In recent months, Jews having been taking a lot of heat because of investment scammer Bernard Madoff who happens to be Jewish. It appears now Mormons have to bear the media's maligning of Mormons for the actions of a federal judge and pair of psychologists involved in creating the Bush administration's controversial interrogation policies that have been labeled torture.
Here's the recent headline in two columns in The Salt Lake Tribune: "On opposite poles: two Mormons on torture" and "LDS lawyers, psychologists had a hand in torture policies."
The Huffington Post follows up with a column by a retired colonel: "Two Mormons, Two ethics on torture" and a New York Times blog quoting Vanity Fair about the "Mormon Mafia."
So here's the question: Did these columns cross a journalistic ethical line by over-emphasizing the faith of those involved? I believe they did. Here's why. Implicit in this kind of writing is age-old stereotyping that disparages Mormons en masse. It plays into the kinds of framing scholars have found in media reports about Mormons for more than a century - the media plays Latter-day Saints as the outsiders, the plotters, and the blindly monolithic.
Read the opening paragraphs of Tribune columnist Rebecca Walsh's piece: "Just weeks into the war in Iraq, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley said the conflict could be justified as an effort to defend liberty and depose a dictator. God would not hold soldiers responsible 'as agents of their government in carrying forward that which they are legally obligated to do.' But, like church leaders before him, he said nothing about torture. Into that gap, two faithful Mormons — an interrogator and a government attorney — reached very different conclusions of conscience."
Talk about zig and zag. So how did we go from the anecdotes of a couple Mormons out of 13 million to a blanket indictment of the faith and its leaders? It's not even a well thought out indictment as Walsh misapplies a speech about the justification of war to the U.S. interrogation techniques. Following Walsh's leaps of logic is akin to getting whiplash on an old wooden roller coaster.
She continues: "Long before Hinckley spoke, Justice Department attorney Jay Bybee signed the infamous memo outlining a 10-step checklist of horrors that ended with making al Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed think they were drowning — a total of 266 times. Just five months after that conference talk, Army interrogator Alyssa Peterson killed herself after refusing to use the degrading techniques Bybee endorsed on prisoners at her air base in Tal Afar."
So was the faith of either (now) Judge Jay Bybee and Alyssa Peterson necessary for telling the story? If it was, why does "Mormon" belong in the headline? It is a requirement for faiths to take public stands on torture? Where's the balance in the reporting?
At least Time magazine and the New York Times avoided the unnecessary tie to Bybee's faith. Time did mention his LDS mission and statements in an LDS publication in a short bio.
In the telling of the Madoff-Jewish connection, at least Madoff has been convicted of a crime. Even so, the connection to his faith increased antisemitism on the Web. In this case, a number of people are ready to impeach Bybee and convict two Mormon psychologists James E. Mitchell and John B. Jessen connected to the controversial interrogation techniques. On the Mormon Lawyers blog, people are still debating whether Bybee did anything illegal.
Walsh says she wants to stir the hearts of Mormon faithful about the issue. Unfortunately, she's brought out the bigots instead. If Walsh didn't explicitly make all Mormons guilty by association, the bigoted readers who commented online about her column certainly connected the dots.
Ironically, it seems Walsh may have felt she absolved herself with this statement by a scholar that only reinforces why the column was so ill conceived. " 'Only the pacifists really shine at moments like these," says Sarah Barringer Gordon, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She says Mormon players in President George W. Bush's torture program are being singled out unfairly. " 'This looks like the actions of people, Mormons as well as others, who made enormously dangerous and inhumane mistakes about what our national policy should be,' Gordon says. 'The media is isolating a few individuals and the issue is swirling around them relentlessly'."
If Walsh's column wasn't enough, the Tribune ran another column highlighting the LDS ties. Written by David R. Irvine, the op-ed covered two-thirds of a page. The yarn identifies Latter-day Saints in the history of the interrogation policy. However interesting, the coverage is not proportional.
Was it simply the sensationalism that people of the same faith happened to be involved along a string of events? Was the shared church affiliation of these players in the Bush administration a defining element of the case? I can detect no coordination among Mormons at any level, no edicts from the church that they participate and have seen no survey or poll that would indicate that Mormons approve of these tactics?
If research indentified a bunch of Catholics or Jews would it have been of any interest? Has anyone spent any time investigating the religious affiliation of any of the other players? So, in all, what percentage of those who worked on and promoted this interrogation policy were Latter-day Saints?
And with all of this ink spilt on the Mormon-interrogation ties, there has yet to be a balanced report from an investigative journalist sorting out the facts related to the legality of Bybee's decisions and the implications of religious affliation. At this point, it seems Mormons, as usual, are easy targets for journalists, but not good journalism.