Religion & the Media: The Editors Chicago Forum:
Williams, Martin Marty, Peter Steinfels, Don Wycliff, Carol Marin, David Neff, Daniel Lehmann Washin
Religion & the Media: Three 7Oth Anniversary Forums Media treatment of religion has become a neuralgic issue. The perception of bias, unfairness, or outright distortion has reached the point where...
...How do we know that the Ten Commandments came from God...
...We almost expect that...
...I think that is not only a good definition of religion's role and purpose in our lives, but I also think it's a very good definition of the journalist's task...
...The spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion...
...It's my responsibility and the church's responsibility to make the world understand when it is that we are speaking theologically, and when it is that we are speaking from natural law...
...A page in a magazine like Commonweal, the New Republic, or the Christian Century is about 1,000 words...
...It's a hate war...
...Should not a fair-minded journalist leave his or her mind open to at least the possibility that the rain doctors know something we don't...
...I remember when the first reports were coming out, it was largely being treated in some of the reports, NBC included, as the Catholic Church imposing its view on the world...
...No, they tend to keep good news a secret...
...Dart: Yes, controversy is an element of a news story that will maybe push it up somewhere near the front...
...On the religion side, you not only need more attention to public relation efforts, especially at the regional level, but also-contrary to people who are familiar with Commonweal or some excellent pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post and some thoughtful writing about religion- throughout the country I see religion not expressing itself in very compelling, articulate, sophisticated ways...
...The reason I bring this up is this: All my life, ordained and unordained, I thought of myself as a minister of the word...
...But there may be less conflict in these contradictory findings than one might think...
...The aim here is to provide something handy, answer the editor's questions: Give me a short phrase for the Pentecostal movement or something of that nature...
...Some of it is quite worthwhile...
...If you say, Easter, the day on which Christians allege Jesus rose from the dead, you make it sound like a crime...
...Rothman was saying in effect, that Allen and Dart were surveying a special group plus smalltown editors rather than national communicators, who were setting the media agenda...
...And I have no doubt that Lichter and Rothman are broadly speaking right in seeing journalists as a whole as being less religious than other groups in the country...
...Terry Eastland of Forbes Media Critic...
...He was in his seventies and was a very interesting man...
...Now the pope never used those words "implicit pact," but it sounded like a wonderful idea to us...
...That only happens when reporters are attuned by the elite new culture to treat religion as this fumbling little obstacle that we should have gotten over by now...
...But, again, going full circle, I don't think we can simply blame the journalists because these papers and these stories are selling and the public likes simple stories...
...When I returned to NBC, five years ago, I became the religion department because I had the impressive background of having been-I am very proud to say-in the grip of the Jesuits during my education which qualified me for well, very little, but there I was...
...I wonder if the feeling among religious people that there's some sort of void is because it's very hard to tell that particular truth...
...And, therefore, in a city such as Chicago, and I think much the same is probably true in New York, with 40 something percent of the population being Roman Catholic, easily 40 percent of the stories that appear in the Sun Times and the Tribune are Roman Catholic...
...Where news is controversy, a lot of this stuff you read, if you are Catholic or in any of the institutions being covered, you're not going to be happy...
...In many ways our editors, certainly mine, are increasingly driven by marketing and market shares...
...You, in the media, do not cover that dimension of the story...
...So they were pretty important, but also in danger of sensationalizing the account...
...Fleming Rutledge: [Senior Associate, Grace Church, New York] I want to make an observation and ask Mr...
...Mary Alice Williams: Is there an antireligious bias in newsrooms...
...The reverse is also true...
...He had big name reporters, Ethan Bonner, of the Globe, others, quoted as saying this...
...Diversity-conscious news editors need to hire more people who are explicitly religious...
...The best estimate is that fewer than 70 of the nation's 1,500 daily papers have religion specialists...
...Let's take them in reverse order because a lot could be done about ignorance and incompetence if there were adequate resources...
...The cutting edge of what's going on in terms of religious sensibilities and beliefs and spirituality in America is an odd mix of New Age expressions and language, but curiously resonant of old-line sorts of rhetoric...
...Some of it is just maddening in terms of what you're allowed to say, what you are uncomfortable in expressing for fear of offending or of not getting it exactly right...
...I want also to talk briefly about something that I refer to as the abortion distortion...
...Third, there is a failure to cover the legal aspects of certain political-religious disputes...
...Lewis's Screwtape Letters in which Satan tells his nephew, and I quote roughly, "All we have to do is to get them to believe we don't exist and then we've won...
...My colleagues here on the panel loved it...
...John McDermott students is now under attack by a strong national movement...
...But there's something to be said for reporting controversy...
...it's almost seen as if there's really no difference between ignorance and knowledge about it...
...On what issue...
...I notice that there is frequent reference made to those in the so-called religious right in terms of their support for something called school prayer...
...That is out of more than 23,000 stories, again not counting weekends...
...But I think it's a largely unreported story...
...There are editors who do not know that Baptist churches do not have altars...
...But there is a cycle and there will come a time when everybody loses the institutional memory ten years from now and they'll do it again...
...That fluidity is missed when you emphasize the pronouncements of church denominations or religious bodies...
...laughter] He and I were the non-Ivy contingent at Time...
...This is true in terms, certainly, of the media's origins...
...But you really felt, I think, a prochoice or a prolife person would listen to that and say, that was a remarkable essay on an issue that is dividing us...
...When I quit, there went the religion department...
...The emphasis on biblical inerrancy, so puzzling to secular people, and even to nonfun-damentalist Christians, was, in part, the result of a rational search for a form of authority strong enough to resist encroachments by liberal and modern ideas on traditional doctrine...
...In general, our recommendations were that organized religion needs more media savvy and news media need more expertise and familiarity with religion...
...Put it down in the third paragraph...
...The culture wars over abortion and homosexuality, to name just two, are inherently political...
...I thought I understood what secular meant* but in the context in which I was reading* it almost sounded godless...
...You hear the same sort of language permeating New Age sensibilities and it's very exciting to see...
...But the professional's role is to do it in a measured, accurate, and perceptive way...
...Francis Haniscalco: [Director, Office of Media Relations, United States Catholic Conference] Should religion reporting be rethought in terms of the expert sort of commentary that all newspapers have...
...Whatever the religious proclivities of Journalists, contemporary Journalism needs to question whether it is confining the coverage of religion to a ghetto...
...On magazine shows and Sunday talk shows, only 18 segments in 1993 covered religion, again with Catholics dominating, except that here clerical sex abuse or celibacy outran the papal visit...
...KEYNOTE ADDRESS Peter Steinfels Religion and the media is a topic surrounded by hypersensitivity, if not downright paranoia...
...On the day that a Supreme Court decision about abortion was handed down-I can no longer remember which decision it was or which side it gave comfort to-a colleague was asked to write a sidebar to the main report...
...Steinfels: To pick up from both Roy's and Carol's remarks about the truth: I think that's what motivates me and it motivates a lot of the people I work with...
...Neff: One thing that is often missed is that newspapers have to do very short stories and the electronic broadcast media generally do the very quickest takes on things...
...TV Guide had a cover story, "Is God Snubbed by TV News...
...Then suddenly, well, wait a minute, there's also a coalition here, with the Muslim Fundamentalists, Islamic nations...
...I am the Lord your God...
...We had some time before the pope got there, so I started talking to people from the area...
...Those two events taught me two things...
...Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter, The Media Elite (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler 1986...
...I can tell you personally what has happened in both my life in public broadcasting and in commercial broadcasting: Frequently when I would bring up subjects for religious programs or programs with themes of-again, rarely religion, but more broadly philosophy and theology and ethics, I've had very sophisticated mature television programmers tell me, "You know, that's kind of cute...
...Horatio, a modern man of the world, is astonished at the sight...
...Let me give one example...
...You have people viewing these things differently...
...That's one difficulty...
...They have no idea...
...Kevin Clarke: I'm from Salt Magazine...
...I didn't try...
...I don't think the coverage of the Good Friday decision took into account the recent surveys which show that 85 percent of Americans define themselves as Christian in one way or the other...
...These people were perhaps using the same language but talking about different realities seen in radically different ways...
...It isn't a conscious conspiracy to hold religion down or to ignore coverage...
...I want to talk from my perspective as a participant, as a respondent to reporters and columnists, to print, audio, and video journalists...
...Those formats do constrict us to the extent to which we don't sufficiently cover religious experience, particularly religious experience of the kinds of people who are apt to be readers of the New York Times...
...It's now twelve years later and reporters are doing it again...
...I have not necessarily been successful, but I think that it is a real issue...
...Baker: All of this discussion is centered around journalism in the newsroom...
...If you cover the killing of a police officer in Chicago, it is almost inextricably linked with religious observance, the sermon, the music, the pageantry, the respect, the reverence of what his faith brought him, how he served his profession and so forth...
...Islam, incidentally, did better than Jews or specific Protestant or other religious groups...
...Everybody knew what the story was and they kept telling the same story over and over again...
...Both for a major newspaper at least, and I'm sure for a television program, a great deal of planning often goes into the stories that are more than the day's stories...
...I think in large part it was the constant news coverage of the debate in Cairo...
...So there's that problem...
...On the one hand, they were anxious to point out any bit of chicanery or betrayal of the public trust on the part of elected officials...
...So, this is a really complicated and fascinating question about what secular means and how it operates in the media...
...Lee: I don't think there's a shortage of religion coverage in America, but I do think the coverage is of religion as an interest or a hobby in Stephen Carter's terms...
...We are almost at the point where the right-to-die issue is about to be considered in the press as settled...
...As I read religious writers in their analyses, what I keep hearing is the word secular, the secular world, the secular reporter...
...First, Ideology: journalists are ideologically opposed to religion or unusually influenced by negative stereotypes of most faiths and believers...
...Although it did mention that Act-Up had run into the cathedral, it didn't have any of the gamey details about interrupting the Mass and spitting out the host and jumping up and down on it...
...This is called a new class...
...I think of two examples of issues that, because they were not controversial, were not reported...
...I am sure the church gets better play than the Congress...
...This reporter said quote, "This practice has its precedent in the Bible...
...I obtained a tape recording...
...The voluntary associational life of religion is the biggest, single, undercovered story...
...You would have liked it...
...The condition of a man's soul is a matter about which he already knows the news, if you will-in the Christian tradition, for example, the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ...
...They don't get through the screen either in commentary or in reporting...
...At the New York Times we have postmortems of every issue and somebody wrote an article, in which they included a profile of the subject: where he lives, what kind of a laptop computer he uses, where his last vacation was, the car he drives, and then his religion...
...And wait a minute, just what did the State Department say in May...
...The Dallas Morning News has a project to start a weekly section...
...In looking at John Dart's data about how people who are religious by trade see the media versus how people in the media see it, I must say, it is exactly the same as the way any other trade sees the media...
...The reason why we do it and the reason why I do it in the area of abortion, is because I don't believe I'm speaking about revelation or theology directly...
...News & World Report...
...it's quite a different experience from the Israelites wandering in the wilderness...
...The sheer number of institutions and services that the church as a whole delivers in this area are unavoidable...
...We can do a program on religious, or other controversial areas (nothing is more controversial than a controversial religious area, I might add), that gets a 1 or 2 rating (in New York the equivalent of about 200,000 people) and I might get 5,000 or 6,000 letters...
...Dionne mentioned my passion for the Buffalo Bills...
...The press lives off novelty and "itching ears...
...And I often think that journalists think that we are far more important to the proper running of the universe than we actually are, and assume that the whole world is interested in what we do...
...Now no one expects a sudden explosion in employment for religion reporters...
...To refuse even to enter temporarily into the world of the religious believer reflects a lack of religious imagination that should be foreign to a journalist trying to do his or her job right...
...The real issue, I think, is not the precise figures on the religious inclination of journalists, but rather the way journalists, religious and nonreligious alike, regard religious news itself...
...You see a spate of books written by people who claim that, despite all appearances, we are a minority...
...And, therefore, we pay an inordinate amount of attention to names...
...The Times was almost alone, for example, in deciding that, in the absence of more impressive evidence, the lawsuit charging Cardinal Joseph Bernardin with sexual abuse was worthy of no more than three or four paragraphs on page twenty-seven, and when that lawsuit was withdrawn by the accuser, the paper, a bit mechanically in my opinion, reported the dropping of charges in a similar low-key fashion...
...their morning newspaper consisted of manna delivered every morning from heaven...
...For instance, the other day I was doing a radio program on NPR and the host said to the Muslim [also being interviewed]: "Isn't your religion kind of famous for degrading women...
...I think that writers like Anna Quindlen really don't know any theology...
...Faith in a Box: Television and Religion," No...
...Whereas when you're filling someone in about a discrete subject within a larger arena of religion, sometimes my quotations are like a thud...
...One, can the desire to be entertaining and interesting deform and distort...
...They are also broader political issues...
...How do I finally apportion degrees of responsibility for media failures in religion coverage among the factors I have described...
...Of course, I cannot really quantify these matters, and, of course, the reality actually varies from one form of media to another and from one outlet to another within each form...
...But there is another ideological factor that enters into religion coverage, and that is the professional ideology of journalism, the ethic of objectivity or balance...
...He deeply believed he had encountered Satan, and while I'm not big on Satan myself, it was impossible to doubt that this man's description of what he had encountered was entirely honest...
...All of this indicates, I believe, that religion is at least visible in some parts of the media...
...And I'm curious if that is the perception of those who represent religious interests or of religion writers...
...The Mass ended and the pope got some more cheers...
...It was done in 1992-93 at Vanderbilt, while Jimmy Allen and I were visiting professional scholars there...
...Now just a second...
...But believers do deserve to be treated without bigotry...
...The specialists, in effect, were somewhat more religious than the public-at-large, the editors somewhat less but not at all the secular-minded crew portrayed in the Rothman-Lichter study...
...In talking to journalism students I tell this story and ask them to consider what their assumptions are in coming to stories about spirituality and religion...
...And this is not, and here I speak as a Commonweal Catholic, this is not simply a phenomenon of liberals or the left...
...In the United States we have a score of significant Christian groups, and hundreds of smaller ones...
...Thank you...
...it's not relegated to a special section which runs a real danger of accomplishing what Stephen Carter referred to as making religion a hobby that people have...
...The fact that the president of the United States and the would-be Republican nominee think family values are the main thing to talk about to attract voters to their causes, argues that the counterculturalism of churches through the '60s and '70s is paying off...
...Evangelical Protestantism is changing, and it's changing rapidly...
...I don't see why anybody should be interested at all...
...The percentage of clergy who were unhappy was high, even those who identify themselves as mainline clergy...
...I think a lot of the problems with people doing investigative or political type reporting on religious matters is that it's badly done...
...Steinfels: You mentioned the amount of time...
...Professor: Right, uh huh, uh huh...
...I'd like to try to do two things today: First, I want to reflect a bit on my own experiences covering religion, especially the time I spent covering the pope and the Vatican...
...Martin Marty: Today, the voluntary association is the religion story...
...Therefore, she chucked the mandated holiday by ordering a preliminary injunction proscribing its enforcement throughout the state...
...The other lesson is that religious institutions really are, in their way, thoroughly worldly and understand the imperatives in the world they are dealing with...
...Act-Up harassed his wife and put paint on his house and everything else...
...I think Helen put it well when she talked about the need for justifications in some ways may be greater for religious institutions, partly because of our separationist tradition, or Terry would prefer me to say, a nonestablishment tradition...
...The daily book review has got belles lettres, biographies, political/contemporary affairs, some history...
...It cannot be overestimated...
...They read their bulletin We moderns read the morning newspapers or we listen to Cokie Roberts in the evening...lt*s quite a different experience from the Israelites wandering in the wilderness...
...Lots of journalists don't know how to cook very well, but they understand the importance of having recipes in their newspapers...
...The amount of work that reporters now do, the different places to which they are sent, the multiple stories they may do in a day militate against that...
...While the media, a cousin of social science and social science is a modern phenomenon, tend to exclude the supernatural as a category of explanation...
...He had loved his way to the cathedral and jumped up and down on the host and shown his respect for the church...
...But for the sake of argument I'll assign responsibility symmetrically to the three sorts of causes: one-third to ideological hostility...
...To console, but also and above all, to challenge and confront...
...But, of course, the story gets better and I bet you know how it turns out...
...And no one expects a massive increase in the amount of space that newspapers, television stations, or networks devote to religion...
...Yet, I do think, where religion is treated as a serious subject that provokes wide interest, the coverage is demonstrably better...
...You know it has to be good if public television will rerun it as a pledge show and ask for money around it...
...If there is an absence of discussion, that is because there are fewer of us...
...third, on more than fifty interviews with representative people in journalism and religion...
...So those who want to see murder, mayhem, and other gee whiz entertainment stuff, will have it, but those like me who can't find time to watch that kind of thing, will have something else to turn to...
...These are, I think, interesting questions, but I'm not sure that they are, in any way, decisive...
...Terry Eastland: I do think that there is an epistemo-logical problem of sorts, if you will, between the media, broadly construed, and religion...
...Anyway, not in the Columbia Journalism Review, not in any journalism review, not in the Times or anywhere...
...It simply is not as black and white as John describes it...
...The media stress conflict...
...When the writer of that TV Guide article actually called me up, he said, "I'd like to talk to you about an article I'm working on...
...Encountering in the New York Times's editorials, columns, and criticism, for example, almost unrelievedly liberal opinions and attitudes toward traditional morality that range from indifference to derision, these readers naturally expect the same in our news columns-and they will find it regardless of all our protestations, and indeed practical efforts, to the end of keeping editorial and reportorial treatments separate...
...All of my colleagues with names like O'Hara and Gibbons and Murphy and McCarthy went to the telephone and said, "The pope began...
...I never got an answer back on why that happened...
...And they're angry at the media...
...Does the secular reporter now mean a reporter who is irreligious As I read religious writers...,what I keep hearing is the word secular, the secular world, the secular reporter...
...Carol Marin imposed professionally...
...From the church's angle, this can be an area too hot to touch, particularly for television reporters who, as it has been pointed out, tend to reach more people than a single newspaper does...
...To jump to today...
...My own per-sonal experience is that reporters are somewhat more religious than the Rothman study would suggest...
...The best evidence is that a lot of the Catholic Church, for a good part of this century, has been countercultural in all kinds of important and good ways...
