guise of Christianity. We as journalists should not allow this to happen. If a Christian ministry is operating with honesty and integrity, then leaders should have no problem with being open and accountable when asked about their operations and finances.
Besides “planting a seed” and “shining a light,” I would urge you to apply the golden rule in your work as a journalist: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
In your work as a journalist, you are going to operate under immense deadline pressure and stress. Someone’s son or daughter is going to die in a school shooting, or a plane crash, and it’s going to be your job to call and ask a parent to comment on the tragedy.
How do you treat that grieving relative when you call or show up on their doorstep? Do you demand that they comment – and do so immediately – because you have a deadline to meet? Do you push the digital recorder or the television camera into their face without their permission?
Or do you afford them the kind of sensitivity and respect that you would appreciate yourself? Do you explain that you hate to bother them but wanted to give them an opportunity to talk about their relative – if they choose?
After the Oklahoma City bombing, a mad circus of national media competed to get to the parents of the children killed in the federal building’s day care center. I called the mother of one 19-month-old baby who died. I got her answering machine and explained that I was a writer for The Oklahoman and wanted to visit with her. I did not hear from her for two weeks. But when she called me, she told me that she had declined interviews from all kinds of reporters – most of them with the national media – because of how they treated her. But she appreciated me leaving a message and then letting her get back with me. I ended up with an exclusive story that got national attention.
Applying the golden rule, in my view, also means no fake tears or sympathy. Don’t tell someone you know how they feel because, if you’ve never lost someone in a bombing or in the Iraq war, you don’t know how they feel. You can be polite without being insincere.
The important thing to remember as a journalist is that people are more important than any sound bite or headline. If you have to sacrifice your own morals or integrity to get a story, the story isn’t worth it.
Thank you for your time and attention. Plant a seed. Shine the light. Apply the golden rule. And live the journalistic dream.
) Sunday night after church, Brian and his family introduced me to 
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