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An Open Letter
to Journalists Covering the 2002 Winter Olympics
by
Maurine Proctor
Editor-in-Chief, Meridian Magazine ( www.ldsmag.com )
The Place Where Latter-day Saints Gather
The 2002 Winter
Olympics are just beginning, and already Latter-day Saints are learning
that the persecution that drove us from state to state and finally,
in 1847, to the forgotten, arid basin of the Great Salt Lake still
continues.
The only difference
is now the mistreatment is slightly more sophisticated, and instead
of night riders, it is night writers—those members
of the press who are bashing us in their coverage of the games.
Call it the
journalists' temptation—going for flair instead of accuracy—but
Latter-day Saints are continually perplexed how, with such contempt,
the media portrays an international Christian church with more than
11 million members. As we anticipate the days ahead, many Latter-day
Saints wonder just how the press will continue to weigh us, and
whether the flood of news from the games will be more of the sometimes
mortifying, smug treatment we are so often used to receiving.
The question
is: will the reporters covering the Winter Olympics drop into Utah,
do their drive-by reporting, and leave the population slumped under
a new load of misinformation and stereotyping?
When journalists
talk about members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
they ought to be wary of creating a caricature. The picture, too
often drawn by carelessness or prejudice, is so woefully out of
shape, Latter-day Saints don't recognize themselves in the articles.
We either read that we are part of a vast wealthy, clannish and
secretive empire or that we are Puritanical hicks. We see our rich
history reduced to polygamy and our complex theology to a cartoon.
No wonder some
who come to Utah are disappointed. They ask if they can see one
of those Mormons, and are frankly disappointed to see that the normal
people all around them are members of the faith.
Jan Shipps,
professor emeritus in religious studies at Indiana University and
the foremost non-Mormon scholar on the church, cited that a European
reporter was so convinced of his own misunderstanding of Mormonism
as bizarre that "they called me to say 'we know it's bizarre, tell
us how' or 'give us a quote that will let people know we're right.'"
Our American
society has struggled to come to a higher plateau in our sensitivity
to minorities. We don't brook racial or ethnic slurs. A journalist
who portrayed that attitude would be widely and justifiably excoriated.
Yet, the press corps takes its often aggressively hostile stance
toward Latter-day Saints as if a sign that it is enlightened and
sophisticated.
The Press
Sneers
Hugh
Hewitt, the creator of the book and PBS series, Searching for
God in America, notes, "The early Church practice of multiple
marriages was abandoned a century ago, and although the Mormons
remain opposed to alcohol use, they share this tenet with many other
religions. To the average secular observer in the media, then, the
LDS should be just another religion. But it has drawn and continues
to draw a distinct hostility from mainstream media. As the Olympics
approach, the criticism and snickering will increase. Listen for
it. You will certainly hear it."
In the last
few days, we've been hearing it. Try this opening to Time's
article written by Terry McCarthy, who describes the offices of
the church's First Presidency in sinister terms. "In these hushed
precincts, groups of gray-haired men in identical black suits pass
by, beaming smiles like undertakers. Everyone is scrupulously polite,
but as a visitor, one feels that one has been dropped into the middle
of a plot, without knowing the beginning or the end."
What McCarthy
saw were men in business suits who smiled and were polite, but the
scene has been recast by the reporter's prejudices. McCarthy concocted
"identical black" suits, transformed smiles into the fawning mince
of an undertaker, and made courtesy "scrupulous" as if it was put
on like a mask. None of the dark nuances here escape the reader,
but, if by some chance we should have missed the reporter's bias,
McCarthy can't resist making it clear that it is all part of a "plot."
The Los Angeles
Times gets away with headlines that call Utah a "theocracy,"
a word pregnant with meaning as the U.S. grapples with the Taliban.
The Associated Press says that the Latter-day Saints made their
wilderness migration to Utah in 1847 because "they were on the run
from public scrutiny." This forgets the salient detail that they
were driven from their homes in the middle of winter by other American
citizens who had assassinated their prophet and despised them. Thousands
of them wore out shoes and perished along that trail west. "Scrutiny"
should be changed to "persecution." The Latter-day Saints didn't
want to hide; they wanted to live.
