Revealing help-wanted notice

May 16, 2006 By

ep 6Our friends on the other side of the religion-and-journalism sanctuary aisle are looking for some additional scribes. Check out this help-wanted notice from the folks at The Revealer media blog (source of the photo). Here is a clip:

Who we’re looking for: journalists at odds with the profession; scholars who can talk to the commoners; bloggers who make sharp-edged media criticism a priority. … You needn’t be an “expert,” but you do need to be seriously curious. You needn’t be religious, but you do need to be interested in religion as a category and expansive in your definition of the term. Specialists, however — writers who want to work a beat, such as TV news, or coverage of the war in Iraq, or the evangelical press — are welcome.

The Revealer tilts left, but unpredictably. We’re looking for writers who are critical of power, which means that we loathe party hacks of all varieties. We want sharp-toothed media critics who will occasionally publish rants and manifestos, but no pundits need apply. We don’t much care about issues of “balance” or “bias”; we want to investigate the function and performance of media narratives of religion. We want to imagine a smarter press. We want to read, see, and hear sharper thinking, deeper history, and thicker description.

Some interesting phrases to mull over in there.

Here at GetReligion, we are very interested in issues in issues of — note the lack of distancing quote marks — balance and bias in MSM religion coverage. Most of all, we are pro accuracy and pro diversity and I believe the folks at The Revealer are with us on those points. My reading of this notice is that, with its emphasis on “media narratives of religion,” we are divided by our clashing beliefs about the viability of that old-fashioned American model of the press, with its commitment to seeking balance and a lack of bias.

Let me take a stab at this. The late, great A.M. Rosenthal used to say that he wanted the New York Times to “keep the news straight,” or to “deliver the news straight down the middle.” I can still say “amen” to that.

I think, as journalists, we all have our biases and blind spots. I sure do. We have worldviews. But I remain convinced that newsrooms staffed with talented, informed and committed journalists representing a wide diversity of intellectual points of view can provide a mix of coverage that will be seen as accurate, balanced and fair by a diverse audience of readers. I think that is part of being a “smarter press.” We can, as professionals, work together to offer a product that is wider than our solo narratives. I believe it is in the financial interest of our industry to do that.

In short, journalists should listen to their critics and try to learn from them. As I have said in conversations with Jeff Sharlett, our friends at Poynter.org and elsewhere, I realize that terms like “accuracy” and “balance” carry the burdens of modernity and pre-modernity and sound old-fashioned, to many.

So be it. I am not ready for niche newspapers in one-newspaper towns.

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Filed Under: First Person, Godbeat, Journalism, Web/Tech
About TMatt

Terry Mattingly directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

  • http://www.geocities.com.hohjohn John L. Hoh, Jr.

    The late, great A.M. Rosenthal used to say that he wanted the New York Times to “keep the news straight,” or to “deliver the news straight down the middle.” I can still say “amen” to that.

    I’m not sure that the newsroon actually was intended to be unbiased. Early American history is filled with two, three, even four newspaper towns (how many were in New York City at its zenith?). These newspapers staked positions at some point in the political spectrum. Even today we have about 20-odd newspapers still containing “Republican” in the masthead, 30-odd newspapers containing “Democrat” in the masthead, and one newspaper that still carries the Whig (or W.H.I.G.) name in its masthead.

    My hometown newspaper, the Appleton Post-Crescent, recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. Originally there were two newspapers, the Crescent and the Motor (which changed to the Post). One was started by four brothers who were Democrats. A fifth brother was a Republican and started the other paper. Some years later a merger was effected and the Post-Crescent, in its anniversary issue, reprinted the editorial upon the merger, that the new paper would get out of partisan politics and work for “the common good of the community.” It is highly likely that the “unbiased media” “myth” is a result of mergers and acquisitions and an attempt to quell fears not having diverse views presented.

    Today we have many more media forms and we have alternative weekly newspapers in many cities–heck, even the mainstream newspapers are going for the advertising dollars found in these venues and starting free weeklies. Milwaukee has the liberal Shepherd Express and the Journal Sentinel’s MKE weeklies.

  • http://www.newpantagruel.com dk

    Accuracy in relation to what standard? Balance between what and what? Check those neopagans at the Da Vinci Dialogue site protesting how its full of Christian commentary (like tmatt’s) without any input or dialogue from goddess religion experts. Why not put them on an equal footing? Is accuracy a matter of truth or a product of balance and dialogue between all avialable mutually incompatible truth claims?

    Those terms “accuracy” and “balance” are not problematic now because they merely sound “old-fashioned.” There is a broad consensus across the religious and political spectrum on our inability to escape the slant or bias of our foundational and formative beliefs. Everything is in some way advocacy, apoloogetic, or polemic. To consistently deny that, you’d have to embrace relativism or apathy–as many people do.

