Between The Lines | Protesters Disrupted a Worship Service. Legacy Media Shrugged
How AP, CNN, and NYT covered the Cities Church disruption—and what they left out
Welcome to the first edition of “How to Read Between the Lines.”
This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, take a single news event, pull coverage from multiple outlets, and walk you through exactly how editorial choices shape the story you absorb. Same facts, different narratives. The stuff they didn’t teach you in school.
I’m making this first installment free for everyone because I want you to see what this series is all about. When future opportunities arise—stories where the coverage diverges in ways worth dissecting—those editions will be for paid subscribers.
If media literacy matters to you, and you want to sharpen your ability to see through the spin, I’d love to have you as a paying subscriber. You’ll get these “Between the Lines” breakdowns plus everything else behind the paywall.
Don’t miss the next one with this 30% discount on annual subscriptions!
Now, let’s get into it.
On Sunday, protesters entered Cities Church in St. Paul during worship, chanted slogans, disrupted the service, and left after police arrived. The Department of Justice announced an investigation. Those are the facts everyone agrees on.
But how you learned about this story—what it meant, who the heroes and villains were, and what questions you should be asking—depended entirely on which outlet you read.
Today, I’m going to walk you through a side-by-side analysis of coverage from Alpha News, the Associated Press (which was picked up by the Washington Post), CNN, and the New York Times. Not to tell you which one is “right.” But to show you how to see the choices each outlet made, and what those choices reveal about the story they wanted you to take in.
This is the stuff they don’t teach you in school. Let’s get into it.
Start With the Headlines
Before you read a single word of an article, the headline has already told you what the outlet thinks the story is, especially in the time of social media. It’s the frame through which everything else flows.
Look at these:
Alpha News: “Anti-ICE mob storms St. Paul church, shuts down service”
AP/WaPo: “DOJ vows to press charges after activists disrupt church where Minnesota ICE official is a pastor”
CNN: “St. Paul, Minnesota church protesters who targeted ICE official being investigated”
NYT: “Protest at Minnesota Church Service Adds to Tensions Over ICE Tactics”
See the difference? Alpha’s headline centers the act, storming a church, shutting down worship. The subject is the mob, and the verb is violent (”storms”).
The AP and WaPo headline? The subject is the DOJ. The story isn’t what happened at the church, it’s the government’s response to what happened. The church incident becomes subordinate clause material.
CNN’s headline makes the protesters the subject, but the operative framing is that they’re “being investigated.” Again, the story is the investigation, not the disruption.
And the Times? “Protest at Minnesota Church Service Adds to Tensions.” Notice the word choice: it’s a “protest,” not a disruption or a storming. And it’s not really about the church at all—it’s about “tensions over ICE tactics.” The church is incidental.
The lesson: The headline tells you the outlet’s hierarchy of importance. Before you’ve read anything, you’ve already been told what this story is about.
What Comes First Matters
Now let’s look at lead paragraphs, the first thing you read after the headline. This is where outlets reveal what they think is most important.
Alpha News opens with the event itself: “Anti-ICE leftists stormed a St. Paul church Sunday morning and shut down the worship service after learning that one of the church’s pastors allegedly works as an ICE agent.”
Event. Disruption. Motive. In that order. The reader knows what happened before they know anything else.
AP/WaPo opens with: “The U.S. Department of Justice said Sunday it is investigating a group of protesters in Minnesota who disrupted services at a church where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement apparently serves as a pastor.”
The investigation is the lead. The event itself is described through the lens of the government response. You learn about the DOJ before you learn what actually happened inside that church.
CNN takes a similar approach but adds another layer. The opening paragraph frames the incident as “the latest flash point in escalating tensions between the Trump administration and demonstrators in Minnesota.”
The church isn’t the focus. The political conflict is. This happened, sure, but it’s really about the bigger fight between protesters and Trump.
NYT goes even further. The protest at the church is immediately connected to “escalating tensions between Minnesota residents and the Trump administration after an immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis.”
By the second paragraph, we’re hearing about “videos posted on social media” and congregants leaving, but the framing has already been set: this is about ICE, not about worship being interrupted.
The lesson: When does the reader learn what actually happened versus the political context or government response? The lead paragraph tells you the outlet’s hierarchy of importance. Notice who gets priority: the worshipers, or the political actors?
Whose Voice Is Centered?
This is where things get really interesting. Every outlet has limited space. Who they quote—and in what order—shapes whose perspective the reader absorbs.
