Concluding adddress 2:  Where do we go from here?

Simply part of doing the job well

The news media ought to pay attention to religious dimensions of stories they are already covering . . . coverage of religion is simply part of doing their job well. A presentation by John Stackhouse, a professor at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. and a former columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press. (Note: The following is a draft of remarks made at the concluding session of the Faith and the Media Conference held at Carleton University, Ottawa, early in June 1998. All rights reserved by the author: duplication by permission only.)  In the television program of a few years ago, big-city newspaper editor Lou Grant was working on two problems, seemingly unrelated. The first was that his Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor.

His second problem was how to get rid of lazy, often-drunk, and generally no-good reporter Mal Cavanaugh. All through this episode the management of the Tribune had been trying to find a way to get Cavanaugh to resign. Then, in a moment of inspiration, the solution appears.

LOU: Congratulations, Mal. You're the Trib's new religion editor. Lou sits back, smiling broadly. The information seeps in a bit slowly to the befuddled Cavanaugh, who blinks back at Lou.

CAVANAUGH: Religion editor?

LOU: That's right, Mal. And I can't think of a better man to interview the clergy..., you know, take ministers to lunch.

CAVANAUGH: Are you kidding?

LOU: Detail the theological frontier in this country and abroad.

CAVANAUGH: That stinks! Before you stick me with a lousy job like that, I'd quit.

LOU: Quit? You haven't even given it a chance. You can't quit.

CAVANAUGH: The hell I can't. Just watch me.

Grant's newsroom associates beam as Cavanaugh storms out. The television audience is left with the impression that Grant's problems are brilliantly solved. The religion editor spot is still empty, but who cares?¹

Well, one of the dominant themes of this conference-indeed, its raison d'àtre-is that many Canadians do care about religion and about its coverage in secular news media, and many of those Canadians believe coverage of religion can be, and ought to be, improved.

Saeculum is Latin for "the world," and secular news media work in, and take their cues from, and are sponsored by "the world." Specifically, they are not church periodicals, and in our western heritage that is the key distinction for a "secular" institution: it is not funded by , nor beholden to, religious institutions, but instead serves society at large.

Now if we want a secular news medium to pay attention to religion, we cannot do so properly by arguing on religious grounds. We can't expect a secular newspaper to pay attention to a Christian church because the Holy Spirit is there, or to an Islamic idea because the Holy Qur'an teaches it in the name of Allah. A secular news medium properly pays attention to religion not because it is good or right, but because religion is important in the world.

Now, what a number of journalists have failed to realize, as this conference has agreed, is that religion is important in the world. Put a blindfold on, pick up a dart, and throw it at a world map. You will hit an important news story in which religion plays an important role. Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East are obvious examples-someone earlier suggested that these are not merely religious conflicts, and that's true, but the participants in them use religions as rallying points, and that's also a matter of fact.

Furthermore, important recent events had religious factors that eluded most journalists. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of European communism had much to do with Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity in those countries as churches were one of the few institutional networks not entirely under the control of totalitarian regimes and Christianity was an ideology stubbornly resistant to communist attack and subversion. If the CIA in the 1970s had paid attention to an internal report recommending study of Islamic religious leaders, instead of dismissing it as mere "sociology," the United States might not have been quite so surprised by one Ayatollah Khomeini and the Shi'ite revolution in Iran twenty years ago.

What are the similar untold stories in Canadian society today? Why is evangelicalism growing in British Columbia, one of the provinces generally least interested in traditional religion? This isn't just a religion story, it's an education story-as school board disputes in Abbotsford and court cases regarding teacher education at Trinity Western University make clear.

What is the story behind the new Mennonite university project in Manitoba ? How much of this is about ethnic identity versus religious education, and how much is the government's support directed toward retention of the rural vote and how much toward expanding the province's postsecondary options?