    I think what you generally do well here at GR is write with knowledge and accuracy about non-controversial facts. Most of all you strive to be accurate in your representation of how religious groups and individuals regard themselves, others, and various issues based on their own values, beliefs, and assumptions–which you do not dismiss, criticize, or cast in a negative or condescending light. But you do not do this work by extensively balancing those religious representations with opposing religious or non-religious groups and views–not within your individual stories or from story to story. GR is clearly a reaction to the more secularist and/or liberal assumptions and emphases of the MSM. Between the two (GR and something like the NYT) you could say a “balance” is generated, but I don’t think that’s true for a lot of reasons. GR is in some ways, partisan and even polemical, but not nearly to the extent that TR is.

    I would describe the difference this way: TR has an ideological agenda, or a metaphysical one. It promotes a particular philosophy of religious faith and beliefs. It’s not that coherent–kind of struggle with a basic commitment to a Rortyean or Tillichian view–pretty much the traditional secular/secularizing liberal attitude. Religious faith (“spoirituality”) is fine privatized stuff; belief is bad unless it conforms to the established religion of secular liberalism in its current version.

    TR also doesn’t care much at all about accuracy or fairness unless a partisan or ideological point can be scored through it. Often points are scored at TR by inaccuracy and unfairness of the usual MSM kind–outsider values and assumptions shared with an implied outsider readership frame a story about some very different (i.e. wrong) religionist insider group.

    GR on the other hand holds back from the larger metaphysical concerns, although you make it clear where you all stand. Your agenda is much simpler–report on religion with insider knowledge of the particularities of different groups, and represent them in their own integrity, without unwarranted or uninformed suspicion, hostility, or condescension. There is an evagelistic impulse behind this as well, and the people who you’d see as probably needing to buy into it most are also most likely to reject that call–as partisan and “politically motivated” in some way. They would not be wrong.

    Maybe it works out this way–Tmatt wants the news to tell the truth, but not all the truth. It’s still all about slant.

  • http://www.newpantagruel.com dk

    John, MKE and the ShepEx are mostly fluff, but the former is not about news or politics much at all, while the latter is–though not as much as it used to be–in a typical indy rag liberal-libertine way. (income based on beer, cuircuses, and sex industry ads.) A lot of liberals don’t see that as their kind of liberalism, but it’s what they’ve got locally.

    The J-S is more complicated. Liberals think it’s conservative, and conservatives think it’s liberal. A detailed account would make an interesting social history, but I consider it “Suburblican.” Very few self-described conservatives on board. Lots of moderates. Walmart Democrats. Mostly people who live in the burbs with very economically conservative lives leading to abstract-issue liberalism as a compensatory practice, a source of good karma. More than a tad of “white guilt.”

    Bruce Murphy’s piece on the J-S for Milwaukee Magazine was very good, though incomplete and really wrong on some things, in my view. I’m not sure how to categorize MM.

  • tmatt

    DK:

    Have you ever worked in a newsroom? Any who has knows that there are people there with very, very strong beliefs who still have a strong commitment to journalism and care deeply about whether the people they are reporting about believe that the coverage is fair and accurate.

    You may want to check out Mark Pinsky’s upcoming book “A Jew among the Evangelicals” from Westminster John Knox Press. It is a fine exploration of this kind of commitment to basic reporting.

    We had a controversy once at the Rocky Mountain News about the newspaper’s balance in abortion coverage. I was arguing for a 50-50 strategy between two very strong segments in our community.

    Finally, another member of the staff said that my appeals for balanced coverage were evidence of my pro-life bias. There was no need for balance in a story in which one side was clearly right and the other wrong. In other words, my opposition to advocacy journalism was a form of advocacy.

    So, dk, defense of the American model of the press — as defined in the era of the modern, faster presses of the late 19th century, which caused the fading of niche, advocacy model in the century or so before that — is now a form of political activism?

  • http://www.newpantagruel.com dk

    What do “fair” and “accurate” mean to different people who say they are committed to those things? That is my point. You are not addressing it. Feel free not to, but if you respond, respond to what I wrote.

    I don’t accept your newly introduced definition of one paticular model as THE “American model of the press.” (Why should anyone accept it–you simply declare it without support.) As John pointed out, competing partisan papers have a long history in the US, and (as I’ve said here before), that has been the dominant model in the whole, global history of the press.

    Yes, the “objective/accurate/fair” model has been adn remains a form of political activism for the “naked public square” and a homogeneous non-particularist creed of no creeds. This has been so extensively discussed and studied and written about, I don’t understand why you seem to regard it as shocking news.

