Posted on 08/31/2007 8:05:41 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
HUNTINGTON, Ind. (Our Sunday Visitor) – “Why does the secular media often get faith wrong?” That’s the question asked all too often when Catholic happenings make news in the secular press.
Our Sunday Visitor Case in point: Pope Benedict XVI’s freeing of the traditional Latin Mass last July.
No sooner did the news break than did errors in reporting start making their way into the living rooms of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Some of those errors were small — misnaming the missal that would be used — and some were great — passing off the decision as nothing more than an attempt to placate “rabid traditionalists.” All, however, played a role in confusing people about just what exactly the Catholic Church was up to.
Of course, it’s not just news about the Catholic Church that the secular press gets wrong. Protestants, Jews and Muslims also fret about how they’re represented in the press. So, what’s behind the persistent errors about Catholicism and other religions that make their way into news reports? Is it ignorance? Bias? Ratings? Or is covering religious news simply more difficult than covering political or business news?
Try “all of the above.”
Bias and ignorance
According to Raymond Arroyo, veteran journalist and host of EWTN’s “The World Over,” one of, if not the greatest, problem in the mainstream media’s religion reporting is the reporters themselves. Many, he said, have little or no religious training, view faith as a mere curiosity and can’t understand the significance of what they’re covering. They also, he said, lack basic knowledge of religious history and doctrine.
Arroyo recalled one journalist for a major network approaching him at the papal conclave in 2005.
“He said, ‘I know they call this the Holy See, so when did the water recede?’ And he was being serious,” Arroyo told Our Sunday Visitor.
“Most journalists are stone dumb when it comes to theological matters. And this is a complex beat. You’re dealing with thousands of years of history and laws,” he said. “It’s hard enough for me to get it right as a lifelong Catholic.”
On top of that, Krista Tippett, who hosts the weekly National Public Radio program “Speaking of Faith,” believes most journalists approach religion assuming that it’s subjective and, therefore, not to be taken seriously.
“It’s not that most people sit down and decide that,” she said.
“But the bias is there, which means journalists aren’t taking the time and care to do the research and analysis they would for other stories.”
Covering all faiths
That problem isn’t made any easier by the need for journalists to cover not one, but dozens of faith traditions.
“I could have a Ph.D. in religious studies, and I still wouldn’t know enough,” said Laurie Goodstein, the chief religion correspondent for The New York Times. “The sports staff has somebody devoted to basketball, somebody devoted to soccer, somebody devoted to college sports. But there are just two of us at the national religion desk. I have to cover the entire world of faith.”
The reporters, of course, aren’t the only ones to blame. There are also the folks who sit behind the desks at corporate headquarters, wanting to please the advertisers and garner top ratings. That want shapes the stories covered, the depth of coverage given and the headlines devised.
“Even good reporters are subject to the editorial desk,” said Arroyo. “And, at least in broadcast journalism, the Holy Grail these days is ratings — not communicating an idea, not understanding it, not getting a story right, but getting the largest audience.”
Too little time, space
In a news culture dominated by sound bites, reporters also have the challenge of conveying complex ideas in two minutes of airtime or in 900 or fewer printed words. Which, according to Tippett, sets a reporter up for problems.
“When we’re talking about God, mystery, ultimate truth, we’re talking about something that ultimately defies words,” she said.
“We’re trying to put the language of the public sphere on the ineffable. Religion is the most intimate thing you can ask people to talk about, but it ends up sounding trivialized when we squeeze it into soundbites.”
The end result of that type of reporting is not simply isolated mistakes that confuse Catholics and others, but rather a mistaken picture of religion as a whole, a picture that’s increasingly dominant in American’s conceptions of religion. That picture is essentially political, with religion becoming just one more place where “conservatives” and “liberals” square off against each other.
It’s also a picture of extremes, where only the loudest and most passionate voices get heard. “The sexy headline and strident voice are more exciting than the gentle voice,” said Tippett. “So, we have this skewed picture of religious events and who religious people are.”
Consistent errors in reporting also undermine people’s trust in the source. More and more, Arroyo said, those errors are perceived as “spin,” and they’re driving faithful people away from the traditional news outlets straight into the arms of alternative media, particularly talk radio. And that brings with it yet another set of problems.
“Increasingly, people aren’t getting solid reporting, they’re getting opinion,” he said. “That’s especially bad for the church.”
Improving the news
There are at least a few correctives currently available in the mainstream press. Goodstein pointed to the Religion Newswriters Association, which educates journalists about how to cover the world of faith.
