I enjoy stories informed by real experience in unfamiliar areas.
Mattingly is discussing why media doesn’t cover religion properly. He starts with the basic social divide that outsiders can see: Modern journalists are educated elites, thus extremely secular. He also mentions several internal factors that outsiders couldn’t imagine.
1. Editors hated dealing with religion because every religion story would bring long loud phone calls from people who objected to small errors or “wrong” theology. Karens have always been around.
2. Loop: Churches learned that editors hated dealing with them, so they didn’t bother to run ads in the paper. Stories that don’t lead to ads don’t get printed.
3. If a religion story is really important (like Waco or Sunni-Shia conflicts), then it’s too important to let the religion reporter handle it. “Politics is the real world, religion is a make-believe world.” The religion reporter ends up covering only trivial-sounding stuff, so he’s the first to go when the new corporate owner starts cutting Negative Externalities.
Polistra's Mill 