    As for your opening remark, are you implying the authority of real knowledge on this subject is restricted to people who have worked in a newsroom? I have worked in “citizen journalism” (which poynter gives such attentions) in the form of a monthly newspaper. My wife and I were part of that from the ground up for about 3 years. We did not have a traditional newsroom exactly. My wife is by training a journalist who is currently an editor of a weekly tabloid attached to the large local daily. (the citizen journalism stint effectively launched her into this job. She is also a former student of yours incidentally from the CCCU DC program.) My academic work was aimed at things pertaining to the history of print and the public square in its earliest phases with broader philosophical and theoretical concern to the whole deal up to the present. FYI.

  • http://www.newpantagruel.com DK

    Some thought experiments:

    1) Tmatt frequently contends, in repose to reporting that ascribes much authority or significance to Pat Robertson as an evangelical leader, that Pat is no such thing. Yet isn’t that status largely or almost exclusively a consequence or construct of the press–and of Pat’s organizations’ efforts? And once constructed as significant in significant media venues, one becomes significant? How does this have anything to do with truth and accuracy? Is the truth or accuracy of Robertson as a significant evangelical leader something that can be measured as a reality apart from its construction as a reality of the media/ted world?

    2) Suppose Tmatt, David Brooks, Cal Thomas, Jeff Sharlet, and Nicholas Kristoff all are newsroom based religion reporters, and they each write an article on the same subject. Will they all, each following their own (and eminently reasonable) standards of fairness and accuracy (as their publications and editors define and allow it) produce approximately the same results, or at least results that are deemed free from “significant bias,” and utterly non-controversial with nobody seeing any implicit advocacy in their writing? Suppose we even restrict that judgment to the writers themselves alone?

  • http://www.newpantagruel.com DK

    “in RESPONSE” I meant! Not repose.

  • tmatt

    The U.S. press was very European, niche and advocacy based in the 18th and early 19th century. Marvin Olasky has written bluntly about that. Some see us heading, in the digital age, back to that model.

    But in the late 19th century the printing presses began to speed up and, yet another example of technology shaping content of media, publishers began seeking larger or “broadcast” audiences (not using that word in an electronic sense). The content of the press changed and publishers moved to a model stressing diversity, dialogue and fair debate. The wire services — one common product for a nation of newspapers — further established this model of the press.

    it is called “American” as opposed to “European.”

    I would suggest reading “The Elements of Journalism” by Kovach and Rosenstiel. Or, even better, “A History of the News” by Mitchell Stephens. I wish I had my copy of my old James Carey syllabus on the printing press and the history of mass communications technology!

  • http://www.therevealer.org Jeff Sharlet

    Thanks, Terry, for posting this link and for your interesting comments. I’m sorry I’m late getting to the discussion — my immersion in other writing projects is precisely why I’m seeking help. Some thoughts though, if anyone’s still looking at this thread (not edited for length. apologies.):

    1. You write: “I am not ready for niche newspapers in one-newspaper towns.” Agreed. And there’s the rub, isn’t it? One newspaper towns. But can any town said be to be “one newspaper” anymore, given the internet? I’m not much impressed by the internet, and even less so by blogging, but it does provide a forum for the kind of early American bare-knuckle fighting that intellectual mad dogs like Dan Knauss (DK) — and maybe myself — believe to be valuable.

    2. In that same context, “as professionals” is to me a troubling phrase. Not because I believe in citizen journalism (if it’s good, I like it; if it’s not, I don’t; I have no genre loyalty), but because of the class issues involved, in which I’m as implicated as anyone else. Professionalization brings with it pomposity, a quality lacking here at GR but all too evident in most newsrooms. It brings with it also identification with the “responsible” class. I remember that during the anti-globalization protests of the late 90s, leftists imagined a press conspiracy against them. But what explained the anti-protestor bile of ostensibly “liberal” papers like the NYT and WaPo, was, I suspect, the professionalism of their staffs. Professionalism drives toward a benign capitalist center, the “vital center” of establishment drones.

    3. We’ll be expanding The Revealer beyond my interests, but since they’ve been guiding it thus far, I should point out that all my blather about what “journalism” should be is beside the point. I don’t care that much about newspapers. My disinterest is not (or mostly not) ideological, but aesthetic — I love long form narrative nonfiction. That said, it’s more than personal preference — I’d argue that experiments in narration are essential to finding a better way of writing and thinking about religion.

    4. DK accuses TR (by which I think he means me and Kathryn Joyce, not the various other writers) of “partisan” points scoring. This is incorrect, in that partisanship implies in current usage party affiliation. Neither of is a Democrat, I don’t think, and I haven’t voted for one since 1992. That said, TR is driven by ideological commitments. I’m a leftist. That puts me at odds with both conservatives and liberals. But DK is out of his mind if he says we care about accuracy only when we see a chance to scare points for our point of view. We’ve a pretty good track record of attacking liberal and leftist inaccuracy — sufficient for TR to occasionally get mistaken by lefties as a conservative publication. DK’s snarl is even more perplexing, given the praise we’ve lavished on his conservative rag.