...United States...
...The real world, too, has to do with the responses I get running a major public television institution...
...A similar thing has happened in the media...
...If the taxpayer actually had to foot the bill for the food kitchens, the AIDS hospitals, the child care, the senior centers, that church and church people and all believers provide voluntarily, the nation would be hobbled...
...Well, we'll give them several short phrases [laughter...
...Our survey was nationwide...
...William F. Baker, with long experience in commercial television, is president and CEO of Thirteen/WNET, New York's public television station...
...Since then, I've learned that CBS affiliate stations in Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Huntsville, Alabama, have religion reporters who spend more than half their time on that beat...
...Fundamentally, traditional religion understands the world in terms that include the supernatural...
...The churches cannot expect deference from the press, especially on those occasions when they choose, as they must, to intervene in secular, political controversies...
...That is not something anybody who believes in making money would do...
...That's my first text, and my second text comes from one of my favorite articles and Father O'Hare's favorite magazine of which he was editor...
...You should label things for what they are...
...He had a huge Mass on Boston Common, and the rain doctor was not there...
...And, therefore, that the categories for reporting news tend to be nonreligious, nonspiritual categories, that tend not to touch that major portion of people's lives...
...Another finding is contrary to a common assumption in churches and religious circles: that the news media coverage is bad because of widespread unbelief...
...or even 12:30 p.m...
...There are, I think, many lessons here...
...Well, I disagree...
...Recently ABC hired as the first network religion correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer, who had been one of the very few reporters covering religion for a local station, the ABC affiliate in Dallas...
...There is a flip side to this: that the media should not assume that certain outrages are automatically worse when they are perpetrated by people in religious institutions...
...Monne: I just wanted to tell a wonderful story about Cokie Roberts covering the extraordinary synod in Rome...
...Second, the three "i's": ignorance, incompetence, insufficient resources...
...rather, it goes to the more fundamental issue of fairness...
...In the last millennium, the church looked East...
...Just as an example: I keep pointing out to reporters that Catholic women are actually more prolife than Catholic men...
...You do that because you think that's fair and also it is more interesting to listen to...
...If you try to follow what went on in Cairo at what I call the Abortion Conference, you couldn't figure it out from the Times, because in the non-Steinfels articles they just have no clue as to what's going on...
...I don't think you can cover religion in America from New York City without getting out...
...How can we help the reader get inside the religious experience, the religious world view of a particular group...
...It's amazing that that particular statute, part of the school code, lasted as long as it did, that it wasn't challenged earlier...
...But a lot of it is in the eye of the beholder...
...Faith-you can't see it, you can't taste it, you can't touch it, and you certainly can't prove it...
...All these things about column inches and the Lichter/Rothman study, I couldn't be less interested in...
...And, yes, it's true that Science Times is out there, and I think you have some data on who reads this stuff...
...That article, in fact, was occasioned by ABC "World News Tonight" with Peter Jennings, hiring Peggy Wehmeyer as the first full-time network television reporter to cover religion...
...There's been an attempt to start the Center for Religion and the News Media cosponsored by Medill School of Journalism and Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern...
...It's generated by names...
...The press is democratic and questioning...
...So when the tabloids picked it up, the Times scratched its head for ten days and figured out it had to sort of get the story into the paper...
...Where are you headed with this...
...There is a dearth of programming on this subject on television and there are a lot of reasons...
...Another view looks on traditional morality as enshrining a host of prejudices from which we need to be liberated-indeed it considers the proudest moments of recent history to be those when people were liberated from inherited prejudices...
...WASHINGTON page 26 Tim Russert is NBC-TV Washington bureau chief and moderator of "Meet the Press...
...The press looks to the tangible...
...They are a continually evolving and truly varied representation of many approaches...
...And in some instances, I think justifiably so...
...He further criticized their low return rate and failure to test whether it might be causing biased results...
...From that period's Progressive muckraking, the press inherits its suspicion of figures in authority and of all high-minded statements...
...They have a quote on one side and they want a quote on the other side, because this is the way they can prove to their readers and their editor that this is an objective story...
...This would be intellectual discussion of a philosophical, theological nature...
...The media are most definitely a modern phenomenon...
...When I was at Time, Tom Callahan, the sports writer said to me, ever notice everybody here's from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Mount Saint Mary's in Baltimore...
...Greed, he said, was the clearest sign of Satan's presence in the world...
...Daniel Lehmann: Peter talked about the difficulty of dealing with an issue, given the space limitations of the daily newspaper...
...We give the two sides equal weight when, in fact, in whatever the political discussion is, whether it's a church discussion, a congressional discussion, whatever, they don't have equal weight...
...Helen Alvare is a lawyer and prolife spokesperson for the U.S...
...Everyone is trying to put together her or his own story and theology...
...And therefore their pronouncements, not necessarily those cases where they're really engaged in action, but their pronouncements about world problems, I really can't convince the desk that these are things that they want to give space to...
...The journalist is still going to shrug his or her shoulders and say, well, this one story isn't going to tell you everything, but please get acquainted, as you probably will if you're really interested, with other news reports and with the story as it unfolds...
...The suggestion has been made that most news editors today are very diversity-conscious...
...No...
...Dionne that that is not the issue, but sometimes that's seen as the issue: "Well, they're not religious-no wonder we don't get good coverage...
...The headline of the lead story on the event, accompanied with a photograph, had read: "Youths Gather in Denver to See Pope...
...What I observe is that when there's reporting of religious teachings to do with sexuality, generally the pattern is that they report it as rules...
...I can mark the very first day when the media said, "Roman Catholic Church and other conservative organizations...
...So I think we're dealing with a wider cultural phenomenon here...
...In the Allen and Dart study, nearly 60 percent of the religion writers surveyed reported having had no formal training in religious studies...
...That kind of stuff doesn't make the evening news...
...I have sat in offices, one of them at Channel 13, talking to a number of very sophisticated people and suggested that perhaps we do a series on religion, and one of the producers with some seniority looked at me and said, "But Bill, you know, the separation of church and state, it's illegal for us to do a religious program...
...There's a great deal of frustration displaced onto the media about dealing with some of the uncomfortable realities of our lives...
...Those are the exact words...
...Daniel Lehmann or disinterested in religion...
...But, he goes on, "Instead of discouraging moral inquiry, religious prompting can just as easily stimulate it by calling attention to the dysfunction between verbal profession and practice, by insisting that a profound observation of prescribed rituals is not enough to ensure salvation, and by encouraging believers at every step to question their own motives...
...Well, if the result was biased, in my judgment it was biased, at the very most, 55 to 45 in the direction of her beliefs...
...Anyway, this is following up my very strong feeling that it's a matter of unfamiliarity...
...They're all scientists...
...I said, "Well, what's the thesis of your article...
...Religious people living in a free society cannot expect others to accept on faith that all they believe is true...
...But we also know that in this society, unfortunately, the electronic media really dominate thought and opinion...
...If you look at the ACLU, and similar groups' programs, you'll see tax exemption is next on the list, a challenging of the tax exemption of churches and church-related institutions across the country...
...I have yet to hear a bishop stand up and say, "I'm sorry...
...It was like covering a presidential campaign in October, a few days before the election...
...Above" here is a relative term...
...John Leo writes a column "On Society" for U.S...
...It will change publishing and broadcasting...
...DISCUSSION Tim Russert: Thank you E.J...
...Journalists have great room for creativity in conceiving stories, pitching them to editors, reporting and writing them...
...It poured...
...DISCUSSION Don Wycliff: I keep on a bulletin board next to my desk a quotation from Hamlet, a line spoken right after he and his friend Horatio have seen the ghost of Hamlet's father...
...That's really kind of immature thinking on your part...
...One of the problems with what might be identified as the religious left is that as a reporter you're not very confident about how many of the grand statements about world issues are backed up anymore by conviction and emotion in the pews...
...Catholic Conference...
...If we're going to talk about the bashing of religion, Catholic-bashing, Evangelical-bashing, and Fundamentalist-bashing, I think we also have to acknowledge that there's media-bashing, and this creates a certain immunity among media people to fair criticism...
...Contraception could be defined in such a way as to include abortion or exclude natural family planning...
...And when the Christian Coalition got involved in the Rainbow curriculum debate a couple of years ago here in New York, that was portrayed in the conventional prismatic way of right-wing Catholics, right-wing Robertsonians ganging up to tell New York what to do...
...We feel that the premise is vastly overstated...
...In a study completed in 1993 for the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, John Dart, veteran religion writer for the Los Angeles Times, and the Reverend Jimmy Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, traced the misuse of the Rothman-Lichter data...
...Roberts: Nobody's calling for term limits for priests [laughter...
...In terms of the earlier point about the way that the religious, cultural wars are reported, or the religious right is reported, I think I would agree with a good deal of what John McDermott said...
...It occurred to me after four months in the factory that I was an ideal choice, because I was Catholic...
...It doesn't got calculated into the government's index of leading economic indicators...
...One column was about 900 words and it's even less now that we have conceded to the realities of modern eyesight the need for additional space between columns and lines of type...
...Bryan Healy, senior political producer for CBS News, told a conference at Columbia University a year ago: "It is the rare executive or senior producer who wakes up on any morning with a thought of theology or theocracy on his or her mind...
...And if you look at our life, it does seem to me, at least, that most of the action, most of the aggression, the pressure, is coming from the left...
...and Joseph O'Hare, S.J., Fordham, who graciously welcomed the forums to their campuses...
...The first religious story I ever covered was the snake handlers of the Holiness Church of God in Jesus' Name...
...Or perhaps that the pope was particularly blessed that day...
...Medical reporters are expected to have passed through medical school, legal reporters through law...
...I think some of the blame that's been pointed at the media is in that sense misplaced...
...It said, "The Lord spoke to Moses and said, when you reap the harvest of your land you shall not reap right into the edges of your field, neither shall you glean the loose ears of your crop...
...It's the race and gender PC lobby and the new publisher has made clear what the coverage is going to be on these matters...
...Peter Steinfels There were certain things in the series about the Catholic Church in the United States [New York Times, May 29-June 1,1994], the results of this poll that we took, that absolutely startled me...
...My favorite story in the entire time I was covering the Vatican took place in a town called Beminda, up country in Cameroon, during one of the pope's visits to Africa...
...Eastland: Speaking of this great question, what is news, there's the other question, what is truth...
...That is a common response...
...Leo and Mr...
...The First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt had backed them in that...
...This is the issue my friend covering the pope was getting at when he said, tongue-in-cheek, there was nothing but religion in that particular packet of papal speeches...
...The churches cannot expect deference from the press, especially on those occasions when they choose, as they must* to intervene in secular, political controversies...
...Nonetheless I have learned of readers complaining that we played the accusations on page one while relegating the retraction to a tiny article...
...The abortion issue is settled...
...Although the study's conservative origins naturally influenced its further examination of how the media treat certain topics like abortion, these numbers are fairly objective-and telling...
...I think we are seeing the culture coming back around to it...
...The other problem is youth...
...When they're asked, 75 percent of religion writers said religion was "very important" to them...
...As part of its 70th anniversary celebration, Commonweal invited journalists and religious leaders to participate in three public forums exploring these troubled relations...
...And it's not just the Times...
...That's a very hard thing to communicate, I think, to many reporters...
...So too the various watchdog groups, each with its own ideological axe to grind, concentrate on bias rather than incompetence, and some operate in any case with little sense of the media's working conditions...
...The abortion distortion has badly infected other areas of interchange between the public and journalists and religion...
...In fact, these statements are mild extensions of the data compared to others in more polemical sources...
...It had been raining, I was told, for six days...
...My experience has to do with the naive nature of the journalists and the management in the television business, both commercial and public...
...If a journalist is supposed to be a Joe Friday, just-the-facts-ma'am enterprise, the facts in that story do not necessarily point to the conclusion that this was the merest coincidence...
...So if I'm a Protestant, I do not bring Protestantism to my story...
...If you want to talk about voluntary associational life in America, 80 percent of it is being done by the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities and Bread for the World and so on...
...Religious bodies are frequently hierarchical and authoritative...
...I think that the Catholic Church, for example, would have benefited from more, not less, early reporting on the question of clerical sexual abuse...
...Dionne, Jr...
...The findings and conclusions: a high percentage of clergy felt that religion news is biased and unfairly negative, while newspaper editors and religion news specialists strongly deny such is the case...
...He took very seriously the whole notion that the people doing the killing believe that they were operating in a tradition that was akin to John Brown's tradition...
...it's about whether or not a third human being has a right to live or not...
...A friend with one of the wire services once said that any story she wrote with the words "pope" and "sex" in the lead were guaranteed to be used in every paper all across America...
...The New York Times ran an extensive series on Muslims this past year, which was not occasioned by anything particular, other than the increasing presence of Muslims in the United States...
...E. J. Dionne, Jr...
...Practice can be counted on not to measure up to preachment, and preachment is, of course, a specialty of religion...
...Secular humanism is not a compliment for many people...
...I thought it was rather nondenominational and secular, but nonetheless, it was evidence of my religion...
...I don't think it's fair for any of us to separate those out as religious issues...
...Show me...
...I suggest that the most important goal for those seeking fairer coverage of religion is the same as the goal George Meany set for the trade union movement-more...
...These presuppositions or assumptions are usually not malicious and perhaps not even intentional, but they certainly put a subjective spin on the public understanding of events...
...I thought it interesting in this respect that the pope's encyclical on morality, Veritatis splendor, was very much undercovered generally, certainly in the United States...
...I'd like to see the press notice that more...
...You don't see your colleagues until the end of the day...
...At one point, one of the clergymen said something about the media's reports of violence...
...If you say Easter, the day on which Christians claim Jesus rose from the dead, you make it sound like a lie...
...Peter Steinfels is senior religion correspondent of the New York Times...
...The first is that my friend was right...
...We didn't cover it because there wasn't controversy...
...I kept expecting these phone calls to be congratulatory telephone calls about the Billy Graham documentary...
...When a member of the Catholic hierarchy claims that there is no connection between priestly pedophilia and the requirement of clerical celibacy, you don't need to caricature that...
...If it is ultimately forgiving of human weakness and folly, it is not because it ignores them or attributes them exclusively to unbelievers...
...Your back's up against the wall anyway, and you're just a bunch of white, celibate, old male guys, and you don't really represent most people, so your opponents deserve two to one...
...When I started in 1972 with WBIR-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, we had a five-minute Billy Graham news segment, a syndicated religious discussion...
...The pressure of time is related to the problem of preconceptions...
...Professor: Okay, it's the last book in the Bible in the New Testament...
...What's new...
...I didn't propose it as a story...
...Then they started recognizing that it is a disease, incurable disease like alcoholism, and started getting the handful, in terms of ratio, of priests who were perpetrators of pedophilia out of the parishes and away from the children and into some sort of treatment...
...We were handed a big packet at the beginning of the day, and having read through it, one of my colleagues, one of the best Vatican correspondents, looked up with alarm and said, "What are we going to write about...
...They were a legitimate part of the story because they were at the basis of a lot of the outcry that came over the convention...
...Because there was no controversy and nobody wrote about it, so there was no spotlight of the press on the actual piece of legislation...
...My friend and I left this conversation with big smiles on our faces...
...Mary Alice Williams the ones doing the reporting...
...My sense is the great middle portion of Americans are not energized by those sorts of polarities...
...We talked...
...It virtually never reviews a serious book about religion unless some controversy has arisen, when they belatedly decide they have to have a review of it, and it's usually not a first-rate book...
...We tend to be chary of a quest for religious unity at the expense of genuine differences, particularly when it is imposed from above...
...These sorts of regular interchange can improve the actual quality of reporting, as well as the quality of the relationship between religionists and members of the media...
...That is actually relatively uninflammatory language as far as this discussion goes...
...The Times also buried Act-Up's campaign against the New York City Health Commissioner, Steven Joseph...
...So finally, the church got smart and got Helen Alvare as a spokesperson, which is the best thing that has happened to the Catholic Church in a very long time...
...So he figured out the best way to get his message across, and it worked, proving that even the Good News is subject to spin...
...Why was there no theologian or philosopher from one of the great metaphysical or philosophical traditions...
...it's about faith and not reason...
...Are young people returning to religion...
...Rothman and Lichter had, of course, found nothing at all about their elite journalists' level of religious information...
...There's a dynamic and a fluidity to it that I find very, very invigorating, very exciting...
...Religious teaching is often compex and subtle...
...And it has...
...Churches will get whacked from the left when they take a stand against abortion...
...Speaking as an individual and not as a journalist, I expect a bit more from people who are nuns and priests and ministers and rabbis...
...Third and finally, the framework of journalism itself: its conceptual framework-the way that news is defined-and also its practical framework, the conditions under which news reports are produced...
...It's just that simple...
...The real question for me is where are the stories...
...As the novelist James Carroll put it, referring to his own church in an essay for the Nietnan Reports, "To Catholics who want to return to the idea of a church mystically exempt from the human condition, the reporting of a simple truth about church affairs can be an affront...
...Now, to know theology is no big deal...
...And, also, for people, if you will, on the secular side or on the media side, not to question automatically the right of religious people to be in the public debate, because I don't know how we could have a public debate without their presence...
...It's a bulletin board for modern people to communicate through...
...Second, what about incompetence...
...As a profession we are actually more concerned about bias than incompetence, because frankly it is a more interesting problem to examine...
...That's news...
...Now he understood perfectly the irony of what he was saying, but his comments did raise some interesting questions about what journalists look for when they come to religion...
...Marin: When we do stories and...I will preface this by saying that many of them are very quick hits, they include tourist attractions like weeping Madonnas, the traffic jams that surround churches where they exist, which is not what I consider to be a religious story...
...American religion or religion in America has been shaped profoundly by American history and culture...
...Much has been made of the conflicting studies of the religious views of journalists...
...Contraception is an important moral issue, but contraception is not a public issue in the same way because a life is not at stake...
...People don't get the idea...
...Lehmann: Well, I'll try that one by asking Bishop Imesch over here why he didn't return the phone calls that I made to him over the years...
...That story sank without a trace...
...It wasn't just the pope and a few terrorists against the world...
...The more controversial question, and one that will govern our search for improvement, is why this is so...
...In a certain sense I don't mind the metaphor of culture wars...
...A frequent question I am asked is what is an Evangelical...