And what about the faith commitments of Canada's leaders? Americans typically pay attention to the religion of their Presidents: how about Prime Minister Chretien, Premier Bouchard, and an actually fair-minded and well- informed discussion of Opposition Leader Preston Manning's religion as it relates to his career of public service? Why does novelist Margaret Atwood mention religion so much in her books, as many Canadian writers do? For that matter, I have yet to read a profile of newspaper magnate Conrad Black that explores his religious commitments as a way to understand the man and his work.

This is half of the main point I want to make about religion's importance in the news: news media ought to pay attention to religious dimensions of stories they are already covering. And that means something quite radical: "All journalists must become better educated about religion, regardless of the subjects they cover. Religion weaves its way through art, politics, local government, personal relationships, music, ethnic cultures, values, legal systems, culinary arts, sciences, history, lifestyles, international diplomacy, sports, business, literature, psychology, terrorism, and war."

You might think, "That's just what a religion professor would say: "Pay attention to my subject. But this last paragraph comes from Nancy Nielsen, Vice President of Corporate Communications at The New York Times Company. Her remarks echo the point made by senior journalists throughout this conference.

The second half of my main point about the importance of religion for the secular media is that religion is worth covering on its own. People still care about religion. Maclean's editors evidently took a lot of persuading by the late Prof. George Rawlyk of Queen's University and the Angus Reid polling Group that many Canadians were (a) still deeply religious and (b) wanted to receive more coverage of religion by secular media. When they published their landmark issue on the research of Rawlyk and Angus Reid, entitled "God Is Alive" in the spring of 1993, and two subsequent cover stories on religion, Maclean's said later that they received more mail on these three than any other stories of this decade except one on the Charlottetown accord and one on the Quebec referendum.

The key idea here, then, is not that coverage of religion needs to be justified in terms of "filling out" the coverage of something journalists recognize already as important, such as politics or economics or entertainment. Religion is something that many readers and listeners and viewers clearly find important for its own sake. Cultural tensions in Quebec, school board struggles in Newfoundland, abortion and euthanasia-all of these issues and more ought to have sent a strong signal to politicians and journalists alike: people care deeply about more than money and power. They care about ideas and culture and identity and morality and meaning. To correct the slogan of the Clinton presidential election campaign, "It's not just the economy, stupid."

And so this goes to the heart of a catchphrase used often in this conference without much definition: religion will get covered if it is a "good story." But a good story in whose eyes? A baseball player throws a ball well and wins and people make some inexplicably big deal about a mysterious thing they call a "perfect game." Is that a good story or not? Or an eccentric Canadian pianist (to reach back a bit) records an idiosyncratic version of Bach's "Goldberg Variations." (I'm thinking, of course, of Glenn Gould.) Is that a good story or not? We cannot expect good sports reporting from reporters who do not recognize the names of Rocket Richard or Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali. We cannot expect good business reporting from reporters who do not understand the difference between monetarism and the money supply. We cannot expect good arts reporting from reporters who do not know a pas de deux from a Picasso. So please, editors, don't send out reporters to cover religion who don't know the difference between a Sikh and a Hindu, let alone the difference between a Baptist and a Pentecostal.

But how should religion be covered? I would like to make two suggestions: one formal, and one material.

Formally, I'd like to suggest that media consider responding to the importance of religion as part of regular, general news by covering it as such and featuring it as part of other stories and occasionally as page one/lead stories themselves. But I also suggest religion sections as part of a regular broadcast schedule or periodical line-up or newspaper section with reporters who are regularly on this beat. This is not to perpetuate the "church page ghetto," but to recognize a simple idea: just as sports and politics and business have their particular readers who want more than most readers want-in-depth coverage expressed in arcane vocabulary ("left-wing lock," "vote of nonconfidence," "futures and options")-so, this conference has maintained, many Canadians want news of religion covered by people who appreciate naturally what interests readers, viewers, and listeners and can serve those interests well.