    5. But DK’s really ridiculous error is accusing me of a Rortyean / Tillichian view. Accusing me of being a fan of Tillich is beyond absurd, for reasons I don’t want to reveal before my next article comes out. Rorty does nothing for me. But this is the kicker: “Religious faith (“spirituality”) is fine privatized stuff; belief is bad unless it conforms to the established religion of secular liberalism in its current version.” Huh? This is pretty much at odds with everything I’ve ever published. I don’t even believe there’s any such thing as “private” religion, much less “privatized” religion. My first real foray into religion writing was a long profile of Radical Orthodoxy, which argues that secularism is something of a myth as well, the product of a theological process. The introduction to my first book, “Killing the Buddha,” was in part an attack on the vagueness of “spirituality,” much less the bland, veiled protestantism of “spiritual but not religious.

    6. So much for DK’s weird obsession with attacking my alleged secular liberalism. What’s more interesting is the possibility that DK is not alone. Not in his dislike of me, but in his insistence that all who disagree with him are card carrying secular liberals. On the one hand, this reminds me of Francis Schaeffer, a leading intellectual figure for many conservative protestant intellectuals, who wrote often of something called the “Humanist Manifesto,” allegedly an influential document. Never read it? Neither have I. Never even heard of it before Schaeffer dredged it up. Liberals do this, too, accusing every Christian conservative of taking marching orders from the impenetrable texts of J.R. Rushdoony, an obscure figure. But DK, the New Pantagruel, Rod Dreher, and others looked for awhile like a genuinely interesting intellectual movement. Not one I agreed with, but one that I mostly admired for its apparent fearlessness. They had — may still have — potential to radically transform the way intellectual journalism approaches religion. But I wonder if they’re squandering it? Retreating into rigidity instead of expanding orthodoxy? DK, still occasionally an interesting writer and clearly a smart guy, writes more and more like a Stalinist commisar. “Comrade, we must have purity!” Maybe it’s time DK and co signed up for a little good ol’ fashioned Maoist self-criticism.

    7. DK imagines a newsroom of Tmatt, David Brooks, Cal Thomas, Jeff Sharlet, and Nicholas Kristoff. Eek! Putting me in that awful company of hackery (w/ the exception of TMatt) is the lowest blow of all. Suppose Dan Knauss was in a sealed room with Westbrook Pegler, Father Coughlin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Ted Kaczynski…

  • tmatt

    Jeff:

    You know what I’m going to say already. But for others…

    GR’s position is that diversity of viewpoints in a room is good. Diversity in viewpoints and sources of information in stories is good. Producing stories in which the people on BOTH SIDES OF HOT ISSUES believe that their quotes were handled fairly and that the information they provided was handled accurately is good and signs that (See “Elements of Journalism”) key journalistic virtues are at work.

    Newsrooms in which 95 percent of the people believe the same thing on some of the hottest issues in American life are, well, bad for the future of the newspaper industry.

  • http://www.maryams.net/dervish Umm Yasmin

    “accurate, balanced and fair by a diverse audience of readers”

    hmmmmmm… not for this Muslim reader. The longer I read GetReligion, the more I am convinced it is mainly pro-traditional-Christian and lots of negative-towards-Islam and negative towards minority-Christian (eg. pluralistic Christian trends) that zooms in almost entirely on US preoccupations.

    You have pieces claiming that there should be more focus on the Ascension, but when did you call for more attention on Isra’ wa Mi’raj (the ascension of the Prophet Muhammad to the heavens where he met with previous prophets like Jesus, and finally had an audience with the Almighty Creator)? Sorry, but that’s how this diverse reader sees it.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Miriam,

    We are definitely biased toward US coverage. However, we do try to cover some international media. And we like coverage of any topic — domestic or international.

    I do think that there needs to be much more coverage of Muslim holy days, although I would point out that Ascension is ostensibly celebrated by many millions of people in the United States. The CIA Factbook says that 24% of the population is Roman Catholic — for whom its a holy day of obligation — and when you add all the Lutherans, Episcopals, Presbyterians, Orthodox, etc., it’s just a huge swath of people.

    The Factbook has the current Muslim population in the United States at 1% of the total. So while I agree with you — these Muslim holy days should be covered by reporters — all the more should those holy days marked by many many more.

    I would encourage you to submit story ideas to GetReligion — link to the left over there — about other stories you think are being left out.

    I’m not sure, since you weren’t specific, what you mean by pro-traditional Christian, and anti-Islam and anti-minority-Christian.

    Could you be specific about those things and let us know?