Alpha News leads with Pastor Jonathan Parnell: “This is unacceptable, it’s shameful. It’s shameful to interrupt a public gathering of Christians in worship.”
The pastor’s voice comes first. Then Alpha includes something I didn’t see prominently featured anywhere else: an anonymous church member who described the scene as “chaotic, with many women and children crying.”
Another eyewitness said: “It was really scary, it felt like it was on the verge of violence. One of the main agitators was getting up in the faces of women and children and screaming at them.”
Then Alpha quotes Kevin Ezell from the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board, who said he spoke with a pastor at the church and that “the kids in the worship service were terrified.”
These voices—the pastor, the frightened congregants, the children—are centered in Alpha’s coverage.
Now look at the legacy outlets.
AP/WaPo and NYT center Nekima Levy Armstrong, the protest organizer. Her voice appears early, her rationale is given space, and her framing of the event dominates.
Armstrong told AP: “If people are more concerned about someone coming to a church on a Sunday and disrupting business as usual than they are about the atrocities that we are experiencing in our community, then they need to check their theology and they need to check their hearts.”
That quote appears in AP, WaPo, and NYT. It’s given prominence in all three.
Meanwhile, the frightened church member? The crying children? Largely absent or buried.
The lesson: Who gets to explain themselves first? Whose emotional experience is prioritized? In legacy outlets, the activist’s rationale is centered. In Alpha, the worshipers’ fear is centered. Neither is lying, but they’re telling you different stories.
Distance vs. Immersion
Here’s something subtle but important: how does the outlet position the reader in relation to the event?
Alpha News embeds actual video of the disruption. They describe specific details: the chants of “Hands up, Don’t shoot” and “Renee Good,” the church emptying, the 45 minutes of chaos before police arrived.
When you read Alpha, you’re there. You’re seeing the video, hearing the chants, watching the fear.
Legacy outlets reference “videos posted on social media” or describe events through reported speech:
CNN: “Dozens of people rushed into Cities Church in St. Paul Sunday morning, interrupting the church service and leading to tense confrontations, videos posted by activists and content creators show.”
See that phrasing? “Videos posted by activists and content creators show.” The reader doesn’t see the video, they’re told what the video shows. That’s editorial distance.
The lesson: When outlets describe video instead of showing it, they’re creating a filter between you and the event. You experience it through their summary rather than your own eyes.
Moral Justification: Before or After?
This is the one that really jumped out at me.
Look at the structure of the legacy outlet coverage. Before fully describing what happened inside that church, AP, WaPo, CNN, and NYT all explain why protesters targeted it.
The AP lead mentions that one of the church’s pastors “apparently serves” as an ICE official. By paragraph four, we’re learning that “the protesters allege that one of the church’s pastors—David Easterwood—also leads the local ICE field office overseeing the operations that have involved violent tactics and illegal arrests.”
“Violent tactics.” “Illegal arrests.” These characterizations of ICE—sourced to the protesters’ allegations—appear before the reader fully understands what happened to the worshipers.
The Times does the same thing. By the time you’re three paragraphs in, you’ve learned about the Renee Good shooting, the lawsuit against ICE tactics, and the protesters’ grievances. The disruption itself is contextualized as part of a larger (sympathetic) struggle.
Alpha News structures it differently. The disruption is described first. The impact on worshipers is documented. Then the protesters’ rationale is given.
The lesson: When justification precedes conduct, the reader is primed to view the conduct more sympathetically. When conduct precedes justification, the reader judges the act before hearing the explanation. Neither is “wrong”—but they produce different reactions for the reader.
The Reframe
Now we get into some real editorial breakdancing
CNN does something fascinating toward the end of their piece. After covering the event and the investigation, they pivot to framing the entire incident as a “free speech” issue:
“With emotions running high and confrontational tactics escalating on both sides, Sunday’s protest highlights the growing tension between protecting free expression and silencing opposing voices.”
Perdoname?
We went from “protesters disrupted a worship service” to “this is about the tension between free expression and silencing opposing voices.”
That’s not neutral framing, that’s recategorization. By placing the incident in a “free speech” framework, CNN is implicitly asking readers to weigh the protesters’ expression rights against... what, exactly? The worshipers’ right to worship without being screamed at? That question is never posed.
NYT does something similar but in a different direction. They connect the church disruption to MLK Day protests happening across Minnesota, peaceful marches, car caravans, community gatherings.