...Often, too, I am interviewed and reporters have the perspective that it's not important for them to have knowledge about religion, because religion isn't about knowledge...
...Now, the thing that I refer to as the abortion distortion: The level of hostility has risen in the public debate over abortion...
...Some sort of-we're paying you back, we're saying you're not all villains...
...Second, there is increasingly a failure to cover the political positions of those people who are motivated for religious reasons to be involved in politics...
...Now again, that may be regrettable theologically from an orthodox perspective, but people are dabbling in New Age sensibilities, New Age expressions of religion, and that to me is very exciting...
...This is the only nation on earth that was specifically founded on no religion, even though its people are profoundly religious...
...But they just don't get it, that you can take religion seriously and report it in a critical way...
...People have said that when abortion entered constitutional jurisprudence, it upset all kinds of balances in terms of fundamental rights and privacy rights...
...Fundamentalists are imagined to be half-literate at best...
...There is no empirical evidence of the Lord's presence in our time...
...That story appeared as a two-inch item in the Times the next day which failed to mention, perhaps they didn't know about it, the desecration of the host...
...Now, there is something about the word secular, which can simply mean a kind of neutrality, but I think that it often works in our society to refer to a substantive set of world views and what is proper for discussion and what isn't...
...We feel that the weaknesses stem not from overt bias, but primarily from a lack of knowledge of the subject, a deficiency that handicaps most news people from doing a fully professional job...
...Christ telling the people to leave the edges of their fields unharvested...
...So, I did a very uncharacteristic thing for a reporter, I actually phoned a few people...
...During the synod, the bishops would all go into that ugly, new building at the Vatican and talk in Latin...
...You presume that that's not the most important discipline there is...
...But I couldn't resist at the end of the story, quoting a Vatican official citing C.S...
...David Bennington, who's a historian of religion at the University of Sterling, in the British Isles, has argued, I think very persuasively, that Evangelicalism is very adaptive...
...He got back on the plane and the heavens opened and it started pouring...
...How do you plead...
...The Commonweal Forums were supported by a grant from the Catholic Communication Campaign...
...Neff: I think that most of the people that I hear use the phrase [secular] that way usually mean godless, a person who doesn't have any kind of religious feeling and commitment...
...As Peter Steinfels noted in an earlier session in Chicago, being a religion reporter, even in a paper that takes religion seriously, is like being a one-man sports department...
...I decided to conduct a little survey of articles that dealt with religion in the New York Times between Saturday, May 28 and Tuesday, June 7 [1994], an eleven-day period...
...Of course, we know the rest of the story...
...So it's a very difficult story to do-we have models for it, we have human interest models, etc.-but we have not done sufficient religion writing, reporting along those lines...
...Christians, Jews, and Muslims affected by the modern world may seek to rationalize or water down these beliefs, but for the devout, they are quite simply true...
...Religious people...cannot and should not want the media to exempt church leaders from criticism for the sorts of failures that are routinely criticized and brought to light in other human Institutions...
...Lehmann: When I used the term secular and secular education and a secular newsroom, I was talking specifically about the world view that by my definition is not parochial...
...Good moderns always try to keep up with the news, of course...
...Judith Banki: I want to throw a couple of questions into the hopper as well...
...So I looked in the camera and said, "Well, now it's in God's hands and God is good and God is just...
...For them, truthful and aggressive reporting of church affairs broadly defined, is not only welcome, but also essential...
...I see a lot of very doctrinaire things being said...
...The New York Times can have a whole section entitled Science on Tuesdays, in which it commissions stories and the stories are not all about controversy...
...In France, the Catholic Church plus the others...
...I used to think that way, but as I've become more sophisticated I realize that that's really not important...
...John McDermott: [President, John A. McDermott & Associates, a public policy and urban issues consulting firm] We're all being too nice, so let me invoke the spirit of Saul Alinsky, a great Chicagoan, and say I think it's time to open the sores of discontent...
...Going to the encyclopedia can be daunting, because you get a full history and so forth and you don't know currently what terms can be used...
...So, I have no real optimistic theory on how to turn this around but the press is more and more an alien culture that you have to translate before you know what's really going on...
...I think that's the reality...
...National Public Radio assigned a reporter to cover religion, and its "Talk of the Nation" program with Ray Suarez began giving intelligent attention to religion...
...So what does this really mean...
...it's not that they are mean-spirited and cynical, though heaven knows some certainly are or we wouldn't be subjected to what we are subjected to each night on television...
...The first was with a priest who was handling the press on this story...
...I was the religion department...
...Here is a truism: Reporters and editors are very often described as malicious, venal, and all manner of venial sins, but we scarcely ever accuse them of stupidity, which is usually the cause of their offense...
...When I speak to a full-time religion reporter-and I can think of many, New York Times, Saint Petersburg Times, Time, Newsweek-who actually has a background in religion, you can tell...
...Stephen Carter, in his book, The Culture of Disbelief, talks about how the whole abortion debate has created a fundamental shift in the way these issues are perceived...
...you'll go to hell...
...And, yes, they are suspicious of authority and I think that's appropriate: Not to be contemptuous of authority, but to remember that authority, including cardinals, bishops, popes, are people who work for their flock, just like presidents work for us...
...In the four years that I've been interacting with the media, the good news for me is that I think I've come to be comfortable with journalists and therefore, vice versa...
...Sam Donaldson's response, which was one I encounter regularly, was, "I thought this was about mortal sin for you guys...
...No mention of anything that actually occurred...
...He found it...
...It was a real-estate writer, who had been investigating the community development going on at the Lawndale community here in Chicago...
...Cokie Roberts: Thank you...
...And it is hard not to get trapped by the very elements that one has invoked to win column space or broadcast time, not to let these elements be highlighted to the point of distortion...
...and having to produce a story by 5 or 6 p.m...
...Third, the framework of journalism itself, the working definitions of news, and the practical conditions under which it is carried out...
...During the service when announcements were being given, the priest said, "Now we're going to have a convention this week, it's going to be in Louisville...
...I think that there is...
...In the postmortem this was circled and a correction put in: The New York Times does not report people's religions unless it's relevant to the story...
...The Good News isn't, by any conventional sense, news...
...One of the reasons I love what I do in the study of American religion is you have the symbiosis between the two, this give and take...
...it's true that religious leaders should hold themselves to the highest standards, since they preach those standards to the rest of us...
...There was a case in the Supreme Court, this year, the Kiryas Joel case...
...About 60 percent of the stories were about Catholics, with Supreme Court church-and-state cases and reports on the religious right in second place...
...Any thoughts on that...
...I think this point goes to our failure to really try to create arguments and to force choices in the sense that make it easier for people out there to make choices...
...Religion and the News: A Conference Report" (The Freedom Forum, Columbia University, 2950 Broadway, N.Y., NY 10027-7004,212-678-6600, free...
...Minorities are "in" these days...
...They didn't notice because nobody in the newsroom had ever met anybody who had any reservations about abortion...
...I may have a greater understanding of what that faith is, but there is great care and great deliberateness in saying that what I am personally is something that should not be Whatever I might have thought about drinking strychnine and handling snakes...which they believed was biblically justified, the two men I met were like me, like any number of people who have a belief, who live in a community, who support the community, and who are often misunderstood...
...Alvare: We say that the reason that we teach as we do is not to repress sexuality or to deny it, but because sexuality is so important that it ought to be valued in these ways...
...We have defined the religious right as a problem in that story, rather than in neutral terms...
...Now, that doesn't mean they're any more or less re-portable...
...I think some of what is today called bias or slant, in the coverage of religion or religious issues or religion and politics, does stem, perhaps on a subliminal level, from the difference in these two kinds of worlds: the different approaches, the different categories in which people think...
...Third, ignorance...
...Father Avery Dulles recently tried to analyze some of the sources of tension between the news media and the Catholic Church and his insights can be extended to religious faiths generally (America, October 1,1994...
...There are no debates in newsrooms about abortions or the death penalty...
...We all hear the bells we hear and we each have a responsibility to try to go beyond that...
...When you report the culture war, when you report these issues, you record that aggression is coming from the right, the pressure is from the religious right who want to create a more conformist America, and you neglect the story of the left...
...It could be given to teen-agers without parental involvement...
...and when something is both important to the church and ought to be reflected in the law...
...That story is the lonely individual against oppressive centralized power...
...But I'm sure that there are plenty of people who heard conservatives on the Hill saying the church just another liberal lobby group...
...They're also about significant and interesting things that are going on in science...
...Stephen Bates, "Separation of Church and Press," Fortes Meilia Critic, Summer 1994 (60 Fifth Ave, N.Y., NY 10011,1-800-825-0061, $7.95...
...Furthermore, a quarter of those stories were aired during Pope John Paul II's trip to the U.S...
...The words "implicit pact" appeared in the leads of both of our stories and my friend's story actually made it to page one of the Los Angeles Times...
...Certainly our friend, the Vatican spokesman, did...
...I just completed a book on mainline Protestants, revisiting the twelve great churches that were designated as such by Christian Century magazine in 1950...
...The end result is a question: Are you for this or against it...
...They come right off the campus now...
...Accordingly it looks on those who defy that traditional morality as at least deserving sympathetic attention, and as probably exhibiting a degree of bravery...
...And is religion reporting currently too closely based on the model of investigative or political reporting...
...This should never be discounted...
...I made a list...
...So, I was hired to do an hour special which I did, which ran in July on "States of Faith in America...
...I think they more and more come from the elite colleges...
...I felt I was treated like a child in my bringing up subjects like that...
...But when the controversy in those denominations continued for months and months and months, I said, hey, this is a story I should cover...
...The news media were developed primarily to report on politics, sports, and business-and to entertain...
...The series is called 'The Glorious Accident," which, in itself, is a kind of metaphysical /religious statement...
...For a lot of people, it's more important than sex...
...We approach them sometimes on that level...
...It was a great blessing for all of us that she was there...
...And it shows a major shift in the way Evangelical religion is experienced...
...Some years ago on the 'Today Show" I heard a report from a Midwest reporter on a group called the Gleaners who picked up the leftover, unharvested corn, grains, and vegetables from local farms and distributed it to food centers and soup kitchens for the poor...
...The door opened up and suddenly it stopped raining...
...And he replied, "Because the rain doctors told me...
...But I would also appreciate some more background and knowledge on the part of the person interviewing me...
...One of them, in New York, had a headline that was simply "Sad Day," with a one-column story and not much more...
...Complaints about the media's treatment of religion have a sound basis...
...Another problem for the church in the public square, and it bears on both the responsibility of journalists and the responsibility of the church, is to clearly articulate, when you are speaking about a position that is morally important, the difference between something that is important to the church and you are not trying to change the law...
...So, I have become in some ways more vehement-at least to wave the flag...
...Newspaper editors in our survey, 35 percent or so, said religion was very important to them...
...If you go back to the civil rights period, the people who complained the most about the intervention of churches in the public square were mostly Southern segregationists who were furious at the extent to which the civil rights movement grew out of and was based within the churches...
...But the Catholics who glory in the humanism of the church, understand that its limits and its sins, like their own, can be forgiven...
...David Shaw, the press critic at the Los Angeles Times, did a 20,000-word piece on coverage of the abortion issue...
...I did a piece when the pope came last time about the Catholic Church's lobbying for social justice on Capitol Hill...
...That is, that most reporters, while very anxious to decry electoral corruption and campaign abuses, were also extremely, in fact, I would say terminally, cynical about the possibility of any kind of electoral reform...
...He reported it, and he was roundly criticized...
...The whole congregation went into cheering and clapping...
...But if you look not at the stories about religion, but at a story in which religion is an element, I think your surveys would really be quite different...
...I'm often reminded of those pictures in the Middle Ages of the different disciplines...
...One was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the other was the Americans with Disabilities Act...
...it's not just coming...
...The whole moral tradition of the West in the form of the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition, visa-vis sexuality, has been basically banned from public education...
...The first disability bill that was written was a terrible bill...
...An hour is from here to eternity in television terms but still, it was one of those hours that NBC chose to allow stations to run at local option and in some places we got wonderful placement...
...But what's really exciting, it seems to me, is that there is this marvelous sort of eclecticism going on in American religion today...
...So as soon as anybody or anything religious comes up, they're hearing those voices from their childhood, not appreciating that there may be something substantive there...
...Overt antireligious sentiments are rare," Dart and Allen concluded, "but uninformed reporters are too often intellectually lazy about getting their facts straight when assigned to cover religion stories...
...The professor was explaining the sect's reliance on the Book of Revelation...
...You shall leave them for the poor and the stranger...
...Are women abandoning religion...
...What was striking about this legislation was that it managed to gather together such previously at-odds groups as People for the American Way and Concerned Women for America...
...It's really the lack of resources, of expertise you can call upon to help cover a difficult subject...
...For tens of millions of Americans, and literally billions around the world, religion is a central fact of life...
...It is an industry in which they cyclically eat their young and you're seeing a lot of that...
...You have to convince journalists that there is news and that there are people out there who are thoughtful and convincing...
...And yet, for that kind of statement to be made about a religion seems to be more acceptable, and I do believe that's in large part because of the tone of the abortion debate in our society...
...The Catholic Church is something like the Marine Corps, with papal documents and statements by cardinals constituting marching orders and anything less than immediate submission equivalent to mutiny in the ranks...
...We [Dart/ Allen Report] feel that religion news suffers from too many mistakes and mischaracterizations, and too many pertinent religious elements in stories are missed or avoided...
...laughter] And, I had to say, well, not as often as I'd like, but there are others who have made this kind of sacrifice...
...In fact, the Times had to back down recently, after six articles in a row on how the religious right was this terrible threat to America, they finally had to have one on page one saying Evangelicals are nice, too...
...But what's really happening in American religion...
...Two encounters were of particular interest...
...This is an exercise that's especially important to the modern world, especially the one that is now coming into being everywhere it seems, with the demise of communism, with the spread of democracy, and with the spread of capitalism...
...Many churches are inherently undemocratic...
...When the Washington Post does that, it's to the good...
...But things are getting better and part of the reason they are is because of forums like this and because of people like E.J...
...You are practically forced to begin with a strong hypothesis, a kind of shadow story in mind...
...Very few people ever knew what was in the health packages...
...Suppose your hypothesis or imagined story turns out to be wrong...
...Heck, we're still trying to figure that out in our magazine, and I've got several, many definitions...
...I think that these industries are changing dramatically and rapidly...
...There is a willingness to take religion seriously, and there's a feeling that it has its place on the front page...
...I joke here, but I do think this is a serious problem and a serious source of misunderstanding between journalists and people of faith, precisely because religious people are profoundly convinced that what they believe is true...
...That reporter sits with a picture of herself, her husband, and the pope on their wedding trip as they're kissing his ring...
...Compare, for example, the treatment of the Catholic Church in the media to the coverage of the Salvation Army, which holds equally traditional or even more traditional positions on controversial questions of personal morality but has chosen to stress social service and direct assistance rather than interventions in the public debates...
...When bias does show up, it's most likely to be on public, perhaps clerical issues, writs by religious bodies...
...Convinced that its message is permanently valuable, religion shuns innovation and seeks commitment to truth...
...At one time, the Fundamentalism that preceded Evangelicalism in this country was not only culturally dispossessed, but economically dispossessed...
...Aside from those high-minded philosophical differences, there's some plain old animus...
...it's not that the newspaper editors are sitting there saying they're people dying for religion and we're not giving it to them because we hate religion...
...That it isn't just one thing that can be traced from year to year and decade to decade...
...it's important for us to know that traditional religion is a premodern phenomenon...
...Hamlet says, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...
...The story I wrote began with the lead, "It was not clear who had done the work, but someone was clearly on the job...
...Those who are complaining about religious stereotyping, it seems to me, are not quite on the mark...
...They will get whacked from the right when they oppose the death penalty or economic injustice...
...The problems in commercial television, though, are much more transparent...
...At the end of all the interviews, the director said in my ear, you have fifteen seconds to fill...
...I elaborate this point to suggest the difference between the traditional religious groups, a premodern phenomenon, and the media, which are distinctly modern...
...These are listed below, along with others readers may find useful...
...It makes it more interest-ins...
...Usually I was given two weeks to put an hour-special together...
...It was the week before the Episcopal convention meeting in Louisville...
...I'm one of two on our paper [Los Angeles Times], but there are only about three newspapers in the country, maybe four, that have two full-time religion writers...
...I have been working for five or six years trying to figure out a way to get more religious, philosophical, theological content in a broad spectrum on public television...
...And other findings lend credence to the charge of invisibility: The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, surveyed ABC's "World News Tonight," CBS's "Evening News," CNN's "World News," NBC's "Nightly News," and the "MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour...
...There are a variety of things like that, where the problems that do come out are handled so badly by the people who are being covered, that it exacerbates the problem...
...A wonderful example of that sort of thing...
...It does not, however, demonstrate that all is well with the media's handling of religion...
...I was able to convince my employers at NBC that it was in their interest for me to bring "Meet the Press" to the Super Bowl the day the Buffalo Bills were playing the Dallas Cowboys...
...Religious people, I think, cannot and should not want the media to exempt church leaders from criticism for the sorts of failures that are routinely criticized and brought to light in other human institutions...
...Religion reporting is like parenthood, the only training is personal experience...
...A similar survey, done about the same time, of all kinds of journalists, came up with just about the same figure, and another 35 percent in both surveys said religion was somewhat important...
...Society did not understand the new rules and regulations for people with disabilities...
...Russell Shaw in the Nieman Reports said that he thinks we influence The fact is that 165 days of the year, the churches arc Ailed with believing;, caring people...
...We live today, it seems to me, in a culture of victimization...
...The influence is really not on one side, it comes from both...
...So ten or twelve days later a piece appeared by Jason DeParle who had just been hired...
...He had a whole range of points of view...
...So you've got an amalgam of opinions...
...Even the idea of voluntary prayer by Many religious people in this town feel there's a cultural war going on In the United States, a real battle over the future and makeup of society and the quality of our country...
...In writing that story, I contacted what I thought was a nice broad spectrum of opinion...
...And so after the Cowboys squeaked by, 52 to 17, I moped back to the hotel and there at the corner bar was Brokaw, and he said, "Well, I guess God's a Southern Baptist...
...Roy Larson: [Retired religion editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, now director, Center for Religion in the News Media, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University] In 1973 I went to a church as a visitor, just dropped in at the 11 o'clock service...