“They play such an important role, both for those who have backgrounds and those who come in cold and have to learn everything,” she said.
There are also programs like Tippett’s “Speaking of Faith” and Bob Abernethy’s PBS’ “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.” Both provide in-depth coverage of religious topics and feature interviews with religious leaders of all stripes. Abernethy started his program with the explicit intent of doing what wasn’t being done elsewhere — recognizing the importance of religion in global events and individual lives and talking about it without pitting different perspectives against each other.
“We try to be mindful of how precious these ideas and traditions are to people,” he said. “And we try to probe the depths of the spiritual motivations people have for what they do.”
Shaping their coverage
Abernethy, who was born into a family of Baptist ministers, and Tippett, who holds a master’s from Yale Divinity School, both see their personal faith shaping the way they approach religion news.
“I recognize that it’s a valid part of life, that it’s possible for intellectually-minded people to have deep faiths, and that faith makes real contributions to our understanding of the world,” Tippett said.
“I think it gives me a better sense of what a good religion story is,” added Abernethy. “And I hope it makes me more sensitive to what people of deep faith tell me, that it makes me try harder to fairly represent what they say.”
Arroyo credits Tippett and Abernethy with “filling a void” and “making up for the woeful lack of coverage at the major networks.” In the long run, however, shows like Tippett’s and Abernethy’s may help journalists working for secular outlets take religion more seriously, but they can’t entirely change the nature of the beast. Working for public television and radio exempts Abernethy and Tippett from much of the ratings game and demands of advertisers that color religion reporting in most broadcast outlets.
And, as Goodstein pointed out, both have a luxury few journalists have — namely, time. Most, regardless of how much they respect questions of faith, are still limited by airtime and word counts. Most are also limited by the confines of what they do — news reporting.
“People look to us for what’s the biggest news of the day, and in that word ‘news’ is the word ‘new,’ ” Goodstein said. “News covers controversies, and it often doesn’t cover the good people are doing.”
Judgment calls
Also, as Arroyo pointed out, even the best secular reporters have to make judgment calls about what constitutes a “legitimate” viewpoint. They have to do so “while trying not to take a position or judge anyone,” but their ability to do that, he continued, is limited by human nature. It’s even more limited when they don’t have an insider’s understanding of the faith on which they’re reporting.
Given those realities and given that, for the foreseeable future, most Catholics will continue to get the majority of their news from the mainstream media, Arroyo believes the only real end run around mistaken and misleading coverage of religious news is for bishops, priests and laypeople to step up their efforts to inoculate Catholics against it.
“If Catholics were better catechized, bad secular coverage wouldn’t matter,” he said. “But because there are such deficiencies in understanding, people are subject to all sorts of propaganda and bad reporting. The real problem is people don’t know their faith.”
“Increasingly, people aren’t getting solid reporting, they’re getting opinion,” he said. “That’s especially bad for the church.”
They "get it wrong" intentionally... methinks.
Possessing a subtle but focused hostility for all matters of Christian faith...
Their verbal-ideological manipulation of the facts,
And "reporting" events and positions filtered through their own worldview and corporate opinion has become the self-imposed obligation of the secular media.
We are playing against the refs...
The fourth estate remains bankrupt!
JMHO
The Church must need to be reminded that the media, or any other institution, will never be its friend.
And as to the reason the media "gets it wrong," well, we could cite a number of quotes, but how about the one about "refusing to believe the truth, they were given a powerful delusion...."
I think that is about the most apt description of the times that I have found myself living in.
No, Mr. Arroyo. They're stoned dumb generally. Doesn't matter what the topic is: science, technology, economics, the military, agriculture, history, religion ... anything beyond the sex lives of vapid hollywood celebrities is also beyond the ken of the above-average journalist.
You know that's very true. Colleges should really make journalism majors minor in some other field (i.e. NOT journalism, communications, or English) so that they have a grasp of something outside the newspaper desk. Study bio, get a science beat. Study history, get a politics beat.
It's really depressing how little many of them know!
You've got a point there -- I've noticed over the years that the closer I was personally to a story (even one free of political or religious elements that might evoke bias -- like a fire in the neighborhood), the more pathetically inadequate and just plain wrong the coverage was.
When she mentioned the many people covering sports, however, I had to admit I've never heard any complaints about sports coverage. I don't follow it myself since I don't like sports, but I hear it discussed. I guess sports are too important to mess with!
Good article. I agree with the writer.
Esp the repoerters not being of faith. Very hard for them to understand the nuances. As my modern Catholic friends and family cannot understand the desire for the Latin Mass — they won’t do the homework to learn about it.
