Faith
and the Media
The first thing I'd like to start with is this whole question of faith
and religion. Now, this conference is called faith and the media, but looking
around at you and having talked to you, this isn't a conference of faith
and people of faith and the media. It's a conference largely about people
from organized religions and people who work in the media, and I think
that right there you have a dichotomy. One of the reasons why I felt so
attacked on Cross Country Checkup yesterday is that, in fact, what has
been talked about here quite a lot or what has been talked about in the
corridors is between organized religion and the media rather than between
faith and the media, but I'll come back to that later.
The other thing that I wanted to do at the beginning is be personal
because faith and religion are personal. Everyone one of us in the media
comes to every story we write with a whole bunch of preconceptions--with
our education, with biases and, I hate to say it, with prejudices. So,
first of all, I am the Winnipeg Free Press, or at least me, the
editorial board and about a hundred others are the Winnipeg Free Press,
but I'm the guiding light of it, if you like. There's not a lot that goes
in the paper that, one way or another, is not directed by me or at least
by the board that I chair, which takes other people's opinions into account--and
we do have opinions. I am not the media as a whole.
However, I've worked in most branches of the media. I've been a producer
in television, I've worked in radio, I've even been in private production.
I know the business end of this. But it's important to understand that
while I speak for the Winnipeg Free Press and I have some idea of
the rest of the media, I am not it. It is a very large and amorphous body
and what applies to me doesn't necessarily apply to the Ottawa Citizen
nor does it apply to the Globe and Mail. The sheer diversity of
the press means that we will always approach religion differently.
The third thing is that I attended my son's bar mitzvah last week so,
yes, I personally am familiar with some kinds of organized religion. I
was brought up in the Church of England. Now, I've heard people around
the corridors talking about one of the differences between the church or
churches or organized religion and the media is you have a product to sell
and we're a business and we have to make money. Growing up as a choir boy
in England, I always thought the church was a business because it paid
me my weekly pocket money.
Is there faith in Canada? Yes, of course, there's faith in Canada and
obviously there's religion in Canada. Does the media care? Well, yes and
no. I think it probably cares at the moment more about religion than it
cares about faith. The survey that we did of our readers says that 46%
of them describe themselves as being quite religious. It's quite interesting
how they break down, too. We also asked the question a year ago which was
somewhat different. It was a question about prayer. More people say they
pray than say they're quite religious. The two groups differ, too. When
you ask about prayer, you get more women answering that they pray and you
get more people that are married. In both groups these people shift towards
the right, they tend to be supporters of the Progressive Conservative party
both provincially and locally, they tend to come from rural rather than
urban areas, and they tend to be more conservative in their outlook.
The Winnipeg Free Press declares itself to be a liberal paper. It's
also the only newspaper outside of Toronto that's not owned by Conrad Black.
It's important to realize that we come at stories and we come at editorial
positions that start off declaring itself to be liberal and liberal in
a small "l" sense, but also Liberal sometimes in a large "L" sense. We
take political positions and we take social positions. We get angry about
the fact that too many children are looked after in hotels, we are a socially
active part of the community, and our belief is that we should be a forum
for debate and that we should draw people together in that debate, rather
than fragmenting them within it. Now, you have to ask yourselves whether
it's possible to do this, either with faith or with religion, and I'm not
sure that it is. We can try, but I'm still not sure.
Throughout this talk I'm going to interchange the words "religion" and
"faith." I'm somebody who deals with words all the time and I believe that
they ought to be used accurately. When I say religion, I mean religion,
and when I say faith, I mean faith. And when I'm talking about religion,
I mean some kind of organized belief. And when I mean faith, I mean simply
what people believe.
One of the problems with covering religion is that people who are religious
tend to believe things as absolutes. You cannot argue with certain religious
groups about abortion, contraception, homosexuality, or the position of
women. The newspaper has positions on all of these things . They are not
the position of many religious groups. The difference between us and the
religious groups is that we believe that there can be more than one view
on these kinds of things. And for religious groups, often the belief is
that they are interpreting a truth and that God has told them that this
is moral and right. We do not believe that. So when we're covering religious
groups and we're talking about faith, there is a grave problem that what
we may do is cause huge degrees of upset.
One of the biggest problems that I have on a daily basis is a lobby
from a religious person within Winnipeg who really believes that we are
totally biased against his position and believes that we control the letters
that go into the newspaper because we don't publish all the letters that
he writes on his position. He's against abortion and he believes that God
has told him to be against abortion, and he clearly believes that we are
just not being unfair to him, but that what we are doing is evil. Now,
I respect his position, but he doesn't greatly respect mine.