...I recently received a newsletter from a conservative Christian group charging that religion was invisibile in the media...
...With all of that said as a preamble, is there any good news...
...Probably not an explosion in any sort of employment in our profession...
...It is simply misinformed, bad reporting, if you will, to assume that religious faith is nothing but prejudice or superstition...
...laughter] Joseph Imesch: [Bishop of Joliet, Illinois] I just want you to know, if there's one thing I do, it is return phone calls...
...The evidence of religion in American society today, which is as we all know the healthiest of any country on earth, gives lie to the notion that the press is negatively influencing people about religion in any significant fashion...
...The coverage was really a mess...
...There's a lot of self-flagellating going on about why they have become so cynical and mean-spirited...
...So if you called me, you got a response, but you were out...
...And I fell into a long conversation with a bright young man who was a practicing Catholic and a representative of the provincial information ministry...
...I recently had the occasion to review a lot of writing on religion over this past year, and I noticed there were a lot of articles that were written, if you will, off the news...
...I think we all fall into these...
...But I would still challenge the editors of the New York Times...
...But the focus of the experience is quite different...
...Many religious people in this town feel there's a cultural war going on in the United States, a real battle over the future and makeup of society and the quality of our country...
...My opinion is that the church did not handle it very well initially until it hit the headlines...
...That is not explored...
...Cokie Roberts was there, and Sam Donaldson...
...Everybody was appalled...
...If you watch what purports to be news in the context of magazine shows, it is murder and mayhem and precious little else...
...Niebuhr went back and found that the Post had run eleven stories on World Youth Day, ten of them in the front section, four of them on page one...
...There's lots of marble everywhere, and you have a bunch of guys who say one thing and mean another" [laughter/applause...
...I think there's good evidence that a lot of peopie get very worked up about the so-called pronouncements of church bodies, that they take these things very seriously...
...There is thus not the inclination to try to understand it on its own terms...
...But we are now in an era where we debate virtually every word we use...
...They'll give the coverage if consumers want it...
...There's nothing but religion here...
...We've seen the removal of religion, basically, from high school textbooks...
...You are racing in...
...Is religion reporting based too much on investigative reporting...
...I have never seen an article on his reportage on the abortion issue...
...Theology is not important to them...
...So, frequently there are stories of this character that are religious in nature, that are sort of written off the news, off of some particular news event, not just controversy...
...She has been excoriated for doing so because she broke some of the pedophile stories before the [Chicago] archdiocese was as open as it currently is about this subject...
...We do face a major problem in educating those who are working in the press about Protestantism, in general, and about Evangelical Protestantism, in particular, because it is a rather shapeless movement...
...One sees traditional morality as enshrining a legacy of wisdom about how we should live together and therefore challengers to that legacy as deserving of a skeptical or jaundiced examination...
...I think that one of the hurdles that religious institutions face, and I do not think it's an easy question to resolve, is the issue of the legitimacy of their intervention on any given issue...
...Contemporary American journalism, on the other hand, is the quintessentially Enlightenment profession...
...He got the Pulitzer Prize but they gave it to him just for the McMartin thing, not for his abortion story, because they didn't want to give a prize for that...
...Mary Alice Williams who was news anchor for CNN and covered religion for NBC-TV, now heads her own production company...
...I wanted to respond finally to one of the rhetorical questions raised in the forum program having to do with negative stereotyping, Catholic-bashing and stereotyping, on the part of the media...
...And I asked him, "How do you know this...
...And someone could have said, "that's negative...
...Famous...
...Earlier this summer I had a phone call from one of the tabloid TV programs, and I forgot what it was frankly, desperate for an interview...
...I thought I understood what secular meant, but in the context in which I was reading, it almost sounded godless...
...But since a lot of religion coverage will be done by nonreligion specialists, whether you like it or not, most papers should have something roughly like a religion editor, not just a religion reporter, but a religion editor who has the same responsibilities as people in science and medicine at the Times...
...It's not to deny them the faith or the respect that they deserve, but it is to explore who they are and what they do...
...Without the terms to articulate mixed in with all sorts of other attitudes...
...There is a cleansing process...
...My own experience is closer to Niebuhr's than to Woodward's, Ostling's, or Healy's...
...When I read a political story, as I did this morning in the Tribune about the elections in Iowa and Virginia where Evangelical Protestants are supposed to be playing a major role, I don't recognize myself as part of that political force that's being characterized...
...But you really kind of grow out of that, Bill...
...There is an interest in religion," he said...
...I don't think so...
...They are involved in checking out subjects, maybe having some involvement in the assigning of stories that touch upon those subjects, even if they're not Reporters live in a discipline replete with fact-checkers...
...Robert Wuthnow's book On Acts of Compassion, notes that 56 percent of adult Americans volunteer for something every week, but that 70 or 80 percent of them do it through religion...
...There's a reason to be grateful for controversy because at least it tells you what's going on...
...It was presented in the basic story line of the press...
...The media are very much with us...
...I went to the Servants of the Paraclete [treatment centers], I went to Saint Luke's, which has a fabulous program...
...Then there is the tape, broadcast on National Public Radio, of the briefing a Baylor University religion professor conducted for reporters during the Waco standoff between government agents and David Koresh's Branch Davidians...
...By secular I mean a way that looks at the world as all parts being equal...
...You can interpret that however you like...
...I have no idea what the rain doctors' track record is over the long haul, or whether it's any better than that of secular meteorologists...
...It began to be a much more objective discussion and more objectively covered...
...The other difficulty is that-and this is only a difficulty for me as a religion writer-the religious left seems to me to have become habitually nervous or uncomfortable with stating its concerns in explicitly religious language...
...Russert: Thank you Helen and thank you all...
...Everyone wants to be a minority...
...It's really entertainment programming and other things...
...There is absolutely no question in my mind that resonating heavily with television and radio mass audiences, is the subject of faith, theology, religion, ideas...
...I mean hierarchical above, not ultimate above...
...And this is where that invisibility factor comes in...
...Nonetheless it is hard to escape certain elements: for example, the need for conflict, the unexpected, or the unusual...
...I am serving on a panel very similar to this Friday morning at Brookings about Congress and the media...
...They don't get these things...
...Allen and Dart argued that their results matched a 1985 study by Ernest C. Hynds of the University of Georgia and another study by Judith M. Buddenbaum of Colorado State University, as well as yet another study in 1982-83, repeated in 1992, that phoned 1400 journalists at papers, broadcast outlets, news magazines, and wire services...
...He was from Turin and was upset that his city, with its reputation for rationality and efficiency, had come to be seen as a place of superstition and Satanism...
...Religion was the subject of 197 stories, less than half of them interviews or reporter-based reports as distinguished from brief stories narrated by an anchorperson...
...They like a contest...
...By religion I mean traditional religion, the great faiths of the world, those that stretch for centuries and millennia backward in time: Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and the rest...
...I wrote a letter to a friend who is on the desk at the Globe...
...Well, this is not journalism, folks...
...One day, a friend and fellow journalist was visiting-he had dropped down from the summit in Geneva-and they were reading this statement from the morning session which said that the patriarch of Antioch got up and said, "In this millennium, the church has been looking West...
...And the reporter said to me, "I have two questions...
...Well, the Times doesn't exist in a vacuum...
...Is that being neglected both by the media and by religious people...
...It mandated that all public schools in the state must observe Good Friday, along with Casimir Pulaski Day, Columbus Day, going down the line...
...Finally, I quite agree with the comment made earlier about the ghetto coverage of religion...
...Peter Steinfels about religion with "none," slightly less than the 10 percent found in most polls of the public...
...The Boston Globe once tried to cover-up an Act-Up desecration of an ordination in Boston...
...I used to be only clearing my throat in that space...
...David Neff is executive editor of Christianity Today...
...The problem is more difficult on the level of editors, who by nature of their primary assignments cannot turn to educating themselves in the multiple forms of American religion...
...Business reporters don't get their jobs without some business experience or an MBA...
...They are interested in it...
...The Billy Graham segment taught me that the media are not monolithic...
...Religion reporting is not treated with the same seriousness as those subjects or even the weather report...
...And the data are exactly the same...
...By their natures, reporters are mostly not joiners...
...The pope got out and began saying Mass...
...Again, turning to abortion, why should the Washington Post, as we all know, have to apologize for not noticing 500,000 anti-abortion people having a rally four blocks from their office...
...Now this is something that Bill Clinton said was nothing less than a very important issue to him personally...
...NEW YORK page 40 Judith Banki, of the Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum Foundation, is a veteran participant in interreligious dialogue...
...Here it might be worth underlining that another element in the Allen and Dart report, an analysis of religion stories in four papers (New York Times, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Atlanta Constitution, and San Francisco Chronicle) in March and November 1992, showed that their own religion reporters as well as religion specialists on the wire services accounted for between 41 and 23 percent of the religion stories...
...In the guise of objective reporting, he was staking out a theoReporters and editors are very often described as malicious, venal, and all manner of venial sins* but we scarcely ever accuse them of stupidity* which is usually the cause of their offense...
...It was very much a working-class religion, and there was a kind of coming up through the ranks, a bootstraps sort of thing that happens through education and other ways...
...In the fullness of time, the pope's plane landed and the crowds cheered...
...What we do is simply a glimpse at a subject...
...I was wrong...
...That line points to an epistemological divide: on one side, religion, and on the other, whatever there is that we deal with in the modern world...
...It wasn't reporters who shot up people on the Brooklyn Bridge...
...Healy thinks this is due to bias and lack of openness...
...Please God, one time, go Bills...
...I saw the little flap about this in several denominations and stories on Religion News Service...
...But there are frequent cases of getting an assignment at 10:30 a.m...
...It did not focus on religion writers at all, for instance, and on the other hand covered television people...
...For the traditional religious person, there is no such thing as religious news in an important sense...
...second, on an extensive review of scholarly studies and periodical literature on the subject...
...The people inside the media think we are, by and large, being fair and balanced and just telling the facts as they are, ma'am...
...Substitute the name John Cardinal O'Connor for Joseph Cardinal Bernardin...
...I figured that would provoke a few conversations around breakfast tables...
...But perhaps as critical as the limited number of knowledgeable reporters is the lack of religion expertise in the editorial ranks that propose and edit the articles done by other reporters, especially foreign correspondents...
...Four endless segments in the Los Angeles Times, saying it was all distorted and dishonest...
...CHICAGO page 14 Martin Marty is a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a senior editor of the Christian Century...
...Isn't it a reasonable accommodation for the majority who have respect for Good Friday to use the occasion in a positive way...
...Who's losing...
...But I might point out in the case of television, most of what you see on television has nothing to do with journalism...
...When the New York Times manages to spring Peter Steinfels out of his Saturday slot and put him on the front page, writing interestingly about religion, that's all to the good...
...They had written their scripts, of course, before the Mass had begun, which was a good thing, because before the days of traveling computers, we were doing this in handwriting and in the rain our scripts were all running down the page...
...Yet, she is perceived as a person who is expert in matters having to do with the Catholic Church...
...laughter] I'll begin with John Dart...
...American reporters, with the exception of a handful of the elite, are not opinion leaders...
...This is what a lot of people see: a militant, secularist movement determined to drive religion out of any expression in public life...
...This was the kind of argumentation that was coming to me from the producer...
...So, things are being ruled out of court all the time in the press and it isn't because they set out to be unfair, it's because they take the role of the individual against authority and because certain issues are conceived to be settled already...
...It's acceptable, as one network tried to do to me the other day, to have you and a person who says they're Catholic and disagrees with you, and a second, secular person who disagrees with you on abortion-to have a network say that's a fair program, because, after all, there's equal hostility in the church and outside the church...
...But we talk about the one time in ten years that there is a problem...
...He had seen that every day, he said, when he was working in the factories...
...The problem was at what point in the story did you mention these things...
...If it were well done, I think it would be perfectly all right...
...That story line goes on all the time in coverage of religion...
...They like news as a sports events with winners and losers because it simplifies the understanding...
...The snake handlers taught me that there's no room for contempt on any level for any article of faith or any believer...
...So that kids can be given condoms but they can't hear about the Ten Commandments...
...Fortunately, I can devote several days, sometimes a week, to many religion stories...
...Abortion has both been affected by the way the media treats religion, but I think it's turned around and has affected the coverage of religion as a whole, in particular, the level of civility between church and the media...
...People of faith believe what they believe because they believe it's true...
...A certain skepticism is an inescapable, and in most ways healthy, aspect of the modern journalist's mind...
...I can't think that you don't open your mouth to reporters and editors, as I do, when you see something going in the paper that's just dead wrong...
...Right before John Paul II came to Denver, in the summer of 1993, NBC News was bent on doing a story about priestly pedophilia...
...David Coolidge: [Graduate, Georgetown Law School] wanted to ask a question about the most controversial topic that a number of people alluded to, and that is when religion and media intersect on questions of sexuality...
...Where is the role of religion in those sorts of programs...
...Simply because she had abided by the rules of good journalistic practice, contacting both sides and quoting them accurately and in fair proportion...
...But they are also frequently exaggerated or inflated...
...And at the end of that story, you felt much more educated about John Brown's raid...
...I say to myself, on the one hand, this finding that a large percentage of American Catholics may no longer hold anything approaching a traditional view of the Eucharist, this could be an alarm bell for people who might want to start educating a bit more intensely...
...They're angry at you because they think most of the time your coverage is hostile...
...They found that of more than 18,000 story segments on those broadcasts in 1993, not counting weekends, only 212 dealt with religion...
...Well, he rode down the streets...
...They don't really have a place in the power structures in this country, whether that's in the universities or in the media or wherever...
...If the pope speaks about politics, it's a good story...
...Steinfels: I'm concerned about there being a false dichotomy there...
...Spirituality is very fluid, especially in American culture because of the free market of religion set up by the separation of church and state, by the free exercise clause in the First Amendment...
...Where are the documents...
...I grant you that the fact that 60 million people have gone to church on Sunday should not be a headline on Monday...
...That's a point that's forgotten too many times among writers of a specialty beat...
...Right...
...That was expected to be a controversial event...
...It is not so difficult to be a biased viewer or reader...
...Frank Butler: I'm with FADICA [Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities] My question deals with part of the Dart/Allen study which talked about the rift, if you will, or lack of trust, between clergy and journalists...
...Speakers, panelists, and discussants brought candid and knowledgeable observations to these lively and extended conversations, which appear here in edited versions...
...Russert: Our next panelist has actually spent a lot of his time on just that notion, that words are important and do have a meaning...
...The truth, he said, was that the Vatican had sent out a circular all through Italy...
...Give me the evidence...
...I confess to letting this person stay in my diocese...
...An example of that was the debate in Congress over sanctions against South Africa, where the vote was basically 405 to 30...
...Judging from the outside as a reader looking at space allocations, layout, magazine covers, and the like, religious subjects are treated comprehensively, critically, and fairly, and on, at least, something approaching equality with other subjects...
...No one in a church will like it any more than Clinton supporters like some of the things said about him in the newspapers...
...And I overheard her doing a live conversation with National Public Radio...
...Some journalists know a lot more about sports than other journalists, and Tim Russert knows more about the Buffalo Bills than anybody, yet I know of not a single journalist who would question the importance of having a sports section...
...The therapeutic culture in this country really has thoroughly permeated Evangelical Christianity...
...Because there was no controversy surrounding them, nobody knew they existed...
...I'd like to close by reading an excerpt from a forthcoming book by the late Christopher Lasch, who I believe lays out a constructive and ultimately very wise approach to religion that might inform us all as journalists, but also as human beings...
...What has this got to do with anything, you might ask...
...Our thanks as well to John Piderit, S.J., Loyola University...
...That implies a kind of dualism and I think that the elite, including the media elite, tend to buy into that, whether progressive or conservative...
...It is very hard, under those constraints, to embark on a general, exploratory fishing expedition or risk what, to mix metaphors, might prove a wild goose chase...
...Helen Alvare: My perspective is as someone who speaks to reporters, to the media, probably four or five times a day on subject matter that makes me in my professional life a walking, talking embodiment of the overlap between religion, politics, and sex...
...Muslims believe that there is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet...
...In all my years of journalism, I would say that the commitment to truth, the commitment to working professionally in the true vocational sense, the journalists I worked with, most of them, were secular monks, in many ways, with as strong a sense of discipline as any priest that I ever knew...
...I had mixed feelings about reporting them...
...There is Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American religion, each with its subdivisions...
...Yet, the deeper significance of it was not very well elaborated...
...You saw that very much in Cairo [The United Nations Conference on Population and Development, September 1994...
...It's my responsibility to make them understand that I'm not here preaching to them as if they should accept it because it is a religious truth, but that I am here, and that I have a right to be heard, because I am speaking about a subject that is rationally available to every human being who cares to take the time to look into it...
...Some editors at the Times thought that highlighting these invocations was really good-it was entertaining...
...Glamour magazine, I think we finally persuaded into at least exposing this reality...
...I don't think that there was any reporting that I saw that helped anyone understand the apocalyptic mind set...
...The depth of the comments about the church made on radio, on television are so hostile that I believe that that's begun to affect the interchange on issues other than abortion...
...What we do, I believe, at most newspapers, what we produce everyday is a daily art form...
...But there were also thirty-six other articles dealing with groups ranging from Orthodox Jews and mainline Protestants to Muslims, Mormons, and self-styled witches...
...The Nieman Reports had a summary issue on "God and the Newsroom," the Society of Professional Journalists' Quill Magazine had a story on religion and the news, Editor and Publisher had a number of articles from different contributors over the last twelve months on this subject...
...And the administration, recognizing that, had a change in policy...
...I thought it was very important to find out and I'd never been to Turin, so I went...
...But it certainly means that they're clearly not a religion story for me to report...
...There are people who object to the use of the words Fundamentalism, Evangelical, cults, sect, religious right, prolife, main-line, mainstream...
...Have a great day.'" I said yes, I did say all that...
...What authorities are you going to call...
...The good news, as I see it, is as follows...
...By giving them equal weight in the piece, it's distorted...
...Negative stories: Are we not to cover them at all...
...There is a flip side to this: that the media should not assume that certain outrages are automatically worse when they are perpetrated by people in religious institutions: E. J. Dionne, Jr...
...It was a very solid book...
...To this day, I don't know what to make of our conversation, except that I am sure I was in the presence of a very honest and very rational man...
