NEWS ANALYSIS: Bringing religion to the `wasteland’ of TV

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Over the past 18 months, three 30-minute weekly religion news shows strode boldly onto television, famously called the”wasteland”several decades ago. The trio are serious efforts to report on the moral and ethical dimensions of society. That’s good. But the question is: Does anyone know they are there? Certainly […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Over the past 18 months, three 30-minute weekly religion news shows strode boldly onto television, famously called the”wasteland”several decades ago. The trio are serious efforts to report on the moral and ethical dimensions of society. That’s good. But the question is: Does anyone know they are there?

Certainly the networks do not.


Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly premiered Sept. 6 and is now available _ when it is not pre-empted _ on 190 public television stations. Odyssey News got underway Feb. 7 and can be found somewhere in the cable welter. Fox News Channel, the 24-hour cable operation of Fox Television, started Fox on Religion in October 1996.

Although a solid majority living in the United States says religion is important, it’s hard to find many places where serious religion reporting takes place. It’s certainly not the television networks.

And then, most of what is reported is what is called”sweet and sour”_ either a fluffy piece about a church social or synagogue event as with much of the coverage of last year’s Promise Keepers gathering in Washington, or, reporting of scandal, as in the Jim Bakker flap, or conflict, such as the denominational dust-ups over sexual mores.

Too rarely do we hear about religion at the core of the way we live and move and have our being, such as the striking mushroom workers in Quincy, Fla., who cite both Martin Luther King and Roman Catholic social teachings on the right to organize in their dispute with Quincy Farms. Or how, for the past decade, in a comparative religion class taught at a major university, the students are increasingly American Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims wrestling with their own beliefs rather than Christians and Jews studying about other faiths.

On television, however, entertainment is paramount.

Television’s”god is brevity,”said Bill Moyers, known for the multiple dimensions of his TV work.”Even when television captures the emotional religious experience of its subjects, it can’t explain it historically, psychologically or analytically in ways that honor (religion’s) complexity and diversity.” But polls suggest Americans want television _ where a majority get their primary news coverage _ to pay more attention to religion. Fifty-six percent of adult Americans in one poll, according to TV Guide, believe that prime-time television does not pay sufficient attention to religion.

Well they might be right. Ninety-nine percent of network news coverage from 1993-1996 ignored religion altogether, according to The Media Research Center.

Not much change has occurred on the network television front, although five years ago ABC News hired Peggy Wehmeyer to create a religion beat. No other television network has one.”But you are missing all these great stories,”Wehmeyer had told the Dallas TV station where she worked a number of years ago. The station let her concentrate on religion. By her estimates, Wehmeyer gets about l8 pieces a year on the air for ABC.

Into that gap have come the new programs.

News Odyssey is produced and largely financed initially _ $1.4 million of the $1.7 million needed for the first year _ by United Methodist Communications in Nashville. It began a little more than a year ago and continues to be available each weekend on the 9-year-old Odyssey Network, sponsored by an interfaith coalition of about 35 religious groups, on hundreds of cable channels.


Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly began in September 1997 on 20 public broadcasting stations and now appears on 190. It has been funded for 39 shows by a $5 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to WNET/Channel 13 in New York and expects to continue for at least another year. The program is put together in the Reuters studios in Washington, D.C. WNET sends it out on Friday afternoons.

Fox on Religion appears Fridays at 11.30 a.m. EST and originates in the Fox studios in Manhattan. It is hosted by Carol Iovanna, a long-time TV anchor. When Fox started Fox News Channel two years ago, it sought to provide in-depth coverage of subjects such as psychology, law, education, health and, yes, religion.

The program _ 18 minutes of news, 12 of commercials _ usually devotes its time to single topics like televangelism or the pope in Cuba.

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and NewsOdyssey begin with crisp current religion news items. Then they present three or four longer pieces. The span ranges from the hundredth birthday celebration of Dorothy Day, whose”Catholic Worker”movement concentrated on the poor, to the impact of Christian rock on worship.

NewsOdyssey has an interesting editorial comment. Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly often has a panel of ethicists or religion experts who discuss a timely issue, such as the current presidential crisis on a show released at the end of January.

A central theme of both has been the growing diversity of American religious expression.

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly has a staff of 15. Executive Producer Gerry Solomon has worked as an executive producer for ABC’s”Good Morning America,”NBC’s”Meet the Press”and CNN.


He joined the show, he said, because”here my values are in play.”A practicing Conservative Jew, Solomon left behind a program on finance that”asked no ethical or moral questions.” Longtime NBC News reporter Bob Abernethy created the show and now hosts and directs it. Abernethy, an active member of a United Church of Christ congregation, emphasizes that”this is news reporting, no apologetics for one point of view.”But it’s another thing to cover ethics and religion. We’ve learned a lot. We have a lot to learn. We need to improve, quickly.” None of the three programs are perfect. But they are a step in the right direction and already challenge the networks to take religion seriously. Check them out … If you can find them.

Eds: For more information contact Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly at 888-665 7537 or http://www.wnet.org; News Odyssey at 800-841-8476 or http://www.umc.org/newsodyssey; and Fox on Religion at 212-301-3000 or http://www.foxnews.com.

DEA END HOWELL

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