In the drone
of a Johnny-one-note, The New Yorker's recent lengthy article
cites polygamy 22 times. U.K's The Guardian says mockingly,
"Most of this seething mass of Mormon children do seem to grow up
in a spirit of acceptance, going off to do their two-year missions
elsewhere and then marrying other happy Mormons to produce many
more children of their own." Translation: Mormons breed like rabbits,
producing children who are too dumb to know better than to follow
in the footsteps of their benighted parents.
Media Instills
Prejudice
Latter-day Saints mostly ignore the strange press they get,
but in a society where media becomes a prime source of education,
journalists are our teachers, and their tilt can become society's.
Before my husband
and I founded Meridian, an Internet magazine for Latter-day
Saints now visited by over 100,000 unique readers a month in all
50 states and 112 countries, we held focus groups in New York with
media buyers to determine their likelihood of placing ads in our
forthcoming publication. They represented all-American clients—cold
cereals and snack foods, disposable diapers and automakers—the
very group that should have been eager to advertise with our family-centered,
educated, and affluent readers. Behind a two-way mirror we watched
while the moderator asked them what they knew about Mormons. Their
answers were an embarrassment. They assumed church members were
uneducated, rural, blue collar, stiff, uninteresting, bland, narrow-minded.
One of these summed up his feelings, "I don't know any Mormons,
but I know I wouldn't want one for a friend."
It was such
a shocking moment of bigotry, the moderator stopped the session
and came back to ask us if we were OK. What should have been surprising
is that none of us was surprised. To be a Latter-day Saint means
that a wave of misconceptions often precedes you, many of these
powered by the media.
Ironically,
it is the same media who mock that Latter-day Saints are overly
concerned about the way they are portrayed. In recent days, we have
been called alternately eager or self-effacing. When the church
created story ideas for the press, reporters opined that the games
were just an excuse for the Mormons to proselytize. If they hadn't
reporters would have called the church secretive.
An Invitation
to Journalists
This is a call to journalists who will be doing stories on the
Latter-day Saints to be intelligent, tolerant, and careful in your
reporting. Religious conviction—especially Christian conviction—too
often receives a sneer from the press as if belief were something
to belittle. Do you suppose that this does no harm? That in a world
seeking to overcome cultural division and bigotry, you don't propel
all of us backward?
If you are going
to do a story on Latter-day Saints, ask the questions that really
take the pulse of this people, that capture the reality that they
know. What, for instance, makes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints so dynamic and appealing that it is consistently the fastest-growing
church in America? Why does it inspire so much loyalty from its
people that youngsters, in the midst of college give up scholarships,
and athletic teams to go on two-year missions at their own expense?
What does it mean to this people to believe in a modern-day prophet—and
how does President Gordon B. Hinckley interpret the meaning of religion
in a world that is growing increasingly secular?
Surely, everyone
is endlessly tired of the old saw that some Mormons once practiced
polygamy. If you want to ask a really interesting historical question,
ask how official persecution and mob rule could have so flourished
in 19th century America, that the civil rights of a religious
minority were thoroughly trampled.
What a story
there is that in 1838, Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs, could
have gotten away with issuing an executive extermination order on
the Latter-day Saints, demanding that they leave his state or be
wiped out like so many insects. What compelling journalism could
be in the little-known pathos of a people in the winter of 1846
who had to finish their temple in Nauvoo, Illinois while they also
built wagons to flee into the western wilderness from persecutors
who wouldn't let them stay until spring.
I have great,
great grandmothers on two different lines who made part of that
journey. They both died in their 30's of chills, fever, and scurvy
in a hastily assembled Nebraska village called Winter Quarters,
built because they didn't have supplies, strength or time to walk
on to the West. The journals that the people left behind tell of
their enormous woe. They described their scurvy, "The flesh would
rot and drop off, some to the bones."
To capture the
essence of a people, you have to listen to them. You have to go
to the heartland of their experience and find what it means to them.
An opportunity awaits journalists who descend upon Salt Lake in
the following days. In your reporting you can open a window on a
people that have been misunderstood, or you can reflect your story
back upon your own prejudices. What you write may say more about
you than it does about the Latter-day Saints.
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© 2001 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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