...After that, I went off to a town in the mountains outside Turin to interview a priest who had long experience as an exorcist...
...it's per se public...
...This also involved the pope's trip to Africa with a series of speeches in three different countries...
...If religion wants to be covered as a serious news subject, it can't get by with pat answers...
...The priest did not know I was in the congregation that morning and expected to cover that convention...
...4 (Media Research Center, 113 S. West St., 2nd Flr., Alexandria, VA 22314,703-689-9733...
...Absolutely nothing...
...Cultured de-spisers of religion suspect that religious tolerance, in short, is a contradiction in terms, a fact seemingly borne out by the long history of religious warfare...
...There really is "no news" most of the time in standard religious declarations...
...For her segment, she was asked the question: Is covering the extraordinary synod at all like covering the Congress...
...While I understand, particularly for the consumer market, the drive to look for a controversy, I can't tell you the number of times a reporter has used the expression, "What's the hook...
...and Brings New Life to GOP...
...And to me, they are countercultural and empowering, particularly to feminists, which is why at natural family planning conventions you'll find people who are there, not only for the orthodoxy of the position, but who are there purely as secular feminists, there for empowerment of their own bodies and biology...
...Too hot to touch because people are so passionate about their beliefs that it's almost a no-win situation for anyone trying to report on what's going on within their own churches, not to mention reporters who aren't part of their own churches and don't know a lot about it...
...First, ideology: journalists are ideologically opposed to religion or unusually influenced by negative stereotypes of most faiths and believers...
...I certainly remember the shock of space limitations I felt when I arrived at the New York Times...
...I went back to the church and handed it to the usher and I said, "Will you please give this to Father after the service is over...
...Is to be against abortion rights a conservative position...
...This is a marketplace decision...
...So, in the end, that was the finding and I didn't know what would be the consequences, good or bad...
...The perception of bias, unfairness, or outright distortion has reached the point where many groups assume that their views will not be accurately reported...
...one-third to the inherited definitions of news and the inherent constraints of time and space...
...It was an effort to legislatively respond to a 1990 Supreme Court decision and to codify standards by which judges would evaluate claims of religious liberty...
...They buried that way down below too...
...I believe that a lot of the problems between those who speak for religions and those who interview them, can be overcome in many of the same human ways that problems between any two groups are overcome...
...One of the problems with what might be identified as the religious left is that as a reporter you're not very confident about how many of the grand statements about world issues are backed up anymore by conviction and emotion in the pews...
...That was one of the major points of Bellah and company's book, Habits of the Heart: that we didn't even have the language to help us live the kind of lives that we seem to be wanting to live...
...It's virtually impossible to switch gears in midafternoon and even when you have more time, you have already invested a lot of effort into exploring one possibility...
...Dionne: I think that the biggest danger of distortion in news stories is not that the reporter will not report something from both sides, it is, that the reporter will not understand both sides or try...
...and without it, I think, the soul of America would be lost...
...It judges those who profess the faith more harshly than it judges unbelievers...
...Often you will see a quote that makes a very reasonable and reasoned case on the one side, and a bald assertion on the other side, with no backup, but that side is covered...
...Now this story would prove to be an excellent vignette for a story I was working on about the relationship between Catholicism and traditional African beliefs...
...I would argue that, in fact, the opinion is much more a range of opinion, and there are a lot of people who are open to real persuasion when one can point out to them the biases under which they are operating...
...They had shouted outside, disrupted the ceremony, mounted a display of Jesus committing sodomy, and then when people came out of the church, they pelted the parents, including a little old lady, the mother of a new priest, with condoms...
...We have some data actually from studies of readership that shows that contrary to a notion that many religious people are primarily interested in local religious news, they are actually quite interested in national and international religious news...
...Religious people, I think, also need to accept that while faith is sublime, religious institutions are run by human beings, with human ambitions and human flaws...
...Our rules say, prove it...
...Many of those specialists work on the larger dailies in our major cities (a few of which have two reporters on the beat) and also on the wire services that are used by papers, radio, and TV throughout the country...
...I'm in my third year as moderator of "Meet the Press...
...one-third to ignorance, incompetence and insufficient resources...
...For the church, abortion is a public issue because a human life is at stake...
...I began to think then, as I have regularly over the last several years, when we talk about diversity-about having more women and people of color at the table-how that has improved what we do...
...He said they had nine groups in New York...
...I have found little evidence that churchgoing or religiously observant journalists are less likely to entertain stereotypes of others' faiths than their nonbelieving colleagues...
...I take the position that one of your obligations as a journalist is to give up, for the time that you're a journalist, some of your rights and privileges as a citizen in order to have the privilege of being a reporter...
...Oh, my God, I said, I've been outed [laughter...
...When you report on the cultural war, you talk about Pat Buchanan and the religious right...
...They grew up and were told: Don't do this...
...I have another grant to do a huge glossary on religion and its terminology...
...And they accuse you-the media-of not covering it neutrally, but joining sides...
...but, in fact, she's understood that the search for some basic truth in some ways is a transcendent ethic and is the ultimate morality...
...And my colleague turns to me and says, "Is this today's story...
...They chose that term for themselves, and now while there's plenty of food on the table, while their children go to some of the best colleges in the country, while they have multiple vehicles in their garages, there is still a sense that somehow they don't really belong...
...it's a broad question that enables me to discourse at length...
...Journalists considerably overestimate readers' attention to the distinctions between editorials, opinion columns, criticism reviews-and straight news stories...
...He was not going to be naive enough to pretend that we'd write about standard religious themes and that those stories would make page one...
...Anyone can have an opinion on that...
...they figure there's nobody that really cares...
...If he speaks about sex, it's a great story...
...And here is how he is right, right now...
...Msgr...
...Don Wycliff served on the editorial board of the New York Times and is currently editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...
...But television has long been a wasteland as far as religion specialists go...
...John Dart with the way in which nineteenth-century or 1865 papers carried that...
...It's probably for a number of rather complex reasons...
...The Italian press had great fun with this story and ran it under headlines like "Does the Devil Live in Turin...
...Many reporters, because of the murder, mayhem, injustice, and societal ills they do see, up-close and personally, cannot comprehend anything other than a random universe and so view those who see a grand design as fringe...
...He described a whole culture war sort of rubric that has become rather popular in recent years...
...Frank Greer, James Carvel, and Roger Ailes clearly have nothing on the Vatican spokesman...
...That is not as bad as it looks...
...I get immense amounts of material from every point of the religious spectrum, right, left, and center: press releases, invitations to cover things, and so on...
...One thesis I'd like to tack up: There really is a fundamental conflict between the definition of truth used by journalists and the definition accepted by people of religious faith...
...Now the spokesman, a very shrewd man, understood exactly what we needed...
...But I do think that that enters into the question, and I'm glad to hear so many people suggest that there should be something more than that little one page on Saturday...
...He said [laughter], "Well, last Easter Sunday you concluded the program by saying, quote, 'The sun is shining, the cherry blossoms are out, Christ has risen, Allah is coming, and tomorrow the Baltimore Orioles open their home season...
...A number of these stories began on page one, alongside photos with religious content, whether portraying John Paul II meeting with the Clintons or a church in Rwanda that had been the site of massacres...
...I walked out of the church, went down to the corner drug store, bought a legal pad and a pen, and wrote him a note...
...And so as a second thesis, I would suggest that secular people, including journalists, need to accept that religious belief is usually built upon an intellectually serious foundation...
...Only 10 percent considered them not at all necessary...
...I was grateful for his ignorance...
...So I ran to the Bible and checked the Holiness Code in Leviticus and sure enough, I didn't find any reference to Christ [laughter...
...I want to conclude by saying that one of the problems, that is a kind of irreducible problem, is that the Catholic Church, and all churches, will always face this attack on their legitimacy inside the debate...
...That story is the lonely Individual against oppressive centralized power...
...When I started, we would sit and watch the newscast together after we'd edited our pieces...
...I will return to ideology, but let me proceed for now to the second reason for news media failings in covering religion, the three "i's"-ignorance, incompetence, and inadequate resources...
...I think that was true, as far as it went, but it is often misquoted as representing journalists nationwide...
...I might have done better to use the word believe...
...Things you couldn't even conceive of somebody doing a story on...
...There is truth to both sides, but part of the problem, as E.J...
...It's just not right...
...I mean the recent discussion of the media's covering of health care: Who's winning...
...In addition, Michele Beardon, an excellent religion writer, returned to religion reporting at a new job at the Tampa Tribune...
...In other words, it's acceptable to be hostile here...
...A third episode is revealing about what we journalists look for when we cover stories...
...If you read the cable and you read Tim Wirth's comments, it's very clear that the United States was going to take a very forward position on advocating abortion rights worldwide...
...He did an amazing piece going back to John Brown...
...So, it is a problem to translate, literally and figuratively...
...Steinfels: There are all sorts of things going on here...
...That we're just reporting what's in the polls, what the polls show...
...That story line goes on all the time in coverage of religion...
...I'm just not sure that's true...
...Understanding the limits of journalism, I think might be the first step toward understanding it better...
...A lot of journalists don't appreciate that religion is not a different reality, but a different way of seeing reality...
...Without exception, the rest of the opinion was based on our understanding of our culture today with its proliferation of pluralism, by no means monotheistic in tradition any longer...
...And there are too few religion specialists...
...It was neighborhoods against Livingston Street [the New York City Board of Education] telling them what they had to teach their kids in the first grade...
...His next question was, "Why would a Christian give up everything to do something like this...
...Steinf els: I think there are two questions...
...Richard John Neuhaus calls the result the naked public square...
...The churches have every right to argue that their entry into these debates is legitimate...
...And the answer is yes, and you've got to be very careful...
...Anyhow, I enjoyed my little stay at the Times...
...Certainly, there probably is some of that going on, but let's be honest...
...They wanted to make sure that exorcists were on the job...
...Opponents of religion," Lasch wrote, "argue that it necessarily fosters intolerance, since those who embrace it imagine themselves to be in possession of absolute exclusive truths, irreconcilable with other truth claims...
...Another colleague and I approached the Vatican spokesman and asked him to make sense of these speeches...
...Sometimes it means reporting very uncomfortable things about a group to which one feels great loyalty...
...But I took this on and I discovered something about the media that I hadn't realized before...
...After all, the New York Times is a huge paper...
...There's tremendous antimedia feeling...
...Because religious voices get challenged as soon as they enter the public square, when people disagree with them the first thing they say is not that your argument is wrong, it's that you have no right to be there...
...I have noticed that the reporting of Evangelicals in the major newspapers that I read-I read nine a day, including the Times-is not serious...
...Thomas Reese* S.J.: [Fellow, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University] I often get calls from reporters and usually they are trying to fill out the other side of the quote...
...To take perhaps the most evident example to me: late in 1993, the Congress passed something called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act...
...A lot of us had come to Turin to look for Satan...
...Do you have two sources on the Virgin Birth...
...They have a variety of views that often conflict in interesting ways...
...The paucity of coverage on this bill was striking, as well as the inability of journalists even to see the political significance here...
...What you have instead is religious people overestimating the influence of religion in American life, and you have, on the other hand, the media downplaying it...
...There is fear of religion in the newsroom because journalists don't want to make mistakes if they're good journalists...
...I'm interested in the way in which theologically informed writing can counteract this kind of thing...
...The overlap between faith and reason is one that I'm constantly bringing up...
...Dionne: I wanted to go back to something Helen said, because I think this also goes to this issue when she talked about the abortion distortion...
...Dionne, Jr., former Rome correspondent for the New York Times, is a columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Post...
...On the other hand, I think there's not only room for these kinds of step back and analyze in light of a series of news events...
...When in fact, what we were seeking there was more human rights related to contraception, asking what happens when contraception gets in the hand of the government...
...In our report, which came out a year before, we say that Peggy Wehmeyer was the only local TV reporter covering religion, that was at a station in Dallas...
...That's really kind of immature thinking on your part...
...There are certain things that hold Evangelical Protestants together, but they are very, very diverse...
...Is it the hierarchy...
...I've been told by several people that, well, that you're a practicing Catholic...
...Thus, a third thesis I'd like to tack up, which is that whatever the religious proclivities of journalists, contemporary journalism needs to question whether it is confining the coverage of religion to a ghetto...
...Well, Cokie Roberts is all those things, but she's also a co-religionist...
...It is a serious question...
...In this era of cheap media bashing (and that doesn't apply to what John just said), which is what the priest had been doing, I don't believe that people within the church appreciate the vocational discernment and the vocational integrity of many of the people working in journalism...
...Apart from being deeply antireligious or simply are-ligious, is there an ideology at work in the media, or maybe simply a para-ideology, that affects religion coverage...
...As far as the print media go, there are reasons beyond numbers and column inches for the anger, distrust, and complaints about religion coverage...
...There is, it seems to me, in America a kind of aggregation of narratives...
...It wasn't reporters who shot at people in Hebron...
...The change that seems to be pervasive...
...What Peter offered in his speech was comprehensive, fair, and accurate: there is incompetence, there are insufficient resources, there's profound ignorance...
...People get worked up about these things...
...Take the coverage of abortion...
...Terry Eastland is editor of Forbes Media Critic...
...Is there going to be a schism in the church...
...According to a recent survey 85 percent of the people in this country said they would make a decision about whom they vote for based on the political commercials, not the programs, they see on television, and the average television set in the home is on seven hours a day...
...But they don't have the sophistication to really report on sophisticated issues and subjects, one of them being religion...
...First, ideology...
...But we talk about the one time in ten years that there is a problem...
...In 1980, as part of a study of media elites, S. Robert Lichter, Linda Lichter, and Stanley Rothman surveyed a sample of 240 journalists at seven major national news outlets in Washington and New York: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the three major networks, Time, and Newsweek...
...Whatever I might have thought about drinking strychnine and handling snakes, which they did and which they believed was biblically justified, the two men I met were like me, like any number of people who have a belief, who live in a community, who support the community, and who are often misunderstood...
...Now what brought that about...
...Otherwise the Presbyterians and the Methodists would not have had huge controversies over reports on human sexuality, and the Lutherans would not have dropped their study on human sexuality basically because of the reaction to the first two paragraphs of David Briggs's Associated Press report on the first draft...
...To go back to something Peter said earlier, where is the story...
...Labels tend to present a pictorial image that takes just one word rather than several paragraphs...
...Cokie Roberts reports for ABC News and National Public Radio...
...Therefore, the fact that you are a specialist or speak for a church, you don't know any more about it than I do...
...Late one Easter Sunday night, after I had covered the pope's Mass, I was staring at my computer screen facing what ought to have been a simple question, which is how do you describe Easter in a secular newspaper...
...They've got to get us on the first shot...
...And there was a negotiating process that goes back and forth about this: "Let's move that up to the first paragraph...
...Maybe the journalist might say they were written the way party platforms are written, and the guys who wrote them figured out the best way to sell them was to assert that God endorses the Ten Commandments...
...Nor do I think that journalists are capable of bringing down the world's religious institutions or of endangering the faith...
...In order to participate in the social conversation, religion and philosophy must be dressed in the garb of socially relevant discourse and not in the vestments of orthodoxy...
...Modern journalism was born in the decades before World War I. Muckraking was that era's typical form of rebellion against both the gilded violence of the Robber Barons and the faded gentility of nineteenth-century Victorianism, against Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly and Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence...
...Herbert Gans, Deciding What's News (New York: Vintage Books, 1980...
...In defense of the original study, Stanley Rothman replied that it was sampling a different group of journalists than Allen and Dart's study...
...Since Catholics were totally outside the mainstream of American cultural and intellectual ideas, I could cover them with a sense of discovery and fairness [laughter...
...Religion has things to say about a person's relationships in this world with other people...
...Turn for a moment from these efforts to quantify to the personal testimony of people in the business...
...The New York Times and other news organizations sent reporters up there to report at some length on the context from which this religion clause case came...
...So education and background in religion itself are important...
...Go back to the nineteenth century: when Lincoln was assassinated, I am struck News Is to keep up with what*s going on, and conflict is almost a natural part of news...
...It seems to me it's often used much more of the process of secularization that our society has gone through...
...To be sure, its teachings are by no means confined to this world...
...It's something vaguely childlike and that opinion pervades the press's attitude toward religion...
...Even though we ran a lot of stories about religion and an exceptionally lengthy and thorough examination of the Catholic Church, at the same time we were nonetheless devoting far more inches to the Knicks and the Rangers and their fortunes in the basketball and hockey playoffs...
...I can give you some specific examples...
...Marin: It is easy to be a biased reporter...
...And then by supplying information about politics, about markets, especially, the media serve what has been described by de Tocqueville as the basic democratic principle, namely that each person is capable of deciding on his or her own...
...Many churches' PR problems are brought on by the churches themselves...
...It turns religious people into advocates of religion in the abstract...
...As I walked off the set, my colleague, Tom Brokaw, said, "You can't pray on the air...
...Second, there is also a kind of a puerile attitude among a lot of journalists...
...Don't forget that more caricatures of religious positions are probably broadcast from pulpits on one weekend than from television in a year...
...Incompetence in the press is rife, and we do far too little about it...
...I agree with E.J...
...My question is, is there some corrective mechanism in the whole practice of journalism as a profession that corrects tendencies like these and checks tides that would go in those kinds of directions...
...There is something then about religion being eliminated from the picture of this major Washington figure...
...They don't join clubs...
...Second, the three "i's": ignorance, incompetence, insufficient resources...
...there is rarely any debate in most television newsrooms on abortion, birth control, celibacy, curriculum oversight, gays in the military, premarital chastity, or condom distribution in high schools...
...E.J...
...I'd like to see more newspapers do that...
...But another word for controversy is conflict, and conflict usually arises over something where the issue is unsettled or opinions divided...
...With diligence many religion reporters do their best to overcome their inevitable lack of knowledge, especially the lack of that kind of knowledge that only comes from direct contact and empathetic experience...
...This is playing to a constituency...
...I will say that as a writer, if I am working on a...
...We should not automatically believe any charge brought against any cleric or religious person-a lesson that we should draw from what was the terrible treatment of Cardinal Bernadin, who was subject to entirely false accusations...
...No one has mentioned the entertainment phenomenon of news coverage these days...
...The fellow who had desecrated the host-I forgot his name...
...The newspaper or news broadcast is a place where we try to keep up with what the different sides are saying...
