Raymond Yepes

A proud bearer of the cross peruses the Olympus.

February 12th, 2025: 70 Christians were beheaded by an ISIS affiliate in the Democratic Republic of Congo. September 21st, 2024: Hezbollah bombs Nazareth, rockets exploding in the city Jesus grew up in. February 2nd, 2025: Tori Kelly, a Christian singer-songwriter, won her sixth Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement. What do all of these dates have in common? There is extremely minimal coverage of these events from all the big news outlets– if any at all.

Doing a simple Google search for any of these topics results in a lackluster page of results. Seriously- search “Tori Kelly wins Grammy 2025.” What appears? A standard list of links, along with an occasional video here and there. Now, search for “Zoe Saldana Oscars.” Or even better, “Trump.” That’s a completely different story: a whole separate “Top stories” section appears, taking up more than half of the page.  The New York Times, People, Variety, CNN and all the major news outlets have covered those topics. Meanwhile, the biggest outlet to cover Kelly’s win is the Grammys themselves.

This doesn’t apply to just Christian pop culture either. For example, take the very first story mentioned in this opinion piece: very recently, 70 Christians were beheaded in the Democratic Republic of Congo in their own Church purely because of their faith. This is a tragedy as important as any other, yet the only major news outlet to cover it is Fox News.

Some might make the argument that stories like this aren’t relevant enough. I’d argue that whether you realize it or not, it’s the media that decides what’s relevant. It’s the media that reports on what’s going on in the world, it’s the media that writes stories about it, and it’s the media that publishes these stories. Without the centuries-old art of Journalism, there is simply no relevancy. Christian stories are made relevant if the media makes them relevant, and in many cases, the Christian stories that do get covered are painted in a negative light.

It simply boils down to what the news wants to make relevant, or in this case, what they don’t. What if that previous headline was tweaked a little bit? For example, change “70 Christians” to “70 Muslims.” Or “70 Transgender people.” You can be sure it would be all over international news, especially American news outlets. Another argument is that Muslims and transgender people are oppressed, marginalized groups that historically haven’t gotten as much coverage as Christians. This is true to an extent, and it’s important to cover stories involving these groups. But making just these issues the center of Journalism is actively suppressing Christians and other religious groups! How ironic.

In conclusion, the secular media needs to put their pride aside and begin covering everything. It’s time to stop pushing an agenda and cover everything, especially Christianity. I’m talking to both conservative and liberal outlets because they both do this. No outlet is exempt from this, even if they come close. Over 2 Billion people in the world are Christians, and we want to see more Christian stories being covered- “irrelevant” simply does not cut it. It’s not fair that the public gets fed what they want on a silver platter, but Christians have to go digging for what they want to know. That’s not true Journalism. It’s time for a change in the media, starting with this.