Religion content in Ontario newspapers
By Larry Cornies
Findings
Total
articles
Content
by persuasion, subject,
origin
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Religion content in Ontario newspapers
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A study printed in Essays in
Journalism, Graduate School of Journalism, University of Western Ontario
By Larry Cornies Findings
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Preamble
One of the first things that becomes clear
when looking at the topic of how the Canadian media covers faith is just
how little research has been done in this field. While there is a great
deal of information about the subject in the U.S., only a few individuals
or organizations in Canada have taken a look at the subject from a Canadian
point of view. One person who did is Larry Cornies; this study was conducted
in the mid-1980s while he was a Graduate student in Journalism at the University
of Western Ontario.
For Larry, interest in the subject of how the media covers faith began in the early 1980s, when he was editor of a U.S.-based Mennonite church publication. One of his responsibilities was to relate to reporters on behalf of his employer, the General Conference Mennonite Church. As he related to the media it became evident to him that media interest in the denomination was highest when it was challenging the structures, institutions, or laws of the country.
"Much attention was given to those instances where church and state butted heads, and far less to the processes, theology, and denominational struggles which had preceded them. From the inside, at least, they seemed to be plucked out of the church's life by the media and magnified for observation by society, often in isolation from their context. "
The main issue at that time for the General Conference Mennonite Church was the payment of "war taxes" and draft registration. While these issues registration were important for the General Conference, delegates took action on other issues which, to the church, were of equal importance. These included the role of women in church leadership, a major study on human sexuality, and a renewed emphasis on the importance of voluntarism and service. While the denominational news services gave these issues as much "play" as taxes and registration, they got almost no notice from the press. The human sexuality study got press inquiries only about that portion which dealt with homosexuality - a portion which, in the context of the total study, was fairly small and rather inconsequential.
Today Larry Cornies is an editor at the London Free Press.
My motivation for this study was partly to test my preconceptions of the media and the way they deal with religion. My experience in dealing with the U.S. news media from an institutional point of view was that they are keen on covering that which is somehow related to world events and other news headlines, that which is sensational or somehow offbeat, and that which focuses on conflict between existing structures, especially government, and organized religion. The Mennonite church job also prepared me to expect news media not to be concerned with explaining background or process, the way they might in a political campaign or other newsfeature.
The hypothesis, then, going into this study, was that Ontario's daily newspapers would follow much the same pattern. They would be primarily interested in those stories which concerned religion - defined as more than just Christianity - as a force in social or political issues, especially those that concerned government.
They would be less interested in stories which dealt with theological and liturgical development, worship, and the more traditional charitable work of religious groups, despite the fact that these are the heart of most religious communities.
I also hypothesized that the Roman Catholic Church would have the highest visibility in Ontario newspapers of the province's various religious groups. It was of interest to me to see how that visibility would compare to the percentage of Ontario's population which affiliates with the Roman Catholic Church. According to the 1981 Census, that figure is 35.6 per cent.
Other points of interest and questions I held for the study were:
How much exposure is given to non-Christian religious communities, such as the Jewish and Islamic communities?
What percentage of Ontario's religion content in newspapers is "home grown," how much is foreign? How much do papers cover their own circulation areas, i.e. how much religion content is local?
Bibliography and
Methodology
The subject of religion content in Ontario's
daily newspapers, or in any sampling of newspapers, is still unsullied
territory. A literature search failed to turn up any books on the subject
of religion in newspapers within the Canadian setting.
What exists are articles for church communicators on how to get local press coverage for church activities, interviews with some religion writers and the highly-respected study by George Gerbner of the Annenberg School of Communications in Philadelphia on religious television.
As far as I could determine, the Canadian newspaper industry itself has produced nothing on the subject of newspapers and religion. The closest the two have come to one another recently was the survey on Canadian attitudes to religion which Southam undertook prior to Pope John Paul's official visit to Canada in late 1984.
There appears, then, to be a great lack of and need for some substantive work on the interplay between religion and the Canadian mass media.
The recognition that religion plays an important part in the lives and attitudes of media consumers seems to have been growing steadily since the late 1970s. In the United States, the Moral Majority, led by Rev. Jerry Falwell, made a noticeable, if not overly-significant, impact on the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan to the White House. Falwell's fundamentalist approach to superpower relations and the need for a militarily-strong America reverberated with Reagan's own right-wing approach, and helped deliver hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of votes to the Republican ticket that year.
The growing significance of Falwell's movement, and his alliances with media magnates like Ted Turner of Atlanta's Cable News Network and Turner Broadcasting Systems - both giants within the U.S. cable TV industry - prompted widespread recognition of religion as a growing force in society within other corporate offices.
