Article Details
Article Added On: October 04, 2004 - over 3 years ago
Title: The media's struggle to convey the impact of faith
Author: Dennis Ryerson
Publication: Indianapolis Star, October 4
Publication Date: January 01, 2004 - over 4 years ago
Faith Groups: Other
Themes: religion in the media
Description: Why should the media cover religion?
I want to return to a favorite topic of mine: the media and religion. Two weekends ago, a dozen other journalists and I gathered in Los Angeles to talk about why newspapers struggle so much with this topic and what we can do to improve. The session was arranged by the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. The group was unanimous in its thinking that it's about time the media got religion. That doesn't mean get religion as in join a church or a religious movement. Newspapers in my view, and in the view of most religious leaders I've talked to, should be secular institutions. But we've got to find a better way to understand in a more meaningful way the impact of faith on such public issues as education, health care, the war in Iraq and same-sex marriage. For starters, we need to recognize some disconnects between how we regard our profession and how many Americans view their lives. Even conservative journalists, according to polls I've seen, feel much stronger than the general public about such things as the separation of church and state. I suspect most journalists also are less inclined than many of our readers to promote one religion over another. That's because we are ingrained with the ideals of respecting competing points of view, providing balanced coverage and not showing favoritism. (I acknowledge the views of both the hard left and the hard right that we do indeed choose sides. I suggest that for both, a middle ground is unrecognizable.) How can newspapers, non-religious institutions, do a better job reporting about the lives of readers, most of whom regard themselves as living in a religious world? For too long we've dealt with that question by avoiding it. Or at best, we've relegated religion coverage to one section of the newspaper and to one reporter, if that. We're also guilty of reporting the "what" regarding issues of the day but minimizing the more difficult but important "why." So we report that many people of faith are opposed to same-sex marriage, but we don't report in depth about their beliefs. We report that President Bush says his favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ, but we fail to report on how the president's faith does or does not impact the decisions he makes on our behalf. We report about immigration. But as Diane Winston, the new Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg school, reminded the L.A. group, we don't write about how immigration affects the religious texture of our country. (She reminded us that there now are as many Buddhists in America as there are Presbyterians; there are as many Sikhs as there are Unitarian-Universalists.) Just as we need to report more effectively on the faiths and values that so affect public policy and life, we also need to do a better job covering the changing religious landscape here and abroad.
