Stories We Are Following

Here are some stories Kris and I are watching.

Local news matters, but it’s in big trouble:

The laws of supply and demand aren’t working for local news.

The local news business was devastated by COVID-19, even though consumers wanted more of its product. Visits to local news websites spiked by 89 percent from February to March 2020, but newspapers did not profit from having more readers: Ad revenues for the largest newspaper publisher in the nation, Gannett, dropped 35 percent from 2019 to 2020. Journalists were laid off, furloughed or forced to accept early retirements or pay cuts.

The pandemic, however, merely accelerated a crisis in local journalism that is now at least two decades old. From 2000 to 2018, weekday newspaper circulation fell from 55.8 million households to an estimated 28.6 million; between 2008 and 2019, newsroom employment fell by 51 percent; and since 2004, more than 1,800 local newspapers have closed across the nation.

Perhaps even more alarming is that the public is largely unaware of this crisis. In late 2018, 71 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center that their local news media was doing very or somewhat well financially, even though only 14 percent said they had paid for local news in the past year. But if local newspapers go away or are weakened beyond recognition, a real possibility given their steep decline and Americans’ lack of awareness of it, we won’t just feel nostalgic for them — we’ll feel actual consequences.

A growing body of research has found that government is worse off when local news suffers. In fact, inadequate local news has been linked to more corruption, less competitive elections, weaker municipal finances and a prevalence of party-line politicians who don’t bring benefits back to their districts. It’s not just government performance, however. My research with Matthew Hitt of Colorado State University and Johanna Dunaway of Texas A&M University shows that when local newspapers close, people don’t find another local option. Instead, they get their news from national outlets, and in the absence of local news, people are more likely to vote for one party up and down the ballot.1

I’ve been following this one for some time, and Obbink and Hobby Lobby are an embarrassment to the pursuit of truth:

BROOKLYN (CN) —  Craft chain Hobby Lobby is going to court again, this time to recover some $7 million it paid a former Oxford University classics professor for ancient fragments of the Christian gospels and other artifacts that turned out to be stolen.

Hobby Lobby says it had looked to professor Dirk Obbink while curating artifacts for its planned Museum of the Bible in Washington. Owned by a billionaire evangelical named Steve Green, the store has made Christianity a pillar of its business, perhaps most famously when it sued to be exempt from providing employees with free contraception under the federal health care law.

Since its 2017 opening, however, Hobby Lobby’s museum has been plagued by scandal over its acquisitions, resulting in the returns of manuscripts that were smuggled out of Egypt and cuneiform tablets looted from Iraq. Last year, experts concluded that “ancient” Dead Sea Scrolls that served as the museum’s centerpiece were in fact counterfeit. 

Hobby Lobby’s dealings with Obbink are another chapter in that story. Represented by art lawyers at Pearlstein & McCullough, the store sued the disgraced 64-year-old professor Wednesday in Brooklyn. The 10-page federal complaint notes that Obbink earned a reputation as “one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient papyri” but had been privately dealing antiquities throughout that storied career. As general editor of the Egyptian Exploration Society, part of the Sackler Classics Library at Oxford, the American-born Obbink oversaw the world’s largest collection of ancient papyri — including artifacts excavated at the ancient Nile valley capital of Oxyrhynchus.

Those honors disintegrated, however, when Obbink was arrested in March 2020 for the alleged theft of as many as 120 pieces of Oxford-owned ancient papyrus. The school began investigating Obbink a year earlier over his sales to Hobby Lobby.

NDAs again:

When staff members join Christ the King Community Church in Burlington, Wash., one of the largest churches in the United States, they sign onto the employee handbook, which has a tightly defined confidentiality clause. By signing, staffers agree never to discuss information “designated as confidential” such as “sensitive information regarding members” or donation records or discipline issues. The handbook is publicly available.

Makes sense, right? That is among the most mild, logical, and tailored of confidentiality agreements in the Christian ministry world—and unlike most confidentiality agreements, which often forbid employees from divulging their very existence, Christ the King members can read the agreement. Typically employees conform to these agreements on pain of loss of employment or severance, though employment laws and enforcement of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) vary by state.