By placing the church incident alongside peaceful demonstrations and invoking Martin Luther King Jr., the Times frames the disruption as part of a noble protest tradition, not as a potential violation of worshipers’ civil rights under the FACE Act.
The lesson: Watch for the reframe. When an outlet places an event in a new category—”free speech issue,” “part of the protest movement”—they’re telling you which legal and moral framework to apply.
The Law Nobody Bothered to Explain
Here’s something that should have been in every single one of these articles—and wasn’t.
The FACE Act isn’t new. It wasn’t cooked up by the Trump DOJ to target protesters. It’s a 30-year-old federal law, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, passed by a Democratic Congress with bipartisan support. Seventeen Republicans voted for it in the Senate. This wasn’t a party-line squeaker.
And here’s the part that makes the legacy outlets’ silence so glaring: the law doesn’t just protect abortion clinics. It contains nearly identical language protecting houses of worship.
The FACE Act prohibits force, threats of force, or physical obstruction that interferes with someone “exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.” Property damage against places of worship? Also prohibited. Same penalties. Same enforcement mechanisms.
This wasn’t an accident. The house of worship provision was part of the legislative compromise that got the bill passed. During the Congressional debate, concerns about religious liberty were front and center—after all, the people protesting outside abortion clinics were predominantly people of faith. The final bill reflected that tension: if we’re going to federally protect access to clinics, we’re going to federally protect access to churches too.
That’s the deal Congress struck. That’s the law that’s been on the books for three decades.
So when AP, WaPo, CNN, and NYT mention the FACE Act, they frame it exclusively as a weapon, something the DOJ is threatening to use against the protesters. What they don’t tell you is that this law exists precisely because we decided, as a bipartisan consensus in 1994, that houses of worship deserve special legal protection from exactly this kind of disruption.
That context would have been useful, no? It reframes the entire story. This isn’t the administration inventing a novel legal theory to go after political opponents. This is a Clinton-era law, passed with Democratic support, being applied to protect a church.
But that doesn’t fit the narrative. So they left it out.
What’s Missing
This is the most important lesson, and it’s the hardest to see: noticing what isn’t there.
Look at what’s consistently absent from the legacy coverage:
No sustained emphasis on the worshipers’ experience. The crying children, the frightened congregants, the chaos described by people who were there, these details are absent or buried in AP, WaPo, CNN, and NYT. Alpha centers them.
No exploration of why houses of worship receive special legal protection. The FACE Act isn’t some obscure statute, it exists because we’ve decided, as a society, that worship is different. That question is never explored.
No framing of the incident as a potential religious liberty violation. Legacy outlets mention the FACE Act as a government threat (the DOJ is going to use it against the protesters), not as a protection for worshipers (this law exists to protect people like the congregants at Cities Church).
No questioning whether protest justification overrides church sanctity. None of the legacy outlets ask the fundamental question: “Is it acceptable to disrupt a worship service, regardless of the target?” The question simply isn’t raised.
Alpha News includes the eyewitness fear. The children’s terror. The direct quotes about the sanctity of worship being violated. The emotional reality of what it felt like to be inside that church.
The legacy outlets give you the protesters’ rationale, the political context, the government response, but not the human experience of the people whose worship was interrupted on of the protestors.
The lesson: What an outlet doesn’t ask is as revealing as what it does.
The Bottom Line
Same facts. Same event. Radically different stories.
This isn’t about which outlet is “right.” It’s about understanding the choices each made, and recognizing that those choices shape how you understand reality.
The next time you read a news story, ask yourself:
What’s the headline’s subject? Who or what is this story “about”?
What comes first? What does the outlet think is most important?
Whose voice is centered? Whose perspective do you absorb?
Is justification placed before or after conduct? Are you primed to sympathize before you judge?
What category is the event placed in? What framework are you being asked to apply?
What questions are never asked? What’s missing from the coverage entirely?
You don’t need me to tell you what to think about the Minnesota church story. But now you have the tools to see how different outlets tried to tell you what to think, and to decide for yourself.
That’s reading between the lines.
Did you see coverage of this story from other outlets? What did you notice? Leave a comment and let me know, I might feature reader observations in a future edition.
This was excellent. I have been trying to do more of this when I read the news, and I really appreciate the tools you include at the end. Your technique with the handwritten notes was very helpful. Thank you thank you thank you!!
This was excellent and so helpful. I've been trying to wrap my mind around how some very intelligent family members can fall for the spin of NYT/CNN, but this really helped me understand it.