Several speakers at this conference have chided us with the reminder that most Canadians don't care that much about religion stories, and have trotted out the same disparaging stereotypes of notices of church socials and the installation of new pastors. "Everyday religion isn't front page news," someone said. But since when did stories have to appeal to ninety per cent of the population to run in a newspaper or be aired on the newscast? How many of us care about detailed business news, or political reporting, or sports updates? Enough of us care to make detailed coverage worthwhile-so then, how about religion?

But now I want to raise perhaps the most controversial, confrontational point of these brief remarks. Let's consider two relatively recent Manitoba news stories: the first dealt with students who opted out of religious exercises in a rural high school and the second with the controversy in Winnipeg over the dismissal of a Christian clergyman over the issue of homosexuality.

These two stories point up a serious problem in much current reporting of religion by secular media. And that is that they are not "secular" enough. Instead, the reporting takes the form of a morality play, a set piece or trope with good guys and bad guys identified by the reporter as he or she tells us a sort of secularized fairytale.

In the first case, the big, bad Mennonite majority in the small town of Steinbach was oppressing poor, innocent non-Mennonites at the local high school. Religious instruction was part of the high school day, and non- Christians who didn't want it were allowed to leave for study hall. This policy, however, apparently made some of those students feel marginalized and unhappy.

Now it may well have been true that the Steinbach Regional Secondary School both flouted the guidelines of the Department of Education in this sort of instruction and treated minorities with less than full Christian charity: a reporter rightly can expose both illegality and hypocrisy if such there be. But what one doesn't get from this stereotyping report-or at least I didn't get it-is a clear sense of just why those Steinbachers are behaving in this way. Are they all just mean-spirited bigots? I detect in this coverage not secular reporting-"We can't take sides on religious matters here; we're just trying to report what's going on"-but secularist reporting -a definite bias against traditional religion. And such bias works against thorough, serious explanation of what's going on

In Canada nowadays, that means bias especially against conservative Roman Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism-but it shows up in the coverage of other groups as well: mainline Protestant denominations are doctrinally vague social work agencies; Sikhs tend toward violence against each other; Muslims tend toward violence against others; and so on. In fact, it has struck me powerfully to hear from Muslim readers, Sikh readers, Hindu readers, and various kinds of Christian readers who have said in response to a newspaper column I've published when I used to write for the Winnipeg Free Press, "It's surprising, and refreshing, to see our religion presented in a way we recognize, in a way that is reasonably fair-minded." And I have found that conservative Christians are positively astonished when their views are given editorial voice by mainstream TV, radio, or print media.

I wonder if we see just beneath the surface here an ideological secularism that views traditional religion as necessarily oppressive and intrinsically unintelligent, and as frequently a cover for some financial or sexual or political impropriety. Indeed, this is part of the secularization myth that shows up too often in religion reporting, namely, that "religion is declining under the impact of reason-and a good thing, too."

Are reporters more secular than the populations they serve? One famous study of elite American journalists published in 1980 found this to be true. But a couple of subsequent studies, as many of you know, disputed this finding.

I want to raise two points here about this oft-cited research. First, as I recall, the 1980 study polled journalists without regard to beat. The later surveys used to dispute this study polled religion editors and writers . Now, if this isn't quite apples and oranges, it strikes me as a significant difference nonetheless. Those whose beat is mainly or exclusively religion might well be expected to have an interest in religion, and even practice it! But if journalists in general are more secular, then religion coverage will be affected by those values: in the matter of who gets what space in the paper or what time on the program, in the matter of what features are brought out and what features neglected, and so on.

Suppose my recollection is mistaken about the general reporters versus religion reporters. The second factor in this comparison is elite media versus media across the country. I don't know how journalism works as a professional would (I'm just an occasional participant in journalism), but I know how my academic profession works. Those of us who are content to teach in the hinterlands can cheerfully ignore what happens among the elite institutions and practitioners. But those of us who aspire to rising in the ranks and moving to the more elite institutions pay attention to what goes on there and we emulate it. My guess is that reporters on the make in Iowa or Maine or Louisiana or Colorado care intensely what their counterparts in New York and Los Angeles think and do. And I expect this is true in Canada especially of journalists as they watch carefully what happens in the major markets, and in Toronto above all.