Another problem is that it is extremely difficult to separate opinion
from the news pages and I'm not sure how far I would like to do so. The
way I direct coverage--the way that a lot of newspapers like mine direct
coverage--is to have a advocacy view within the editorial pages that is
certainly reflected at least in the selection of what we do in news pages.
So you can ask yourself here, if we have opinions and if we direct and
advocate and have campaigns within the community, how should we and how
can we fit either faith or religion into that, and should we? And if we
do, how many people will we upset, how many people will feel that we are
on the wrong side, and what good and what harm will we do? I'm not saying
that we should not cover religion or faith, I'm just saying that it's not
simple.
There's various different kinds of coverage and all of these can be
treated in a different way. How do we treat them? Well, I was very interested
to hear Peggy last night talk about Captain O'Grady because that's an experience
I've seen many times. You get sports people who say that they scored because
of God. You get many social activists who say that what they do is because
of God. I've always known that there has been a greater tendency in the
United States to report this. I know that in Canada it's normally censored
and I'm fairly sure that most of it has to do with embarrassment.
I had a story come across my desk the other day about an ongoing discussion
with the United Church. The United Church has withdrawn from wishing to
convert Jews and there was a round table discussion somewhere about whether
other religious groups would decide to stop trying to convert Jews. The
story from an evangelical group came across the paper and the night editor
looked on it and he said, "I think this belongs on the faith page." Well,
does it or doesn't it? I'm not quite sure. Our faith page appears after
the travel section and I'm often tempted to put in a little box saying,
"If you go."
Some people say that we should write stories about how God influences
people's lives. Here's my question: Do we write stories that say, "Oh,
well, I did this because I'm a Liberal"? Even more so, do we write stories
that say, "Well, I did this because I'm a committed Communist"? What is
permissible here and what is not? How broad should we be?
There's a religious debate going on since Moderator Phipps talked about
the divinity of Christ. I found it fascinating. I sat in an editorial board
meeting, and then I sat in a news meeting and I said, "I want this debate
to take place in our newspaper." It did. Now, what is that covering? Is
that covering religion or is it covering faith or is it covering both?
And does it get to the heart of the many people who have private faith?
I would suggest it does, however many religious groups in the community
were quite upset--as evidenced by the letters that we received saying we
didn't cover the subtleties of the issue. So here you have people who have
one belief of God and the divinity of Jesus or the non-divinity of Jesus,
all the subtleties, and then you have another group who are upset that
the fine points of religion are not covered there. And here you get into
another problem of covering religion: People believe it and hold it very,
very dear, in a way that they don't hardly anything else, and so any coverage
of religion is not only fraught with difficulty, it also needs to be extremely
subtle.
I have another question, and it's this: If we are to write new stories
about religion, should we take an editorial position about it? Should we
say that the position of the Roman Catholic church on not allowing women
to be priests is not right? Should we say: "The Roman Catholic church should
ordain women. In this day and age there is no reason whatsoever . . ."
Should we do that? And if not, why not, because we do it about everything
else and it's supposed to be a free society. Now, I've been troubled with
this because I've been thinking about it. I'm sure we shouldn't, but I'm
not at this point completely sure why not. Why is that off bounds?
Then there's the position of churches in social action. This is where
you sometimes get into controversy. I'm talking about the church or religious
groups as social activists in Northern Ireland, because whether or not
it is true--and it is true--that debate and that war has moved on from
a religious war to something quite totally different, if it ever was a
religious war. It still doesn't make any difference that there are Protestants
on one side and there are Catholics on the other; and when you look at
Bosnia, there are Muslims on one side and there are Christians on the other;
but when you look to the Middle East there are Islamic parties and people
of Islam who support particular points of view and want to get themselves
into power. No, religion is still about gaining power and it is still about
converting people to a point of view. Should we report on that? If yes,
how should we report on that? Now, was it religious coverage when we went
to cover the 50th anniversary of Israel? I would say it was.
I would say that we are covering religion all the time in our story
about the inner city, which we call Inner City Voices, because we keep
talking about healing circles. If I look around here, the one denomination,
if you'd like, that is missing is the denomination that is more than 10%
of the population of the city which I come from, which is the aboriginals.
Now, I know the difficulties of getting them here and I'm not trying to
make a point here, but the point I'm trying to make is that when we write
about religion and faith groups, there are a whole host of religious groups
that need to be covered and talked about and they're not just not Christian
groups, they're not even groups that come from what we call even the western
or civilized world or what we call the world of religious community as
we normally look upon it.
