Friend,

We’ve all heard the epithet “Fake News.” To many, it just means news they disagree with. But even the realest news, and the most professional journalists, can misunderstand and misshape stories.

Consider the massive coverage of AU’s landmark new Supreme Court case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which the court agreed to hear last Friday.

Below, I share some of the coverage from that vantage point, because it demonstrates the tremendous importance of your support for AU and our media work as we face challenges at the Court and beyond.

The decision to hear the case drew international media coverage and hit newspapers, networks and websites everywhere. Most got the gist right, as in this lead from The Associated Press:

“The Supreme Court said Friday it will hear the case of a former Seattle-area football coach who was removed from his job because he refused to stop praying on the field.”

This early framing is key in the run-up to oral arguments in Bremerton, which will be heard this spring, with AU’s own attorneys front and center. That’s why we were ready on Friday with a clear statement from Rachel Laser that made it into many reports, including The New York Times:

“No child attending public school should have to pray to play school sports... This case is not about a school employee praying silently during a private religious devotion. Rather, this case is about protecting impressionable students who felt pressured by their coach to participate repeatedly in public prayer, and a public school district that did right by its students and families.”

But the plaintiff and his Christian nationalist law firm had a statement of their own, and most news reports led with the coach’s perspective. It required reading multiple paragraphs in many of the stories to find mention of students’ rights, the responsibilities of the public school district to protect the students from religious coercion, and the principle of church-state separation at the heart of this case. And even well-meaning reports made factual errors that favored the coach.

That’s why AU’s media outreach is and will be so important. Beyond the Bremerton School District, which is our client, virtually no one is speaking on behalf of students. But AU has already stepped up to counter Kennedy’s false narrative by ensuring that Bremerton’s good faith in offering to accommodate Kennedy got coverage in major outlets:

“The school district says that when it learned what Kennedy was doing it tried to accommodate him, asking that he pray separately from students.” (AP)

“The appeals court pointed out that the school district—before placing him on leave—offered to accommodate his religious exercise in a way that ‘would not be perceived as District endorsement of religion’ by providing that a private location within the school be made available to him or allowing him to wait until the crowd dissipated before taking a knee.” (CNN)

“‘The district thus faced a stark choice: Either let its employee dictate how school events would be run—even if that threatened the safety and religious freedom of the students—or take the steps necessary to curb the practice,’ Bremerton argued.” (Bloomberg)

Even so, far too many reports didn’t include this crucial context. And years working in communications have taught me that in news stories like these, there is a natural inclination to take the side of an individual against an organization.

But you and I know this “individual” is backed by well-organized, well-funded religious extremists, advancing a long-term agenda to change our law and society. It will be our job in the coming months to make the real facts of the case clear to a media ecosystem with vastly differing editorial standards, resources, space and time constraints, perspectives and biases.

We’ll work as effectively as we can to ensure the rights of students and parents, and the responsibilities of public school districts, are front and center in Bremerton coverage. We’ll refute distortion and counter any narrative that ignores the constitutional rights of schoolchildren to believe as they choose and be treated equally, regardless of those beliefs, by their public schools.

Your contributions are critical to our success. I am so grateful for your support.

Naomi Paiss
Vice President, Strategic Communications

P.S. You can help frame the public discussion of Kennedy v. Bremerton on your own. We’ll be in touch on how you can talk about it with friends and family, write letters to the editor, and speak up online. We need your voices now more than ever.