So what the leading media do literally leads the rest of the country to at least some extent. Journalists at the pacesetting media clearly have heavy responsibilities-and important opportunities-in this regard. I mentioned the "emancipation myth" of secularization: that religion is dying out as humankind progresses toward the light of reason. This seems more common, I think, among older journalists who seem still to be reacting against Christianity in the way boomers tend to validate themselves as rebels against anything that looks like "the establishment." Younger journalists have grown up in a Canada much less marked by the cultural dominance of Christianity, and so perhaps don't have this reflexive antagonism toward the Christian religion.

I echo the address of University of Western Ontario journalism dean Peter Desbarats earlier in this conference-although I am astonished at his remarks that posited a widening gap between rational people who take science seriously and, well, credulous people who take religion seriously. I respectfully suggest that Mr. Desbarats needs to widen his circle of acquaintance: some of us read the same science he does and don't feel obliged to choose between reason and revelation-or, as Globe and Mail editor William Thorsell so revealingly put it last night, between "logic and faith." The very positing of this divide by senior Canadian journalists wonderfully exemplifies my point here about the mentality of far too many other journalists.

Still, I can't paint this generation gap too broadly: young journalists trangress in this mode as well. Let's take up the second story I mentioned of the dismissal of a local clergyman over his support for the legitimacy of homosexual relations. I had a most instructive experience with a local TV news crew on this matter.

As the cameraman was setting up in my university office, I enjoyed a friendly chat with the young woman who would interview me. She sensed, I am guessing, a kindred spirit: well-educated, sophisticated, liberal. Then the interview began, and to her increasing horror, she found that this religion professor at the secular university was not going to immediately castigate those ignorant and oppressive Lutherans for persecuting this innocent and noble clergyman. I am not overstating the language used: she explicitly asked me on camera if I thought this fellow was being treated badly by self- righteous religious people in just the same way that Jesus Christ was persecuted by the religious leaders of his day.

When I sensed the bias here and suggested instead that Jesus Christ was persecuted largely because he drew moral lines in places that many people found uncomfortable, and that it was entirely possible that he might view the situation more like the Lutheran churchpeople and less like the clergyman, her face obviously fell and the interview was over.

Now here's the kicker. She was on deadline (it was afternoon and she wanted the story on the air that night) and clearly had no time to tape someone else in the "expert" spot in her piece. So I duly appeared on the evening news: first just a visual with her tendentious voiceover, and then the equivalent of a one-sentence sound bite. I say "the equivalent" because the station edited my words so that the beginning of one sentence was run into the end of another. My lips continued to finish the first sentence while my voice was saying something else. Fortunately, they did such a terrible job that the resulting sentence was just gibberish. But her lead-in to my quote clearly got her point across about the righteous victim and the evil oppressors.

Other times, however, reporters can quote two sides on a controversial issue and moralize in a different mode. These journalists affect the morally superior ground of objectivity-cum-moderation. "Unlike these nutty extremists we've just heard from, I am the voice of sophisticated good sense -a better informed version of yourselves, O audience. Stick with us: we'll give you the news, and views, you can trust." Such a stance is not above the question: adopting it is also to take a position on the issue.

What about the New Journalism that boldly recognizes that no one can be perfectly objective? Fine. That doesn't give anyone a licence to throw out journalistic discipline in news reporting. Instead, it should help each of us be more wary of our biases and to compensate for them, not give in to them and let 'em rip.

So my plea to secular news reporters and editors is this: stay secular. Don't take sides, don't fit all religious people into to your particular moral view of the world. Do your best to understand what's going on, to figure out why human beings could possibly think or do or say that, without taking the lazy way out and fitting them into your convenient prefabricated stereotypes to tell your story. Leave the moralizing to the editorials and columns!

The last main point I'd like to underline from this conference is directed to those of us of religious faith who care about how religions, and especially how our religion and religious community, are portrayed in the secular media.

