Thinking about big religion holes in daily news

Waves of death in Gaza are valid news. How about machete rampages in Nigeria?

Week after week, this topic keeps showing up in my email inbox — the slaughter of Catholics and Protestants in Nigeria. This has been going on for decades (click here for U.S. State Department reports).

You can say the same thing about the siege of violence that has, especially after the Iraq war, been forcing Christians out of their ancient homes in the Middle East (see this week’s “Crossroads” podcast and post). Note this essay by historian Phillip Jenkins: “Is this the end for Mideast Christianity?”

I hear about trends in the Holy Land, of course, since I am an Eastern Orthodox layman (a convert to the ancient Patriarchate of Antioch, which is now based in dangerous Damascus).

But I see more email and social-media chatter about Nigeria for a simple reason — much of the persecution there hits Catholics. Thus, these tragic events are covered by independent Catholic newsrooms and agencies linked to the U.S. Catholic hierarchy.

Why aren’t the waves of persecution in Nigeria covered by elite newsrooms? That’s the question that I hear over and over, year after year.

When innocents and combatants die in Gaza, major print and television newsrooms respond — as they should — with strong coverage.

This has not been the case in Nigeria, even though the violence there has been staggering. For years, this was prime material for GetReligion.org, which focused on why so many newsrooms struggle to cover how religion affects real news, affecting real people, in the real world. That website’s massive archive remains online, open to readers and researchers.

But is this a Rational Sheep topic, a subject I should include in this project about faith, family and the digital-media age? I have struggled with that question. It has been impossible for me to shut down that part of my religion-reporting brain after 20 years of GetReligion work and 37 years of “On Religion” columns.

Here’s what I have decided: Every now and then, I do have to put a spotlight on these GetReligion subjects (especially in the “Crossroads” podcasts and posts), because I want people — pastors, parents, teachers and counselors — to understand the forces that shape the news that they read. This is an important faith and media issue.

Thus, in this weekend “think piece,” I want to point readers to an important essay in The Free Press, an increasingly important corner in the growing mainstream marketplace of digital news. Frankly, this feature by Madeleine Kearns could have been published at GetReligion. The double-decker headline makes this clear:

As Christians Are Slaughtered, the World Looks Away

Islamists massacred over 200 people in Yelwata, Nigeria — many of them women and children. The media barely mentioned it.