If we cover the church's social action, should we comment and analyze
that? If the Mennonite Central Committee is doing things in the inner city,
if the Catholics are doing things in the inner city, do we talk about what
it is that they are doing? Do we make a particular point of bringing in
the faith there in a way that we wouldn't bring in the fact that somebody
was perhaps being supported by the Progressive Conservatives or being supported
by the Liberals or being supported by the NDP?
What do we do about the financial situation of religious groups? How
do we report on that? They actually have power positions in terms of money.
They invest--is that a religious story? It's certainly covering organized
religion, but it's not got much to do about faith, does it ? Or does it?
We do get into discussing things in an editorial manner which can be
very difficult. The Mennonites are forming a university in Manitoba. Our
editorial position on that has been very difficult to arrive at. We're
not sure it's a good idea to have a denominational university. On the other
hand, we do think it's a good idea that the Mennonites have somewhere where
they can bring people up in an education that they believe in. It's a big
controversy in our newspaper but it gets us into very, very difficult areas
which traditionally we have tended not to comment on. How much further
are we going to push this envelope? I'm asking these questions because
I don't know the answers.
Clearly there is an amount of interest in religion. Maybe covering organized
religion is like covering a minority sport. The mere fact that you're all
here says that there's a huge pressure group now developing that says that
we should be doing more than we're doing and paying attention. Guess what?
We tend not to be in the forefront of covering stuff; we tend to be behind
it. Twenty-five years ago I was a thing called an energy correspondent;
two years before that, if you'd done a survey, you'd have found that everybody
said that we weren't covering energy properly. And are there any energy
correspondents today? No, there aren't. What happened to environmental
correspondents? They've fallen off the tree. And guess what, if you do
surveys about the environment right now, you get a different perspective
than you did ten years ago, but clearly there's a ground swell and we might
look and try and find ways to say why there is a ground swell for religion
now. I think if you look around this audience and you see its age, you
might get an answer. But it is pressing upon us now and so we'll do something
about it. We tend to follow. The press always tends to follow. The idea
that we're at the vanguard, I think, is completely wrong. We'd like to
be; we're just not.
So what do we do? Well, I think you need something approaching a beat
reporter of some description, or at least somebody who has some idea of
what religion is about. Now, that person doesn't have to be somebody necessarily
who has a degree in religious studies or a Masters of Divinity, but it
does need to be somebody who's read a bit. We have this difficulty with
reporters in general. You know, a degree in history would go down really
nicely. Unfortunately, people come to us with degrees in journalism when
I'm not sure they've learned a whole bunch about much.
What else should you do? Well, it would be a good idea, wouldn't it,
if reporters in general had the idea that when there are things that touch
people's lives. I think that newspapers really need to be about stuff that
touch people's lives. We used to write about the First World War, the Second
World War and the election of Jean Chretien. At some point along the way,
we realized that the invention of the brassiere, the ball-point pen and
the telephone were as important as the first three. And when you're talking
about religion -- and I don't mean to insult anybody here--I think you're
talking about the second kind of story, you're talking about stuff that
covers people's lives, affects people's lives. What our own surveys tell
us is that if the home subscriber doesn't feel connected with his community
through the newspaper, then he won't read his newspaper. And one of the
ways, clearly, that you feel connected with your community is through faith
and that kind of action. So there's a job that you have to do with all
reporters and all writers that says, if this is part of somebody's lives,
then we should be writing about it. But that's not on a faith page and
it's probably not even in the news pages. It's probably within our "Life"
section.
I think I'm in favour of keeping something close to the faith page.
I'm embarrassed that it appears behind the travel section; it just happened.
You know, there are things that you can't control because of mechanics,
and right now that's one of them and I'm trying to fix it. But I think
the idea of that page, which isn't fully developed but should be, is that
you should have religious professionals with great degrees of expertise,
if not arguing with each other, at least arguing about points of religion.
Whether that exists as a faith page, whether it's two columns that appear
in the news pages, whether it's a third editorial page or whether it's
just columns on the op-ed page, I don't think matters, but I think that
to do away with that kind of debate and to move it into the newspaper as
a whole and just think you don't need it is wrong.
So those are the three things that I think you should do. If you translate
it into radio, you just have different programs of the same type. I mean
you'd have a religious reporter and you'd have a program such as Tapestry
or Ideas that discusses these kinds of things, and the same thing exists
probably in television.
I'd like to sum up by saying that nothing should prevent us from our
role as critics, and I've always believed that a critic is somebody who
wants things to happen better tomorrow. The word "critic" doesn't imply
a pessimistic or a negative view of life; it implies trying to make things
better. The problem in offering criticism on faith and religion is that
God may be above criticism, but his interpreters are not, and you, or quite
a few of you here, ladies and gentlemen, are not God--you are his interpreters.
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Last modified: 29 October 1999