...This is a problem clearly, not just for religion reporting...
...Our dream is to see a program on Channel 13, eventually fed nationwide, every Sunday night where Moyers would talk about issues of philosophy and theology...
...But the professional's role is to do it in a measured, accurate, and perceptive way...
...I think the answer to that is no...
...Was it negative to say that the Vatican was holding up a document that it believed was giving an international human right to abortion...
...Steinfels: Yes, I think theologically informed writing could make a big contribution to Americans understanding the culture in which they live and an understanding even of themselves...
...Most of my colleagues are one-minded, and it's a mind that's made up...
...That day it seemed we had neither sex nor politics to help us get into the newspapers...
...I remember when I was pursuing the question of how much Muslims in the United States were divided by their ethnic loyalties and the differing political concerns in their Muslim homelands...
...I actually do go straight from the Brinkley show to Mass on the theory that I have a lot to atone for...
...These are just routine horror stories in the way things are covered...
...Can you imagine that sort of generalization being made about any particular race or ethnic group...
...Neff: I got a call recently that again showed this proverbial ignorance on the part of a reporter about religion, but one that I really welcomed, because for once it was exactly the right question...
...On the marginalization of religion and why are religious aspects of stories treated badly: One of the paradoxical effects of what Helen referred to as the abortion distortion and the rise of religiously based political movements is that you have more of a religious voice and a religious aspect in news stories today than you did twenty or thirty years ago...
...it's like being required to cover baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer, tennis, polo, track, gymnastics, wrestling, and lacrosse, and to be terrible knowledgeable about every single one...
...Why is it so difficult for the religious left to get much of its message, which is simultaneously critical and hopeful about American society, out through the mainstream press...
...At first, it was simply the Catholic Church...
...I think that is the same thing that's at work in most newsrooms...
...In addition, those of us who are members of traditional religious minorities are particularly sensitive to the nuances of language, and, I think, quick to spot personal or institutional theological presuppositions hidden in common discourse, particularly in the media...
...Religious groups of students who wanted to use the school facilities, as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts do, had to go to court to get that upheld...
...People are anxious to debunk...
...Peter Steinfels is senior religion correspondent of the New York Times...
...Contrast that to the public response of "very important," around 60 percent usually in Gallup polls...
...John Leo: The New York Times was under pressure to hire somebody to cover intellectual trends...
...But the end result of working under tight pressures of time is that we abide by the law of journalism that says the news media do not in fact tell new stories as much as find new ways to retell old stories...
...We are faced, then, with a mixed picture...
...It's the old man bites dog story...
...And the people-who are in the, whatever the trade is or profession, in rare cases-are convinced that we are all out to get them, a bunch of biased, awful people who always get it wrong...
...Randall Balmer: At least once a semester I remind my students you cannot understand American history and culture without understanding the role that religion has played in shaping that history and culture...
...Lehmann: I've been out for a long time...
...If you will, there was not a focus on controversy in those days, such as it has become...
...Yes, to the extent to which we always assume that there are going to be two sides, not three or four or five, and that an event in the religious world will come to some kind of conclusion in which one side or the other will emerge as prevailing...
...News was not very exciting...
...There's a common mixup of these, in particular on the areas of abortion and contraception...
...Then they'd come out and they'd endlessly read these interdictions and stuff...
...I called the local organizer...
...DISCUSSION William Baker: Peter concentrated principally on print media which we all know is significant...
...I found this a very ironic attitude...
...Later, this became what I call a preconceived story...
...And rather than make a mistake, they write around the subject or the point...
...The usual solution is to put such belated discoveries on a list for the future...
...Joseph O'Hare, S.J.: [President, Fordham University] About six years ago, I was invited by Ed Koch to become chairman of the New York City Campaign Finance Board...
...I think the two together, perhaps, create a dangerous combination...
...They are opinion reactors, products of their own families and neighborhoods and communities...
...And they're angry at the media...
...You're taking the easy way out, repeating the phrases that you saw in a previous story and not trying to get somebody to improve upon that depiction or characterization...
...Their working assumption, no doubt, would be that all this was simply a wonderful coincidence...
...Christians believe that Jesus is God and rose from the dead...
...Steinfels: In terms of the religious left, I'm not quite sure what that means anymore...
...The conference that was held under the auspices of the World Council of Churches Year of the Woman in which the whole question of Sophia worship was raised...
...They didn't include Waco or the World Trade Center bombing stories, except where theology and religion were stressed...
...There are three standard explanations for the media's shortcomings...
...All the old language is still there...
...Because commercial institutions are so concerned about making the bottom line work out, they very often hire the brightest, the most charming, but also the least experienced people possible because you can pay them less...
...That it was closed up for so long was not to the benefit of the religious body, in this instance, the Catholic Church...
...The absence of civility here is leading to an absence of civility in areas way outside of abortion...
...The process of interreligious dialogue, in particular JewishChristian dialogue, has allowed us to see differences as not necessarily threatening to our own group, or at least to sense when they are threatening...
...The mail and the responses that we got from the series were incredible...
...Williams: Yes, the entertainment aspect has increasingly-over the quarter of a century that I've been in television- driven television...
...KEYNOTE ADDRESS E.J...
...Now, I'd like to take this opportunity to disagree with John...
...I don't claim to be a theologian, but I know enough to be respectful of what I don't know, and a lot of people are not...
...Would that have been three paragraphs on page twenty-seven...
...This series had a great impact around the country and he got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for the abortion series and for the McMartin child-care series...
...They do this unintentionally when they take offense, not simply at generally unfair coverage, but also at quite normal, less than favorable coverage...
...My generation's the last of the reporters who entered the trade that way...
...This is a relatively low-cost show, a hand mike and a desk and a lamp in the corner...
...That was true with the scandals of the Evangelical preachers...
...A suit was filed in federal court, I believe in March 1993, by a Chicago school teacher, who was joined by the American Jewish Congress, in challenging a part of the state's school code that dates from 1941...
...that they are as interested as we are ourselves...
...But it doesn't give you a real sense of the fact that the debate really went for an hour on one side and fifteen or twenty minutes on another...
...The fact that ABC has hired a religion reporter...
...And that means turning out the editorial product and responding to what readers say they are interested in...
...The Catholic Church and the more outspoken Evangelicals have often taken highly visible positions that make them representatives of one side in this conflict...
...Self-righteousness, indeed, may well be more prevalent among skeptics than among believers...
...That set off a whole discussion and debate, but it was healthy for everyone...
...And he had come to see that there was a strong religious dimension to what was going on...
...From these primary preoccupations we have inherited certain forms and expectations...
...Why should it be news that the pope should talk about Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and salvation...
...And I must take issue with Peter on one point...
...This is an article by Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, before he became president of the NCCB, raising the question of how does an authoritarian church function in a pluralist society...
...A lot of Fundamentalists shed that term Fundamentalism and became Evangelicals...
...So, the whole story was all screwed up because the reporting component was missing, and the prism was there to tell you that religion is an obstacle to freedom...
...My definition, the one that I recall from the first day, my first job, in Marquette, Michigan, was that news is something you don't know...
...I was doing pieces for National Public Radio...
...So before I say anything else, I want to make clear that I don't think that journalism is the alpha and the omega...
...All the people on the series are fascinating individuals...
...Roberts: Listen, I got attacked by a priest for saying it...
...I don't mean communication in that Cool-Hand Luke failure-to-communicate way...
...It is our nature, as journalists, to be skeptics, to be questioning, and to deal with controversy...
...Leo: So there.rogrammers tell me, "You know, that's kind of cute...
...They've been in rebellion ever since...
...I think that the same thing is probably true about the coverage of education...
...To the extent that people in various communities don't like what reporters say about religion, they don't trust us and we all lose our credibility...
...And the problem is that in response to a particular question that's being asked, and this is where I often think the confusion between natural law and pure revelation or what's a moral issue versus a public law issue comes into play-I say this and they'll say yeah but the end result is, you don't want the government giving contraception to teen-agers, and I don't care why...
...But it must be said that the churches themselves may actually discourage, rather than encourage, more extensive coverage and treatment of religious subjects...
...And that was in the hallowed halls of public television...
...And in the middle of the Mass the sun came out and shone on the pope at the altar...
...When I read the headline saying "Religious Right Gains Influence and Spreads Discord in GOP," I was thinking, you know, why doesn't it say...
...To the extent that the reality that John describes is accurate, the only way in which it will be changed is by a general change in the cultural sectors that produce these journalists...
...They're more likely to talk about their sex lives than their religious life or prayer life...
...And then he raised some very serious moral questions...
...And in his own biography, Falwell acknowledges that he, at one point, preached against religious involvement in politics and changed his mind because of Roe v. Wade...
...One of the little contributions was that they presented it as the pope with a few terrorists defying the entire world...
...Balmer: Nothing [laughter...
...in fact I was dragged into covering a lot of religion too...
...We arrived in a pouring rain...
...It did not survive the afternoon...
...They quote an editorial in the Evangelical flagship journal Christianity Today observing that "Studies have shown that news journalists are among the least churched, least religiously informed groups in the...
...But as journalists, we have to be consistent...
...Our souls are subtly affected as we go through this exercise...
...But you saw that the reporting on Cairo covered the theological position on contraception as if we were seeking to get the Cairo document to ban it...
...Joseph Komonchak: [Theology professor, The Catholic University of America] It news is controversy, then perhaps we really do have a serious discussion point here because religion is far more than controversy, and so perhaps the media or the news cannot really deal with religion...
...It's not spicy enough...
...Americans don't care much about theology or ideology...
...I think the issue was Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie...
...it's not been my experience at all...
...So I finally settled on, Easter, the day Christians revere as marking Jesus' resurrection from the dead, which may also be loaded, but I thought it was reasonably accurate...
...Saint Thomas the Apostle, doubting Thomas, could be our patron saint...
...Now that's something that has been developed over the years to prevent stereotypical presentations of religion...
...A particular place where I find this lack of background difficult-and it touches on something that E.J...
...For the next two weeks, I had phone calls from people throughout the country saying they had seen me on this program, which I didn't see myself actually...
...I learned early on, be very careful when you try to insert religion into a program...
...Growing up as a Fundamentalist in the Midwest, you hear about committing yourself to God, letting go, letting the Holy Spirit overcome you...
...Balmer: To me the story about religion is that it's not settled...
...But I would always ask them, "How do you know that for certain...
...Since the secular media are the primary source of news and information for most Americans, inaccuracy and unfairness pose a major challenge to the credibility of both religion and the media...
...laughter] He said, "You Irish Catholics are shameless...
...it's about opinion...
...And our able critics actually may reinforce this hubris...
...The only two who spoke out as I heard you, John, talking about fifty-three years of no harm, the only persons who objected were predictable, conservative elements within the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Coalition...
...They're watching "A Current Affair" or whatever it was...
...Robert Lichter, Daniel Amundson, Linda S. Lichter, Media Coverage of the Catholic Church (New Haven, CT: Knights of Columbus, 1991...
...And society as a whole suffered for that...
...Do we have any understanding at all of the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people...
...I think you see it used that way...
...From the one side, supporting that draft, some Lutherans said well, Briggs's story emphasized everything that was sensational...
...Nonetheless it is widely recognized in journalistic ranks that the news media's presentation of religion is less than satisfactory...
...Yet religion is often covered most when it is an adjunct to something else, especially, as I said, politics and sex...
...Terry Eastland boards in the morning...
...Cokie Roberts the polls by our reporting...
...Religious stereotypes operate in the world of journalism...
...They didn't belong to fraternities...
...One need not accept biblical inerrancy to understand how and why others do accept it...
...To what extent is the religious coverage problem one of accessibility, information, cooperation within the religious community itself...
...I had a very interesting encounter in this regard on the "Brinkley" program...
...Many smaller and medium-sized papers have treated religion as a beat anyone pulled out of the newsroom can do...
...They don't go to Tupperware parties...
...I think this is something that's terribly interesting and could amplify stories where the questions of feminism, Catholicism, and the politics of abortion come together...
...I think that if that's the only way to do it, it does not help to exaggerate the situation...
...On the other hand, it could set a new standard...
...First, frequently there is the reduction of religion or a religious issue that deals with politics purely to politics, so that the religious aspects are obscured or somehow minimized...
...I used to think that way, but as I've become more sophisticated I realize that that's really not important...
...There is a tremendous burden on the reporter to try to write, shall we say, pan-issue stories...
...laughter] And I said, "I just did...
...I have talked about this subject with Cokie Roberts several times, how people who are visible because of television, there's an assumption made, therefore, particularly if they have a Democratic pedigree, that somehow we are either non-religious or perhaps even atheists and how could you be anything else if you are so smart and visible and articulate on national television...
...Religion News Service, which has been a nonprofit struggling entity for decades, was purchased by Newhouse News Service and moved recently to Washington, D.C., and shows signs of being a major player in getting good quality stories to its existing 50 secular and 150 religious clients...
...They might even finally show people going to church on a sit com...
...Now it happens that this period included a major series of articles on the Catholic Church in the United States-four articles involving months of work that, starting on Sunday May 29, ran on page one with a full page or more of text, graphs, photos, and sidebars, on the inside of the paper...
...It doesn't belong there...
...Why do you say conservative...
...There is a certain status to be won in the American culture by claiming you are a victim...
...And he says, I'm quoting here, "Nor does a pluralistic society such as ours define that religion or philosophy should have no influence on corporate or individual behavior, but it does determine that such influence in the civic sector is to be exercised through dialogic persuasion in the political process, not through legal compulsion...
...I think, too, as Mr...
...I contacted the National Association of Evangelicals, the Christian Coalition of Illinois, a priest of the Episcopal Church, as well as lawyers of different stripes...
...They do not know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims or between the religious right and Fundamentalists...
...The letter writer accused the paper of only printing stories calculated to divide Catholics and stir controversy...
...The ethical and professional thing to do is stop and reverse directions even if it's now 4:30 or 5:30 in the afternoon...
...We'll also provide terms that you should not use, little caution signs maybe...
...I live in a newsroom where one of the best reporters we have most regularly covered the controversies of the Catholic Church...
...The educated elite that now goes into journalism is not interested in scrambling along reporting the facts...
...We gave two minutes to this guy, two minutes to this guy, two minutes to this guy, and two minutes to this guy...
...In many countries, religion is a one-church story or a one-and-a-half-church story...
...In New York, the program ran on Sunday, July 3, at 5:00 o'clock in the morning...
...Let me say another thing about another grossly underre-ported story...
...I think the context in which reporters work has the effect of making it seem as though reporters are godThe basic story line off the press on religious matters derives front the Enlightenment and In modern days the ACLU...
...let's say it's John Smith...
...You have to be convinced that it's better to know the truth than not to know the truth...
...Steinfels: A good thing about the Times, as I showed, is that we have religion stories on page one, which a lot of other papers don't have...
...God in the Newsroom," Nieman Reports, Summer 1993 (One Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 $5...
...Pope John Paul doesn't give American Catholics a vote...
...I have to say up until then, electoral reform had not been a consuming passion of mine...
...Thus they are perceived as engaging in, say Catholic-bashing or Muslim-stereotyping...
...They don't go...
...Mary Alice Williams logical claim...
...I think that locution without any elaboration obscures almost all of the issues involved...
...The press had flown in ahead of the pope...
...I would start by agreeing with everyone that those who cover religion need more background in the subject...
...And he said, mournfully, that as a result of its efficiency, the archdiocese had become the laughing-stock of the country...
...I believe I'm communicating natural law...
...After surveying the community on the needs and so forth, it may become a model type weekly issue-and not a ghetto on Saturday-but a high-profile section in a town where the religion writer says there can be traffic jams on Sunday mornings in Dallas...
...Protestant fundamentalism has had rigorous intellectual defenders, who came to their views as a result of a serious confrontation with modernity...
...John Leo less, or at the very least god-free...
...Russert: Thank you, John...
...Whereas teachers, lawyers, bank executives, and so on really abide by an American etiquette that says religion is private...
...Eighty-six percent said they seldom or never attended religious services...
...Since abortion is in the media so often and so explosively overlapping all those categories, it makes my former job as a corporate litigator, which I had thought contentious, seem a joke [laughter...
...How are you selling me this story...
...it stays neutral...
...He argued that if you read the speeches very carefully, you could see that the pope was offering the leaders of these various African countries-this was his quote, "An implicit pact, that if they respected human rights and religious freedom, the Vatican was prepared to do all it could to plead their case to the world for relief from poverty...
...And each issue in our age of reason is subject to whether it is rational, whether it makes any sense or not...
...There are winners and losers, the ins and the outs, who's up in the stock market and who's down...
...I'm not speaking now of columnists or people who do analysis...
...Whatever it was, they sent a crew out to the house and we had to do a quick interview...
...It turns out nobody's watching Billy Graham...
...And that means in whatever faith I was raised, or whatever faith I do or do not hold these days, that I don't carry that as baggage or as an attitude into the stories that I cover...
...Is the Vatican winning or is Planned Parenthood winning...
...I felt I was treated like a child in my bringing up subjects like that...
...We are, indeed, sort of one-hit wonders of once every nine months to a year on a particular topic...
...But that was about the same time that a documentary that I had done for PBS on Billy Graham came out...
...The trap is always to find the extremists on the two sides and have them articulating pure opinion without any backup, without any facts, without any argumentation...
...Whereas when I was in commercial television for thirty years, I would often broadcast programs that would get 20 and 30 ratings and the next day get no letters, no communications, nothing...
...Therefore, we don't seek to make contraception illegal, the way we seek to make abortion illegal, in our public comments and in our public endeavors...
...We journalists, of course, would say that a lot of what we do is just neutral...
...It is one of the reasons I left the business...
...Rural Methodists are harmless teetotalers who live for church picnics...
...What is peculiar to this para-ideology is a debunking attitude to all authority and ideals, rather than only religion...
...It's bad journalism when you're really going for the inflammatory remarks and are only quoting the people on the far left and far right...
...Roughly speaking, American society is torn between two broad perspectives...
...Religion deals with interior matters...
...Reporters live in a discipline replete with fact-checkers...
...They were going to do it...
...Bob Lynn: I'm a former Lutheran communicator...
...We have four Jewish denominations, and several significant strands among the Orthodox alone...
...Indeed, they are most plainly addressed to man's soul, which modern categories tend to mark off as strictly private...
