Terry MattinglyReligion Coverage: Past as Prologue?
By Terry Mattingly
(Copyright) The Poynter Institute
Poynter Reports, May 2003
Lou Grant had a problem.
Actually, the city editor of the classic TV comedy had two problems.
First of all, the fictional Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion
editor and no self-respecting journalist wanted the job. Second, Grant
needed to ditch a lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter named Mal
Cavanaugh.
Finally, Grant saw the light. He told Cavanaugh he was the new religion
editor.
“That stinks! Before you stick me with a lousy job like that, I’d quit,”
said the reporter, before storming out of the room.
Grant’s staff beamed. The religion beat was still vacant, but who cared?
That scenario rang true to the editors and religion reporters I
interviewed while doing my graduate work at the University of Illinois
in Urbana-Champaign, researching a project that reached the cover of The
Quill in January, 1983.
Many religion-beat veterans were proud of their work, but felt like
Rodney Dangerfield in their newsrooms. Editors kept saying that they
knew religion was news, but that religion-beat stories seemed too
boring, or too controversial, to warrant dedicated coverage.
That’s the ticket — too boring and too controversial.
Much has changed in 20 years. For starters, newspaper executives have
been bombarded by research showing that religion news ranks high in the
interests of ordinary readers. Year after year, events rooted in
religious beliefs and trends have appeared in the annual Associated
Press list of top news stories.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the Religion Newswriters Association are
convinced that there have never been more reporters covering religion in
the mainstream press.
“We’ve seen a great increase in the number of religion reporters in the
past 10 to 15 years,” said Dr. Debra L. Mason, the RNA’s executive
director. “We have more than 400 members and subscribers, about 250 of
those who write about religion full-time. … More than a dozen
newspapers have two or more religion reporters. Nearly every newspaper
with a circulation of over 100,000 has at least one person who
specializes in religion, and the vast majority of these folks do it
full-time or nearly full-time.”
But major questions remain. I am convinced that issues related to
religion, faith and morality remain at the heart of many clashes between
journalists and their readers, a source of misunderstandings and lost
opportunities for understanding.
Many news people continue to get sweaty palms when dealing with
religion. Here are a few questions and reflections I shared — 20 years
down the road — with participants in Poynter’s seminar on “Faith,
Religion & Values.”
* If the goal is to improve coverage, does that mean journalists should
cover more religion stories that are interesting to the people who
inhabit newsrooms, or to people who frequent religious sanctuaries?
While teaching at Denver Seminary, I once developed a set of three
questions to help future pastors study the power of the news and
entertainment media in the lives of their people. I urged them to ask:
How do my people spend their time? How do they spend their money? How do
they make their decisions?
What if newspaper editors asked these same questions about the lives of
their readers? If they did, I believe that would quickly affect the time
and resources they dedicate to covering religion news.
* Is the goal of improved religion coverage to reflect the daily
realities in a local community or to change that community’s
understanding of faith? I have heard journalists say that the purpose
of improved religion coverage is to actively promote religious
diversity, thus undercutting the power of established religious groups.
To me, this sounds like a way to ignore and run off scores of long-time
newspaper readers.
Here’s a place to start. In recent decades, newspaper executives have
gone out of their way to survey their readers and learn more about their
lives and interests. The odds are good that most editors already possess
this kind of data. Does it contain questions about religious
affiliations, activities and beliefs? If so, has this information been
circulated in the newsroom? If these questions have not been asked, why
not?
* Is religion best covered by trained, committed specialists or by
newcomers who offer a fresh, blank-slate approach?
This is not a new question. In 1994, Washington Post editors tacked up a
notice for a religion reporter, seeking applicants from within the
newsroom. The “ideal candidate,” it said, is “not necessarily religious
nor an expert in religion.”
Now try to imagine a newsroom notice seeking an opera critic which
states that the “ideal candidate does not necessarily like opera or know
much about opera.” Or how about seeking a Supreme Court reporter who
“does not necessarily care about the law or have done any work in the
field of law.” How about notices for reporters who cover professional
sports, science, film and politics?
Let me make my point by paraphrasing James Carville: It’s journalism,
stupid.
The way to improve religion coverage is for newspaper professionals to
take precisely the same steps they would take to improve coverage on any
other complicated, crucial news beat. They should hire qualified
specialty reporters who have demonstrated commitment to the beat and
then give these reporters the time and space necessary to do their jobs.
* We live in an age in which focus groups drive much of what happens in
the hyper-competitive world of broadcast news. Should this affect
religion coverage?
Peter Jennings once told me, during the time when ABC News offered
regular coverage of religion news, that these reports elicited the
highest positive response rates in the history of his newscast. Yet no
other broadcast or cable-television news operation attempted to
duplicate ABC’s work. Meanwhile, at World News Tonight, the downsizing
of the religion beat, with the exit of Peggy Wehmeyer, led ABC to turn
to Beliefnet.com for team coverage.
So, where are the religion-beat specialists in television news?
“Even the agnostic cannot fail to notice that the headlines and airwaves
are full of religion,” commentator Bill Moyers once noted, speaking at
Harvard Divinity School. Yet news broadcasts are so full of the
“confused and condescending commentary of the religiously tone-deaf that
there is little room for the authentic voices of religiously engaged
people to be heard. So our ears are not trained to hear.”
In conclusion, I believe that many journalists are still struggling to
answer the question, “What is religion news?”
Yet America’s best-known commentator on religion thinks that it is now
time for journalists to ask an even more demanding question: “In the
wake of Sept. 11, is there any news today that is NOT religion news?”
This question is especially intimidating for the elite journalists who
believed that ever time they looked out their newsroom windows, “there
was going to be less religion around than there was before,” said Dr.
Martin Marty. They were wrong. And they were wrong in believing that
whatever “leftover religion” survived in the postmodern age was “going
to be tolerant, concessive, mushy and so on.”
But in the mid-1990s, the University of Chicago historian directed a
massive project to study the “militant religious fundamentalisms” on the
rise worldwide. It concluded that the leaders of many such groups would
resort to military action, when they failed to achieve victory through
constitutional means. And if military might was not enough, Marty noted
that the study warned that “they may very well take no prisoners, allow
no compromises, have no borders and they might resort to terrorism.”
How should networks and newspapers respond? How should they cover a part
of daily life that can affect events at the global level, as well as in
the quiet of ordinary pews, schools and homes?
It would help, he said, if they hired more journalists who are trained
to cover this complex and emotional subject. But that response is no
longer adequate.
“We are past that, right now,” said Marty. “We are now dealing with
issues that all journalists are going to have to try to understand. …
The horizons of religion and the news have touched and we all have to
realize that.”
For more information on this lecture at the Poynter Institute, click: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=12002
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