Many religious leaders and communities think that better coverage of religion means positive coverage of religion. But do we really believe that all that goes by the name of religion, generically speaking, is "good"? I doubt it. But we can all agree that religion is important. So news media should cover it well, and that means they must not cover it as publicists for the religious individuals and groups they discuss. As Mark Silk, former reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes, "Good religion coverage should make religious leaders no happier than good political coverage makes politicians."

There is a key point that I want to underscore from journalist Lois Sweet's presentation earlier in this conference. We need more reporting that offers analysis. By this I do not mean some journalist's half-baked opinion tacked on the end as a mini-editorial, but serious investigation that actually explains what's going on. Consider Maclean's magazine's recent story on the Jesus Marches. Christians perennially complain that such events are undercovered by the media, but when asked about it by journalists, they typically have provided few facts and fewer story ideas: a lot of Christians, of so many denominations, are marching because they love Jesus-what more can one say? Well, Maclean's Sharon Doyle actually tried to figure out why Christians chose to march, and why these were popular at this particular point in Canadian history, and so helped explain this event to her readers.

And I want respectfully to contrast this story with a couple of the clips NBC correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer showed to us on the first night of the conference. I doubt I was the only viewer to conclude that her piece on the Iowa septuplets raised the issue of God answering prayer without then her going on to do much with that issue. Her ending along the lines of "Well, some say miracle, other say freak of nature, but for the mom, her seven babies is enough" struck me as facile. Furthermore, Ms. Wehmeyer's own story shows that her conclusion isn't even on the mark: the mother herself cares a great deal about interpreting this event through a frame of divine providence. But many of us , at least, want to know: why does the mother see it this way when she shows that she also realizes God sometimes answers other mothers' prayers in different, disastrous ways?

So, too, the story on the tornado hitting a small Texas town. We see this people bearing up under catastrophe because of their faith, but we have no idea what that faith is and how it works for them. Are they just heroically strong-willed? Do they have theological ideas that put this in a context they can endure? Have their previous experiences of God's blessing been such that they can accept this occasion of terrible trouble? From the TV segment, we have no idea.

In fairness to Ms. Wehmeyer, however, religious people and religion reporters both need to appreciate that some issues simply can't be covered adequately in the tight confines of the three-minute TV news story or even the twenty-minute radio program. Abortion, euthanasia, heresy, sexual morality, religious leadership, gender roles, suffering and evil-all of these are understood and lived out by believers in deep layers of religious tradition and theory, and it is perhaps best that these issues are treated only in select media appropriate to adequate discussion of the subject in question.

Now, if we do want to pitch stories to our friendly neighbourhood journalists, or even national ones, we have to be able imaginatively to get inside their heads and help them with their agendas, instead of complaining about how they don't help us advance ours. Again: news media exist to help religious groups with their agendas only as this helps the media advance their own, and we must interact with them accordingly.

And I wonder simply this: how many believers, and particularly religious leaders, are personally so well acquainted with enough people outside their religious group that they intuitively know that this or that idea will be interesting to someone outside their circle? How many know journalists well enough to see things from their point of view and to suggest stories that will assist the journalist with his or her own view of the job? Without this level of acquaintance, we will be left with our separate solitudes, mutual suspicion, and resentment.

And one more thing for our religious friends. I believe that news media coverage of religion is simply part of doing their job well, and I hope my remarks today encourage those of you in the media to do so on this ground. Those of us in faith communities can and should help them do so for the common good as citizens of this multicultural and fractious land. But at the end of the day, whether you're pleased with the media or not, consider this: If you really believe that God has spoken to you, or that you have discovered inner peace, or that your community is on its way to eternal bliss, and the CBC or The Globe and Mail or Maclean's magazine don't pay attention, well, who cares?

Notes

1 Terry Mattingly, "The Religion Beat," The Quill (January 1983):12; quoted in Mark Silk, Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America (Urbana, IL and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995):27.

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