...This cultural divison is reflected in our fights over abortion, sexual morality generally, and a lot of other questions...
...But you really kind of grow out of that, Bill...
...I think there are generally three problems with coverage...
...Now those of you who have followed any of those things know that among the events at the conference were various invocations which were extremely biological if not gynecological in nature...
...Half an hour after I got home that day, the priest came to the house, his tail dragging, and full of apologies and he's been apologizing ever since...
...If religions and churches want to be reported on and given the same treatment that our political institutions and our educational institutions and our police force get, then they have to expect the kind of reporting that is not always going to be glowing...
...Two phone calls to Cairo established that there were twenty-three nations for a total of thirty that had boycotted the Cairo conference...
...They do not know that Judaism has four contemporary forms...
...Gus Niebuhr, before joining the Times as a fellow religion reporter, had a similar experience at the Washington Post...
...Quite often one encounters editors who are not at all hostile to religion, who may be active churchgoers or observant Jews, who may be well informed about their faith, but whose exposure, commitment, and knowledge remain limited to the faith of their upbringing...
...We review hardly any serious theological or philosophical books...
...Well this went in the Boston Globe as a colorful, peaceful, and happy demonstration...
...Public self-criticism is inhibited by professional chum-miness but the inhibition is reinforced by the fact that media people are not only chums but competitors, and criticism of a competitor's performance appears embarrassingly self-interested...
...There had been a rise of satanic cults and the Vatican wanted every diocese to deal with this...
...Who said there was no politics that day...
...Half said "none" when asked "What is your present religious preference...
...I can give you twenty more stories that were totally screwed up by newspapers...
...We're not measuring column inches, we're trying to ask: Is religion as a moral force, a permanent moral force in American life, taken seriously by the press...
...Even I, with the job I have, have not been especially successful...
...They tend to punditize almost all the time and they view the world through this acquired prism...
...The Daily News, where my column appears, had three articles in a row saying the same thing- the Christian Coalition descends on New York...
...A certain amount of interpretation is involved in bridging that divide, but the beginning of the whole thing is a certain amount of respect for one's ignorance...
...Paul Elie: [Editor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux] There's a lot of talk in forums such as this about religion as such and the necessity for fair reporting on religion...
...That's my job...
...I came from no educational background and went to a local paper and climbed up it...
...And this involved writing what, on its face, should be the simplest of news stories, which was basically a piece about the pageantry of the pope celebrating Easter Sunday Mass...
...Now I don't challenge the idea that coincidence is one possible explanation for what went on...
...The other side, the conservative side, said well, he told the truth in the first two paragraphs and therefore, the word was out...
...The issue here is not the one that concerns journalists actually more than it should, which is whom will we offend...
...So I think it is important to elaborate what exactly we mean by being for school prayer...
...The worst ignorance is that which doesn't know it's ignorant...
...So, those expected to report on religious matters, people usually from the general assignment ranks, fall back on what they know through a time-tested method makes for a good story...
...In this country, the first newspaper was published in 1690 one morning in Boston...
...From previous conversations it was my impression that she was vehement, not to say vitriolic, on the question, and I held my breath to see what her story would be like...
...They are tied to the bottom line, or what I used to call maximum honorable profits, which means you have to do what gets the audience...
...When you have to spell out the nuances and qualifications attached to almost any religious statement, when you have to tell an editor that we may not know the outcome of this struggle for several decades or perhaps several centuries, enthusiasm for the story definitely tends to flag...
...I do mind the metaphor of culture war: to think that there is a very distinct battle line, and there are two groups firmly placed on either side of it...
...But I suspect that there was much interest in entertainment in much of the media and the press all along in American life...
...But I want you to know I don't get there until after the sermon so that I don't have any occasion of sin [laughter...
...Williams: What do you know about Michael Jackson and Lisa...
...That is to say, we assume there is no news...
...He had been a worker priest in the factories of Turin and clearly had very progressive political views...
...I convinced the New York Times Week in Review that a section of the paper that had taken all manner of ideas and religions seriously, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Marxism, liberalism, and all kinds of other ideas, ought to give animism a fair shot...
...John Dart is a religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times and co-author of Bridging the Gap: Religion and the News Media...
...On the other hand, I don't want to underestimate the depth of feeling, often hostile, that religious people feel toward the media...
...So you had a lot of dissent in Cairo...
...Well, it could lead to some coercion...
...They gave me no budget, so I would call around to my friends in the network all over the world and beg them to do freebie stories for me that I could put into my hour-specials...
...I think partisan, personal, and political biases of liberal journalists often dominate newsrooms...
...Why is that...
...CNN, by the way, began running a ten-minute segment on religion news each Thursday morning, starting in November [1993], usually a live interview...
...I would think that we might have something similar with regard to religion...
...Here nobody in commercial or public television has that kind of resource...
...Bill Moyers and I have been chasing money for four years...
...On the other hand, they were really very, very skeptical and negative that any reforms are really possible...
...The basic skepticism of the journalistic craft strikes them-not unreasonably, from their point of view-as wrong and even ungodly...
...Jews believe that there is one God who handed Moses the Commandments on the moun-taintop...
...it's very hard to get the attention of people who can't hear...
...One of the problems with the Times, for example, and this is certainly true of other papers, is this is not just something that needs to appear in a "Beliefs" column or in a religion report on a general meeting of the church body, but in the book section, in the Arts and Leisure section, particularly in culture stories when they bear upon specific religious traditions...
...In many foreign countries, especially England, the BBC has a huge religion unit, a highly funded unit, and they do major prime-time programs on the subject of religion...
...Sometimes I'm puzzled by what's happened to the explicit religious dimension, which I suspect is there in people's lives/but some kind of self-censorship seems to have removed the articulation of what they're doing...
...But the other thing that is very hard, is trying to make this stuff intelligible for broadcasting...
...I find all of them to be inexcusable...
...There is a temptation on the part of some in my profession to believe that...
...We write stories that are extremely transitory...
...A second story I like to remember concerns the problems involved in how the language we use in journalism colors everything we write and everything we do...
...But I do think that it is fundamentally opposed to the common assumptions that journalists say they hold to, to take this set of facts and rule out by fiat the possibility that something rather special just might have been going on...
...The fact that we're even having a forum like this...
...Peter Steinfels among Americans-at-large...
...Early on, there were real pressures, sometimes economic pressures, that kept local newspapers from really reporting that story...
...I simply refuse to believe that the Times would have treated it the same way...
...This is something that I'm not particularly fond of reporting...
...Again, we moderns read the morning newspapers or we listen to Cokie Roberts in the evening...
...There's a very big dome...
...Perhaps some of you read a book by sociologist David Martin several years back which reported on the spread of Pentacostalism in Latin America...
...Religion is treated as part of the same world, the same real world as other things...
...The rain doctors couldn't possibly know anything about whether or not it would rain on the pope...
...So, I have become in some ways more vehement-at least to wave the flag...
...No one bothered to notice all the little storefront churches that were popping up all over the cities of Latin America...
...Religion seeks to reconcile, or at least to suppress discord...
...All these people were in favor of this particular piece of legislation...
...Covering religion is a special problem in the United States...
...I quoted him in my story respectfully, but I'm not sure my readers had any better understanding than I did of what he was saying...
...Most of what happens in our churches is good news...
...The last story I want to tell concerns the devil...
...That wasn't relevant to the story either...
...They didn't belong to sororities...
...Protestant fundamentalism, for example, has gotten a very bad press throughout this century...
...In fact, we are all, almost inevitably, ignorant...
...Dionne: There is more than one kind of news story...
...In the wake of the massacre in Hebron which was then followed by the shooting of Hasidic young people on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the Marble Collegiate Church had a dialogue sermon in which the pastor was joined by a rabbi and an imam...
...My personal take on American religion, to overgeneral-ize, is that a fair number of people think it's fairly important and fairly interesting...
...So what will count really as a story about religion...
...On the other hand, the little box said that he drove an Alfa Romeo...
...they must explain why a religious body is addressing a subject of importance to the secular world...
...Or is it the people of God...
...There were a large number of conferences and reports and articles about the subject, inspired not simply by "Bridging the Gap...
...One of the most powerful things I've heard on the radio in a long time was a piece Scott Simon did on NPR after the killing of the doctor who had performed abortions...
...The harder case is when you turn up something more ambiguous, say, that the story line you're pursuing is not false, but also not as important or relevant as some other related direction...
...These results swiftly came to rival biblical inerrancy as part of the basic belief system of many conservative Christians and political true believers...
...The article has a consistency to it, quotations are in context...
...Try moving from Jews to Muslims to Catholics to Unitarians, Buddhists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Mormons, Hindus, and to be expected on a day-to-day basis to be expert in each of these faiths...
...Here's another point...
...Reporter: So it's in the Bible in the New Testament...
...An undetermined proportion were already here in New York, so it didn't look like this tidal wave of outside agitators were telling New Yorkers what to do...
...It will likely be appealed by the state attorney general's office...
...Not the religious experience of more-or-less dramatic or experimental or marginal groups in the society, members of which are always much more willing to talk to the press and be personal about their strongly felt religious convictions...
...The information superhighway is sending faxes so it's here already...
...David Neff When I used the term secular and secular education and a secular newsroom* I was talking specifically about the world view that by my definition is not parochial...
...That story isn't known...
...I didn't cover it...
...But, as you can tell, I like stories that get better and this one does too...
...In England, the Church of England plus the others...
...It makes it more interesting...
...One day I opened up my morning newspaper in Rome and discovered that the Archdiocese of Turin had named a panel of exorcists...
...For those who take religion seriously, belief is a burden, not a self-righteous claim to some privileged moral status...
...I think that's probably true...
...and Tim and me inside of our own newsrooms, saying you cannot have Fay Wattleton against Randall Terry...
...This same model was imposed on the Cairo conference...
...Lehmann: Let's take the Good Friday story...
...I don't think you cover it by covering denominations...
...I'm going to return to my prism theme because to me it doesn't make any difference how well-informed you are if you come into a culture that doesn't take these things seriously...
...We have not found any foundations willing to put up money for that...
...The conference in Cairo was a pretty interesting example, I think, of a lot of the issues and pressures that we all confront...
...And in this view, religion is okay for the masses, but it's something you leave behind...
...For many, it is more important than politics and, amazingly, more important than sports...
...Right now, you see it in news reports, including in the New York Times, about the increased cynicism in the press...
...In many ways, I think this is a more important issue than bias against religion in those stories that actually do appear...
...Most of the religious people I know think they're on the defensive, that the aggression is coming from the left, from the very militant secularist movement, which sees religion as purely a matter of personal and private opinion...
...Thus another thesis...
...talked about-the Catholic Church and other churches must be clear to the world, when they enter the public square...
...Are we conveying in the words we use in situations like that, hidden and often biased assumptions about what we think of those people...
...Insufficient resources have shrunk most newsrooms, certainly television newsrooms...
...Why should we believe these guys who said they saw Jesus after he died, the journalist might ask...
...What troubles me is litmus tests, such as the studies that Peter talked about, where it's judged meaningful if [a reporter or editor] regularly attends religious services, whether you consider yourself religious, whether you belong to an organized faith...
...The other is: Have things seriously changed in regard to that...
...That brings us back to the issue of what is news...
...The fact of this epistemological divide came through most clearly to me after Waco...
...The same study looked at ABC's "Good Morning America," CBS's "This Morning," and NBC's "Today": each had two hours of airtime daily...
...The worst ignorance, of course, is the ignorance that's too dumb to know it's ignorant...
...We just saw the end of the Good Friday holiday in Illinois public schools after fifty-three years of undemonstrated harm...
...The fact is that 365 days of the year, the churches are filled with believing, caring people...
...A lot more people would say, well, that's what we believe, I guess that's what majority rule is...
...It's playing to certain constituencies and we know who those constituencies are...
...It's been proven by the so-called religious right that they can mobilize large numbers of people...
...There is no simple solution to this problem...
...Theology used to be at the top and it used to be considered that if you were a theologian, you were one of the most educated of people...
...I'm talking strictly about reporters...
...One front-page story said there were only twelve nations with the pope...
...Although it would be fair to say that filing this suit was not a happenstance event, it was organized by the American Jewish Congress...
...you've covered this simply as an event...
...When religious people make assertions in a dogmatic way about secular political issues, there is a great danger...
...Both Kenneth Woodward at Newsweek and Richard Ostling at Time have said that the Lichter-Rothman findings pretty much matched the environment they worked in...
...Kind of the bookend to the morning sermon...
...Baker indicated, and demonstrated very well, Americans are passionate about religion...
...But these stereotypes are probably no more than those that exist More caricatures of religious positions are probably broadcast from pulpits on one weekend than from television In a year...
...I got there just as he was about to begin afternoon Mass, so I went to Mass and then interviewed him...
...It suggests that we should approach this topic in a measured mood...
...I've written a primer on the "God Beat," for people new to the religion beat, which will be released by the First Amendment Center...
...Lee: The main question here is, how is reporting informed by knowledge about religion...
...They make no sense because the context is not there...
...They talk to one another and don't have any idea what's going on in the culture...
...Is there anything new that I need to know so I can intelligibly discuss the topic myself...
...That's a caricature itself it seems to me...
...This is simply not my experience of the newsroom...
...A devoted and sincere Christian reporter was reading his understanding of the Bible into the Hebrew Scriptures...
...Where are the pictures...
...The lead of the story was "For John Smith it was an act of love...
...But this is not a homily...
...Then a very well-informed Muslim told me, well yes, that was all true, but what really stirred divisions in most of the Muslim communities she knew was disagreement about which day marked the beginning of Ramadan...
...It was censored out of business...
...I don't very often find contempt for religions or religious people...
...If there are professionals on this beat, they will do a decent job...
...And finally he pointed out the apparent contradiction between all the religiosity that Allen and Dart found among journalists with the newsroom ignorance and indifference that the same writers and indeed many journalists themselves reported as obstacles to good reporting...
...We will be increasingly going into niche marketing where there'll be more and more programming devoted to small sectors of the populace...
...Religion resonates with the American people...
...None of that applies very well to religion coverage...
...We need to report real arguments that people are having with each other and I don't think we do that enough...
...Mary Alice Williams said that reporters come from our families and neighborhoods and communities...
...We identified only two major foundations in all of America who are willing to give any money at all to electronic media for religious or philosophical subjects...
...She has been criticized by mainline Catholics, including members of the archdiocese, for being someone unfaithful to her religion...
...I am reminded that public broadcasting, Channel 13, the PBS station in New York, is going to embark on broadcasting programs in which there are fifteen hours of discussion about the origins of humanity and humanity's purpose in the cosmos...
...The last time we went through it was in 1982...
...In 1992,72 percent of those surveyed said religion was very or somewhat important, 17.5 percent said not very, and 10.7 said not at all...
...Dienne: Cokie, I think, is completely right...
...I think the media are capable of doing things like that...
...There is no further elaboration that needs to be read about that...
...Forums like this-where journalists raise questions about what they do, sometimes engaging in that medieval practice of self-flagellation-have become so common that one begins to worry that journalism itself is going through its own crisis of faith, certainly questioning its infallibility...
...Most people presume in the newsroom that religion does not get the audience because they go by these churches and see them mostly empty...
...So if things are bad, I'm not sure that they have become worse...
...20,000 words...
...I wonder if this kind of cynicism that's built into the journalistic mind-set, when it's combined with what we have now in this country, a very, very short attention span, doesn't lead to a very dangerous combination...
...Roberts: I could make a very good case that the coverage of religion is considerably better than the coverage of Congress, in terms of what it tells people about the institution...
...The news is only a very small piece of what's on television...
...And I was able to give him a very theological answer...
...I want to specifically respond to Peter's comment on the New York Times treatment of the Cardinal Bernardin story...
...McDermott: Let me respond...
...What I discovered at the Times is that it's a very different culture...
...So you get an elite view of the world and whether you go to journalism school or not, you're getting the campus view...
...I speak from a television perspective and I don't think so...
...She exists in a profoundly Catholic personal environment...
...Maniscalco replied that since the papal statement was only a few pages long, he'd be happy to mail or fax the reporter a copy...
...The second is that there is often no balance between the two kinds of quotes...
...Obviously, though, as with politicians, when it gets to the one time in ten years that there's a problem, I find that clerics tend to be their own worst enemies...
...Of the religion writers, 75 percent said religion was "very important" in their lives...
...Among some of them, there's a sense of being dispossessed culturally...
...These are the kinds of stories you are not going to get so often, it seems to me, here in New York City...
...I don't think they had anything on a regular basis before...
...Very rarely is there reporting done about the why of our teachings on sexuality...
...And whereas the world was once seen largely in terms of the simpleness of human beings and the radical saving acts of God, and that eventual, otherworldly destination, it is very much now a this-world-ly kind of experience, seeking some sort of therapeutic religious salvation in the present...
...That story went uncovered, except for the National Catholic Reporter that did do reporting on it and received a lot of criticism for it...
...and, fourth, on our own experiences...
...Don't believe what you're going to read in the press about that convention...
...When you do a story on Protestantism, say mainline Protestantism, for example, you try to touch as many of those denominations that fall within that definition as you possibly can...
...A lot of money goes into them as well...
...What the Post was guilty of was a kind of stereotyping, the same kind of stereotyping that it takes great pains to avoid, I would say, in other contexts...
...Newsrooms are also caught up in the contemporary culture wars...
...And he specifically named one individual who had moved from North Barrington, where he had a very large house, huge income and moved into what was a dangerous and economically precarious community...
...And news is also names...
...David Neff: I get phone calls from reporters who are trying to figure out what Evangelicals are up to...
...At the same time, we then spend a fair amount of attention and focus on stories of the major religious group of the area, which is Roman Catholicism...
...Stanley Rothman, "Religion's Bad Press," First Things, January 1994 (156 Fifth Ave, Suite 400 N.Y., NY 10010, $3.75...
...our ideals we are having a harder time living up to them...
...I know there's a lot of ignorance among journalists...
...Do churches adequately represent themselves to the public-at-large...
...I don't want to go too far, but there's certainly segments of the religious left who seem to have lost contact with people in the pews...
...There was no key spokesperson for this movement...
...Well, from my standpoint of working for the Chicago Sun Times, Peter works for the Shakespeare edition, I work for the Cliff Notes version...