The MSM and its consumers are too lazy to put in the time and effort to learn because they believe that the faithful are a crazy “fringe” population— and they perpetuate that notion. And from the outside, ya, the faithful do look a bit loony.
Thanks for all your posting, they are generally a real pleasure to read and stories I would not otherwise find. Thanks and God bless.
Ping
An excellent point. I have several extended family members who are Catholic. IMO they would intellectually reject most of what their own faith professes, if they only understood it. As it stands, they de facto reject it already, just based on their living arrangements.
An example is the way tyhat BBC played the Regensburg speech of the pope. A Pakistrani paper went deep into the speech to find the offensive passage about Islam, ignoring of course the context of the speech, which had to do with infidelity in Europe, not Islam. BBC than picked up on this small matter and broadcast it to the world, presenting the speech as an attack on Islam. The aim, of course, was to discredit the pope. That is the consistent agenda of the post-post-Christians who work for Beeb.
A reporter recently called Father Richard John Neuhaus to discuss Pope Benedict XVI's "Deus Caritas Est (God is Love)." During this interview, Neuhaus referred to the pope as the "bishop of Rome."
The reporter then said, "That raises an interesting point. Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?"
(Cue sound: One comedy-club rimshot.)
Another time, a reporter gal from a national newspaper called to discuss a political scandal. "Sadly," Neuhaus said, "corruption has been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the Garden.”
There was a long pause and she asked: "What garden was that?"
He mentions journalists who don't know that Episcopalians are not "Episcopals" or who confuse evangelicals with "evangelists" or even, God forbid, "evangelicalists."
"I find it hard to believe that political journalists call Washington think tanks and ask to talk with experts about the political strategies of the 'Democrizer' or 'Republication' parties, or about the most recent "Supremicist Court" ruling. So why do so few journalists covering religion know religion?"
Then there's the time Jerry Falwell told a N Y Times reporter about 'a Salt Ministry' -- and the Times reported it as "assault ministry." (!!)
Anybody else got any good stories?
Ah, so the spin originated in a Muslim paper. I thought the BBC started it, since they were obviously fanning the flames.
Incidentally, I wanted to present this fact to John Allen when he was speaking at a function here in Dallas, Question period afterwards. But he was fillibustering all the questions put to him, and finally the moderator cut them off since we running out of time. From the quality of his answers, He seems to be a pretty shallow person.
ROTFL! SirKit and I are sitting here amazed at the stupidity of these alleged journalists. He asked why don’t 5th graders just do the interviews? I remarked that they’d be just as good or better than these maroons!
The information I am posting here is taken from a letter I wrote to a religion reporter in Virginia in 2005. The reporter had stated in his article that he was often asked by “theologically conservative and/or liberal groups who he was going to pay more attention to”? In reply, the reporter wrote, “...readers’ reactions to presumed media bias are determined in large measure by what they bring with them to the reading.” By “they”, he meant the readers, listeners and viewers. I disagreed with him on that point. I suggested that press coverage is determined -in large measure - by what the media themselves bring to the writing or speaking or televising.
I asked the reporter in my letter if he was familiar with the 1981 Lichter - Rothman study which surveyed the political attitudes and voting patterns of the working media in major US media markets? I said “this survey included all network media as well. This study documented a heavy liberal bias in the media. For example, study data showed 90 per cent of media favored abortion on demand, 81 per cent voted Democrat in every election cycle from 1964 to 1976 and most media blamed the United States for third world poverty. Study data also showed that 93 per cent of elite TV media never attend church while 85 per cent of average media personnel never attend church.
Further, a 1985 study of 3,000 journalists and 621 newspapers conducted for the LA Times concluded, “members of the press are predominantly liberal, considerably more liberal than the general public”. This study’s conclusions coincided with and affirmed the above Lichter - Rothman study.
Likewise, the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company also conducted a study: “American Values in the 80s: The Impact of Belief”. This study was based upon 2,018 one hour long interviews of members of the public and 1,700 hour long interviews of media leaders. Study findings showed 64 per cent of media believe abortion on demand is permissible and 58 per cent of media believe homosexuality is acceptable. Conversely, the study data showed 65 per cent of the general public believe abortion is immoral and 71 per cent believe homosexuality is immoral.
These studies certainly do suggest that media have a predisposition, a bias; one that is quite obvious in their coverage, especially in religious coverage. Without question, there is NOT a conservative agenda.”
The reporter did not respond to anything I said in my letter other than to acknowledge that he received it.
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