NDAs appear to have started as a way to protect trade secrets in the tech industry in the mid-20th century, according to a Columbia Journalism Review history of the term, but companies quickly began using them to protect all sorts of information. NDAs were the reason the Harvey Weinstein scandals remained secret, because women signed confidentiality agreements as a condition of their settlements. And this practice from corporate America is now common among religious nonprofits.

Done right, confidentiality agreements help institutions protect members’ privacy and can fend off ruinous litigation. But NDAs can also mask institutional disease and leader misconduct. And even when an institution doesn’t enforce its NDA, the widespread institutional fear of liability can lead to unintended, devastating outcomes.

One employee at a Christian radio station showed me his non-disclosure agreement, which included a clause forbidding him from communicating “any information of any kind” relating to the radio station regardless of whether it is deemed confidential or important. The agreement also included a non-compete clause (see sidebar below) forbidding him from working for another station within 30 miles during his employment and for six months after.

Open Doors USA used an NDA as a condition of three months’ severance for one of its employees, according to a document WORLD received. The NDA required the employee to promise not to make civil claims against the organization and included a non-disparagement clause forbidding both the employer and employee from making disparaging comments “verbally or in writing, or mak[ing] any statements to the press or to any third party.” The agreement also forbade disclosing the existence of the agreement.

The employee signing the agreement felt little choice in the matter: “If I didn’t accept the agreement, we wouldn’t have been able to pay our bills.” Open Doors declined to comment on its NDA policy.

Paige Patterson’s in the SBC news yet again:

Southwestern’s dispatch in the annual Book of Reports, which presents information for messengers attending the denomination’s upcoming annual meeting, alleges Patterson misappropriated “confidential donor information” and took seminary property after his 2018 termination over allegations of mishandling sexual abuse.

The report comes three months after the seminary settled a lawsuit against a foundation that shifted millions in funding following Patterson’s departure.

“Southern Baptists have a right to know these facts and deserve the truth,” said Colby Adams, the seminary’s vice president for strategic initiatives and chief of staff.

According to the seminary report: the Pattersons “improperly removed boxes of documents that belonged to the seminary” and have not returned records requested by Southwestern; “the Pattersons have continued to use the Seminary’s confidential donor list in order to contact Seminary donors to divert donations and gifts away from the Seminary”; and a painting missing from the seminary can be seen in social media pictures “hanging in the Pattersons’ new home.”

Patterson has denied the claims. His wife Dorothy repeated that denial to Christianity Today, adding that removal of any Southwestern property was an accident and that the Pattersons want to meet with seminary officials to resolve the dispute.

Cru and Critical Race Theory:

The debate over critical race theory has landed at Cru, one of the country’s most prominent parachurch ministries, where a 179-page letter alleging an overemphasis on racial justice has exacerbated tensions that have been quietly brewing within the organization for years.

Titled “Seeking Clarity and Unity,” the document was submitted to Cru president Steve Sellers in November 2020 and spread inside the organization before appearing online in May. Its authors, a grassroots group of Cru staff members, raise concerns that a “victim-oppressor worldview” has become embedded throughout the organization, dividing staff and detracting from the true gospel.

“In pursuing [diversity], we have inadvertently adopted a system of unbiblical ideas that have led us to disunity,” the document reads. “These concepts have created distrust, discouragement, and a host of other problems.” …

Leaders have begun to speak about racism more overtly during staff conferences, and the ministry offers a training called “Lenses” on ethnic and cultural “oneness” for staff. Both efforts were singled out in the document as “social justice teachings.”

Various anonymous testimonials called the organization’s cultural competency training “political” and alleged “anti-white American rhetoric.” One anonymous staff (referenced as Minority Staff #30) said the trend within Cru and the church at large represents “a brand new religion of systemic racism, white privilege, and systems of power” that “labels all of Christian theology a racist oppressive ideology of whiteness.”

Throughout the document, contributors characterize the approach to race they see from leaders as a “false gospel,” “unbiblical,” and a threat to evangelism.