...I was speaking about the abortion position that the Catholic Church takes based upon our understanding, from our rational review of science and so forth, that this was a human life that we were talking about, and that it ought to have a right not to be killed...
...Wars, battles in which there is always a winner or loser-politics...
...For those who know the law in this area, I know of no litigator who would be described as being part of the religious right, who seeks to overturn the original school prayer decision, the Engel case, in 1962...
...But I think which ever formulation is right, I think that journalistic constructions tell us a lot about how we actually feel about believers...
...It was based on a survey, first, of Catholic and Protestant clergy and religion writers and newspaper editors...
...The priest argued that because Turin was the most efficient and well-organized of Italian cities, the archdiocese had been the very first to name exorcists, and that's why they had gotten all this terrible publicity...
...I say this, as a Catholic myself: the Catholic Church's position on abortion has not won it a lot of friends...
...There was no room in my story for perhaps the most interesting thing I discovered, how Muslims in the United States were reinventing many of their religious institutions to fit the American environment and often imitating the established patterns of churches and synagogues in the process...
...I have not necessarily been successful, but I think that it is a real issue...
...Reporters, I find in many ways are very fideistic in this way...
...Theologians, representatives of women's groups, politicians, historians, anthropologists, sociologists...
...I'm not very knowledgeable...
...The task is, I think, twofold...
...I kept hearing people saying, "the pope began with the ancient words, 'Introibo ad altare Dei.'" I finally told them that Catholics haven't started the Mass with those words since 1969, which is when those fellows had last been-an example of what we're talking about here...
...I have no doubt that the survey cited by Dart and Allen is right in reporting the strong religious inclinations of reporters who cover religion...
...It has made it a lot of enemies...
...One of the many problems I have with the Lichter study [for the Knights of Columbus, 1991] is how you decide what's negative and what's positive in religion coverage...
...If it is reasonable to close schools, let us say, in Glencoe and Highland Park on Jewish holidays to accommodate the majority-in this era of multiculturalism, it can be an occasion to teach gentile kids respect and understanding of their Jewish neighbors-I don't see why it doesn't work the other way...
...Interwoven in many of our stories is the fact that there's a feeling in the mainstream media that faith is not regarded as a reasonable basis of discussion...
...First, appalling ignorance of religion...
...Carol Marin is a reporter and co-anchor for WMAQ-TV in Chicago...
...Turn to the practical conditions under which news must be gathered and presented...
...If you have any questions, call me and we'll set you right...
...If we rightly ask religious people to understand why we treat the churches as human institutions, we should not suddenly raise the standards we apply to them to divine levels when it suits our purposes...
...The Lichter/Rothman report in 1980 was only of journalists, about 250 in New York and Washington, with the major broadcast and print outfits...
...And I would like to lay out a few guidelines that we could argue about on what can and can not be expected, reasonably, from the press in its coverage of religion...
...As far as I know, neither the Vatican nor the Christian Coalition has fielded a sports team...
...So on balance, in the end, the reporting of it was helpful, not only to the parishes and the church, but to the pedophiles themselves...
...that's not our job...
...There Is no empirical evidence of the Lord's presence in our time...
...They need to demonstrate a much clearer link than is often made about why such and such a subject, a secular subject, needs to be spoken of by religious leaders...
...Daniel J. Lehmann is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times...
...When the Catholic bishops were debating their economic letter, some of the harshest things I have ever seen said about bishops came not from liberals, but from conservatives, who, for their own reasons, had objections to what the bishops were doing...
...Whaf s negative...
...There is too much of that...
...Now the young man who had told me about the rain doctor spotted me on the press platform, and he didn't care that he was getting soaked, he came running up to me with a big smile on his face, pointing to the heavens and saying, "See, see, I told you so...
...Particularly for the Catholic Church, there is a serious issue here that is: What is church...
...That may be good or bad, incredible or otherwise, but that's true, it seems to me...
...of the editors, 72 percent said either very important or somewhat important...
...And so, I'd like to suggest that in the end perhaps journalism and religion have much more in common than any of us might realize...
...I remember the morning afterwards going into our editorial room...
...But there was a section in the preface in which he pointed out that he simply could not get his peers in sociology to pay attention to what he was saying, because in the academic arena in which they were moving, where religion was happening in Latin America was liberation theology...
...don't do that...
...And Joseph Campbell we must have run six or seven times as a pledge show and the money kept coming in...
...Reporter: Where do we find this book of Revelation...
...All I could think was that there had been a huge gulf in understanding, in communication, at work in Waco...
...Last spring Monsigner Francis Maniscalco, who heads the media office for the Catholic bishops, recounted a call from a reporter who said he was interested in finding out more about the pope's apostolic letter restricting priestly ordination to males...
...There was nothing except this tremendous ground swell...
...It is the American version of a program which was made and broadcast originally in the Netherlands where it was a great hit...
...I thought, now wait a minute...
...I have compared the lone religion reporter's situation to the absurdity of asking one reporter to cover all sports, from baseball and boxing to yachting and stock-car racing, from cricket to ski-jumping, with responsibility for knowing all the ratebooks, the teams, the outstanding performers, the history and lore and behind-the-scenes squabbles, covering the weekly contests as well as the championship events, from Super Sunday to the Indianapolis 500, from the Stanley Cup to the Kentucky Derby, from Mike Tyson's trial to the baseball strike...
...Every attitude that John has described is an attitude that I have encountered in the newsroom, but I encounter it in all sorts 6f degrees and Leo: Well, yes, you can open your mouth, but here I'm going to be extreme again...
...I kept making phone calls and I estimated that maybe fifty Christian Coalition people were in New York...
...And if they do care about religion at home, it rarely survives the commute to the office...
...As Dart and Allen point out in their study, fewer than seventy journalists in the entire country cover religion full time...
...On this three-legged stool I rest...
...But society was not prepared because we did not cover it...
...I don't think you can cover religion in America primarily through news releases...
...Judgment calls are constantly made...
...There's an interim step to waiting for this type of journalist to be replaced by the next generation, and that's to open your mouth when you see something happening in a newsroom...
...Carol Marin I think that most off the people that I hear use the phrase [secular] that way usually mean godless,a person who decant have any kind of religious feeling and commitment...
...They're angry at you because they think most of the time your coverage Is hostile...
...If the pope can't speak about religion, after all, who can...
...It runs against the grain of one's own interests and also against the spicy dynamics of the American media...
...One reporter interrupted...
...Roberts: I'd like to say one last thing about the controversy aspect...
...And if you didn't happen to ride down the streets of major Latin American cities and actually look to see what was happening, you could miss it entirely...
...Alvare: The subject of controversy seems to be something that interests everyone...
...It's far more than the question of controversy or of unusual events...
...Think of the morning newspaper in this city...
...It just went on and on and on...
...This is aggravated, I would say, by the Watergate syndrome where every young reporter wants to become Bernstein and Woodward and get the dirt on somebody...
...Catholic Woodstock' Is Replete with Virtues and None of the Vices...
...As the presence of the media comes to dominate in democratic societies, the media create an appetite for what is new...
...He's caricaturing himself...
...Is the pope blessing capitalism...
...Ralph Reed said that they had seven groups in New York...
...it's wrong to be so Olympian that one would want to think that being interesting and even entertaining isn't an important part of this...
...I'm very used now to being accused of being personally responsible for the Inquisition and the Crusades...
...The media want things short and simple...
...I said, wait a minute...
...Then the bill got fixed up...
...Are the Gospels a cover-up...
...Williams: I absolutely, wholeheartedly disagree with you, John...
...has so nicely said, is the nature of journalism...
...And at some point, I wrote a story about it...
...I just thought it was important that we had framed the question carefully and then we reported it and there was a little uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach when I wrote about it...
...Randall Balmer is professor of religion at Barnard College and author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, a study of Evangelicals in the United States...
...Let me say just a little bit about Evangelicals and some conservatives who raise the question of visibility or hostility when it comes to media and religion...
...They come from Yale, Harvard, Princeton...
...Did he see any common themes that Four theses 1. There really is a fundamental conflict between the definition of truth used by Journalists and the definition accented by people of religious faith...
...Dart and Allen contrasted these findings to their own poll in which only 4 percent of the nation's religion writers and 9 percent of the editors surveyed responded to a query There are three standard explanations for the media's shortcomings...
...Graham Greene in his story "The Third Man" comments that we never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us...
...But those that call themselves religious do need to exercise some care in the kinds of assertions they make in the secular realm...
...Senate as an Evangelical Christian and as a champion of traditional values, you don't need to caricature that...
...We are a very young vibrant congregation, and unlike the congregations that were mentioned by Professor Balmer, we really do think theology is important...
...It also bears noting that the news media, more than ever it seems, focus attention on tomorrow's news, sometimes writing it before it arrives...
...Carol Marin: I come to you as somebody who is not a religion reporter nor have I ever been one...
...Other stories were to be found everywhere from the foreign and domestic news pages to the Metropolitan Report, from the business section to "Arts and Leisure," from the editorial pages to the Sunday Style section...
...Others were actually very interested in this whole Sophia notion, which they wanted to use as a peg for getting into the discussion about feminine images of the Godhead and so on...
...well, let's take a practical example...
...I think of George Marsden's book, The Soul of the American University, for example...
...Just one caveat about that...
...Patrick Riley and Russell Shaw, Anti-Catholicism in the Media (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1993, $16.95...
...I'm going to give one very small concrete example...
...As a result, we almost have to define our terms as we walk along...
...Saying that he had to disagree with Healy and with another speaker at the Columbia conference, Gus Niebuhr drew on his experience at the Atlanta Constitution as well as "among the editors that I've dealt with at two national newspapers," the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post...
...I've seen that at work in newsrooms and editorial board rooms where decisions are influenced by an animus born of that policy disagreement...
...Further Reading Speakers and panelists refer in their remarks to a variety of studies and articles on religion and the media...
...I said, "You'll see, Brokaw...
...Religion centers on a mystery to be approached in a posture of reverence...
...It is also imperative that we have people of religion or at least access to people of religion involved in the journalistic process because what I think evolved from Cairo was a very interesting debate...
...It was nice...
...it's certainly been true with the problems of sex abuse in the Catholic Church...
...We are expected to cover more, and I think that's part of what is perceived, and rightfully so in many cases, as the shallowness of our coverage...
...John Dart: With the number of references that were made to "Bridging the Gap," I want to give a brief summary...
...The Post received an accusatory letter from a prominent Washington Roman Catholic, who said the paper had not run any coverage of World Youth Day in Denver...
...He was not pleased and so it should never be said that churches are indifferent to the judgment or logic of the secular world...
...There is Santeria and goddess-worship and Scientology and Fundamentalists Anonymous and so on...
...The interesting issue to join is the other kinds of stories that newspapers, especially, but also television and television magazine shows, are filled with, stories on all manner of subjects...
...And Cokie said, and please correct me if I'm misquoting you, "Oh, yes, it's a lot alike, you know...
...The basic story line of the press on religious matters derives from the Enlightenment and in modern days the ACLU...
...I grew up in a sect which was apocalyptic in its origins and had a lot of that apocalyptic overlay, so that when I saw what was happening in Waco, I could really understand how people could barricade themselves inside a building like that and be willing to die rather than surrender to the ATF...
...it's part of the news...
...Let me jump to the famous Act-Up invasion of Saint Patrick's Cathedral...
...What was never reported, except in Jim Sleeper's column weeks later, is that all minorities voted against the curriculum, the Asians, the blacks, the Hispanics...
...And secondly, I'd like to tack a few theses about religion and the press up on the wall...
...Leo O'Donovan, S.J., Georgetown...
...It was not religious people against the world...
...that's what most Washingtonians do...
...They can't have unrealistic expectations...
...I'd like to go quickly over what's happened since this report was released in September 1993...
...I don't think I'm talking about one story...
...He assured me during this downpour, that it would not rain on the pope...
...Gets better, more favorable coverage than the Congress...
...An article in the same issue of Christianity Today declared that "86 percent of the journalists in a typical newsroom seldom or never attend a church or synagogue...
...It would be a national scandal...
...Leo: So there...
...If it is, then the only thing to hope for is that somehow time will replace all these young journalists with successors in forty or fifty years because if they are of one attitude and of such a militant stance, they simply cannot be convinced...
...Williams: Yes...
...Time after time, going out to these twelve churches all across the country, I asked people about their theology, about their ideology, and they would throw up their arms...
...It's a totally secular culture which tries to be indulgent about hangovers from the Middle Ages and therefore to treat Catholics fairly...
...Inexorably we were reaching the day when they were going to assign it and so I walked into the managing editor and said: "It's mine," because, based on my knowledge of the other reporters at the network, I figured I was probably best positioned to treat it with fairness...
...I particularly like that story because I think it goes to the heart of the problem of the confrontation between contemporary religion and secular journalism...
...In addition, since any given story is probably the only one I'll be doing on Christian Science or African-American Baptists in eight months, or maybe in two years, I have to devote a great deal of space to capsule explanations of Christian Science theology or black Baptist history, so that it seems there are only sixty or seventy words left over to report the specific development that was the basis for the story in the first place...
...But I very rarely read any explanation or rationale from the religious perspective of the person whose teachings are being described...
...Third, the framework of journalism itself, the working definitions of news, and the practical conditions under which it is carried out...
...Acres of trees are sacrificed to produce each Sunday's edition, and carrying that paper around can easily cause tennis elbow if not outright hernia...
...There's a sense in which the question has to be posed back to the media: What counts as a story...
...their morning newspaper consisted of manna delivered every morning from heaven...
...Religion often, though not always, is a weak spot in the overall news package presented to most viewers and readers...
...Judge Ann Claire Williams, by no means a liberal jurist, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame Law School, examined this and applied the Supreme Court's twenty-year-old Lemon test, and found that it violated at least two of those points...
...News is to keep up with what's going on, and conflict is almost a natural part of news...
...When Oliver North runs for the U.S...
...This defines the world view in which religion really isn't necessary, therefore religious figures and institutions who seem to be asserting certain common values or certain moral principles, are regarded by this mind-set as inappropriate...
...The media, it is charged, have a protracted case of H. L. Menckenitis...
...In those days, it was: "What did the cardinal do yesterday for breakfast" kind of coverage...
...Lack of coverage, I think, has to do with a certain blindness perhaps, a lack of an ability or willingness to understand some of these categories that are certainly essential to the traditional religious believer...
...Now I don't mean to express levity about Leviticus but there is a real problem here...
...This priest was enraged at all the attention this story had received...
...One, to answer those arguments...
...He was touching down everywhere...
...Over 75 percent thought such studies would be helpful, and another 14 percent judged them essential...
...Steinfels if they would comment on it...
...Now, I'm not sure of the place for that...
...Because a secular society does not grasp the need for such a discipline, it misunderstands the nature of religion to console, but first of all, to challenge and to confront...
...Reporters also work in a craft that relies on labels, particularly in television, with its time constraints and the fact that viewers can't re-read us...
...political correctness has gotten us into a terrible bind...
...And that's why religion comes out this way...
...What's this natural law stuff...
...The press is investigative, iconoclastic, and primed to expose pretensions, falsehoods, and hypocrisies...
...But is it true...
...So, you can't expect to get the straight goods on these things...
...There was no hierarchy...
...The argument is that they will at least understand religion well enough to help the news organization avoid such egregious mistakes as the infamous one by E.J.'s newspaper last year when it called the people who watched television evangelists quote, "largely poor and uneducated and easy to command...
...And finally, we live in a democracy, a busy, noisy, messy democracy that is the foundation of our freedom, our freedom to speak and to act and to worship as we please...
...Bill Moyers, who works in our shop at WNET, produced a very popular Joseph Campbell series...
...So, oftentimes, perfectly good concerns about hunger or world problems coming out of the religious left sound almost identical to the expressions that would come from nonreligious groups...
...My experience for the last ten years or so has been on the editorial opinion side of things, at the Tribune but previously at the New York Times...
...I guess my point is if you don't cover that, you don't look at the war that's taking place...
...Do Christians do this very often...
...Marin: I think that's how I use it, too...
...Not simply good guys and bad guys in the media and the churches...
...He concludes, "Far from putting doubts and anxieties to rest, religion often has the effect of intensifying them...
...Then there is the pressure of time...
...Sometimes in the interest of fairness, we are unfair...
...It may not always be done well, but I do think there is infinitely greater awareness of the social and political importance of religious faith today...
...Now when we press for more attention to religion, to taking religion seriously in our media, which is something I certainly opt for myself, how can we avoid and safeguard against this kind of unconscious religious tri-umphalism...
...we might have missed...
...The criteria for newsworthiness is the entertainment value of it...
...If that makes the reporter part of the assault on those traditional values, then I would plead guilty...
...You can imagine what it was like in the newsrooms of commercial television...
...I participated in a similar conference to this one at Northwestern University two weeks ago, sponsored by the Law School and the Journalism School, at which both the legal profession and journalism took their share of lumps for the coverage of that particular story...
...Secular people, including Journalists, need to accept that religious belief is usually built upon an Intellectually serious foundation...
...I find two facts predominate...
...That will be when times have really changed...
...They're like inserting a Latin phrase in the middle of an article in English...
...Russert: One of the people who has helped educate journalists is Helen Alvare, from the U. S. Catholic Conference...
...John Dart and Jimmy Allen, Bridging the Gap: Religion and tire News Media (The Freedom Forum, Vander-bilt University, 1222 16th Avenue, Nashville, TN 37212, 61 5-321 -9588, free...
...Now there's a debate about whether they've changed at the New York Times, which is one of the few papers I suspect that once made it a principle not to be entertaining...
...Should Religion Wednesday follow Science Tuesday...
...Many have ethnic or regional variations...
...There's a danger, I think, of a lot of self-importance in these forums as if journalism itself were the center of the world...
...There is a quest for immortality going on in America, among Americans these days...
...It doesn't get calculated into the government's index of leading economic indicators...
...The news magazines, for example, particularly Time and Newsweek, have given religion extensive coverage over many, many years...
...Except for that, nothing...
...She also does a weekly news report on the NBC affiliate there, primarily because the paper and TV station are both owned by Media General...
...Talking about reporters being careful: I covered John Paul II when he came to the United States for the first time in 1979...
...The reporter replied, "Well, I'm not that interested...
...And then he described his various exorcisms, calmly, clearly, in very precise detail...
...III...
Vol. 122 • February 1995 • No. 4
