NEWS STORY: Critics still say religion badly covered, see some improvement

c. 1997 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ People of faith _ especially religious conservatives _ have long decried the way they are portrayed by the mainstream news media and often view journalists as stalking horses for secular society. Religious conservatives, according to Mark Silk, director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ People of faith _ especially religious conservatives _ have long decried the way they are portrayed by the mainstream news media and often view journalists as stalking horses for secular society.

Religious conservatives, according to Mark Silk, director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., commonly believe the mainstream media is hostile to religion in general and the religious right in particular.


Moreover, he adds, religious conservatives view this as hypocritical because of the favorable coverage liberal religious leaders who opposed racial segregation received during the civil rights era.

Given all this, is there any hope for detente between the news media and religious conservatives?

No less a frequent critic of the media’s performance than the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed believes there is.

Reed, the coalition’s executive director, said journalists are becoming increasingly sensitive to religious nuance, particularly in their coverage of political stories with religious dimensions.”The major, tone-setting coverage … has gotten much better,”Reed said Thursday (Feb. 20) at a Washington symposium on the coverage of religion and politics. The session was sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, and the Religion Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based philanthropy.

Despite that, however, Reed, Silk and others at the symposium generally agreed the media has a long way to go before religious conservatives begin to put greater trust in its credibility.

The belief of many secular-oriented journalists remains”the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic, the only good Mormon is a bad Mormon,”said syndicated columnist Mark Shields.

In large part, said Michael Barone, a senior editor at Reader’s Digest, the problem is one of philosophical perspective.


Barone maintained the majority of mainstream journalists adhere to what he called”a Voltaire theory of history,”a reference to the 18th-century French philosopher. What he meant by the phrase was a belief in history as a progression from”authoritarian religious beliefs to a libertarian position of belief or disbelief.” Conservative religious beliefs, such as those articulated by members of the religious right, he continued, are viewed as authoritarian and therefore represent”a step backward.”This thinking allows much of the mainstream media to dismiss conservative religions as anomalies swimming against the historical tide, Barone said.

But a close look at religion in America today dispels the truth of the Voltaire theory, Barone added, pointing to the growth of conservative religious groups and the concurrent membership decline in more liberal groups, such as mainstream Protestant denominations.

Like Barone, Reed decried what he termed the paucity of mainstream journalists who hold conservative _ or”orthodox”_ religious beliefs.

This”lack of personal knowledge of orthodox faith and people of (orthodox) faith leads to sloppy reporting and stereotyping,”he said.

Stereotyping, however, is not limited to insensitive journalists, Silk noted.

A former editorial writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Silk said people of faith populate many newsrooms to the same degree as the general population of the region in which they live and work. The mainstream news media is by no means monolithically secular, he argued.

Where these journalists cross swords with religious conservatives, however, is in the high premium they place on inclusiveness, he added. That is particularly the case in their attitude toward the intersection of religion and politics, he said.


To be tolerant of other viewpoints is held in the highest regard by the majority of these journalists. Religious conservatives are seen as being intolerant of others, he said, thereby setting up the sense of conflict between religious conservatives and the news media.

The problem with journalists focusing on tolerance, Silk said, is that it tends to push aside most other aspects of religious belief that do not neatly fit into what amounts to formula journalism. As a result, the same stories of tolerance and intolerance are written”again and again.”He cited the coverage of last year’s debate over the anti-abortion plank of the Republican Party platform as an example.

And that narrow focus, Silk said, leaves the bulk of religious experience in the United States, conservative or otherwise,”remarkably uncovered.”

MJP END RIFKIN

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