In 1982, NBC took action. It launched a new publication, titled "Of Special Interest," carrying the line on its masthead, "a periodical of fact and opinion from NBC Corporate Communications for the religious community." In its pages, the company has run stories on regular programs, upcoming specials, and interviews with religious leaders, presumeably in the hopes of boosting its image as a socially responsible broadcaster.
On the other side of the coin, companies like Proctor and Gamble and Nestlé became the target of religious communities for their promotions and products. Fundamentalists attacked Proctor and Gamble for its logo, which some religious leaders said signified association with satanism through the depiction of a quarter-moon surrounded by stars. After years of defending the logo, the company finally decided in late 1984 to dispense with it. The widespread boycott against Nestlé Corporation by religious groups because of its infant formula marketing practices in the Third World was also successful.
A similar concern on the part of religious groups here with the state of Canadian television, and how new technologies could be used in communicating religious programming, has prompted years of study and proposals for a Canadian Interfaith Network. The network is awaiting another ruling by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on its program plans and base of support, and hopes to go to air within about a year of getting the necessary approvals.
So the influence of religion on media appears to be growing. But to date, the bibliographical material related to the interplay between the two is very slim - something that may change quickly over the next decade.
Content Analysis
Methodology
The only way to get an adequate glimpse of the
nature of religion coverage in Ontario's daily press, therefore, was to
do original research. I chose three of the province's daily newspapers
for analysis - the Globe and Mail (Metro Edition), the London Free Press
(Morning Edition), and the Sault Star. Several factors determined this
selection:
They were varied in terms of circulation. The Globe's Metro Edition has a circulation of about 350,000, the Free Press is at about 92,000, and the Star stands at approximately 26,000. This sampling, then, would represent large, medium, and small-sized dailies in the province.
They were geographically scattered. The Globe was representative of Ontario's large urban population, the Free Press has a strong rural readership, and the Star is set on the fringe of Northern Ontario, a distance away from the large urban centers.
Ownership was varied. The Globe is the flagship of the Thomson empire, the Free Press independent, and the Star one of Southam's smaller papers.
Two other factors were built into the methodology to ensure balance between papers, i.e. making sure we were comparing apples with apples. The Metro Edition of the Globe and Mail was used instead of the National Edition, so that comparisons with other papers in terms of local religion coverage would be fair. And for the year 1981, the Morning Edition of the London Free Press was sampled in order to ensure continuity with the paper's content after the death of the evening edition late that same year.
The years chosen for the study were 1981 and 1985. There were two reasons for this selection. First, both years are recent enough to provide some meaningful results in terms of current religion content in Ontario. But, secondly, they were two years in which the national economies of Canada were very different. In 1981, the provincial economy, like the country's, was depressed. Unemployment was high. Interest rates were over 20 per cent. Inflation rates were coming down, but were still near 8 per cent.
By 1985, the economy was much improved, with inflation near 3 per cent, unemployment rates shrinking, and interest rates around 11 per cent. The purpose of the selection, then, was to provide opportunity for changes in religion coverage between good and bad economic times.
The sampling pattern for this study was as follows:
Two samples of each paper were taken each month, usually at a 15-day interval. Samples were consecutive in terms of days of the week. For example, the Monday paper from the first week in January was followed by the Tuesday paper from the third week, followed by the Wednesday paper of the first week in February, etc. This would ensure even sampling of days of the week and months of the year. One aberration here: The D. B. Weldon Library, where the most of the microfilms were read, discontinued its subscription to the films of the Sault Star in July 1985. Therefore, I compensated by sampling the last five months of 1984, using the same pattern.
What determined whether or not an article had "religious content?" There is no simple answer to this question. However the follow rule was used as a guide: Articles became part of the study if religion played a major part in the story.
For example, a story in which a minister won a $20,000 lottery prize would not be counted, since the central thrust of the story concerned the winning of a prize, not the faith of the winner. If, however, the minister would have attributed his winning the prize to daily prayer, fasting, and meditation, the article would have become part of the survey, since religion would then become an important part of the story.
Obviously, each article had to be judged subjectively on its own merits. But I believe those judgments were basically consistent. Each issue was studied in its entirety for religion content, including letters to the editor, editorials, and op/ed articles. Once considered part of the study, each article was read closely, then a one- or two-phrase summary included with the headline, recorded verbatim (see Appendicies 1-6), along with the page on which the article was found.
The only articles with religious content which did not become part of the study were those consisting of one- or two-sentence fillers at the bottom of columns, or as part of a "world in brief"-type package. If the piece had three sentences or more, it become part of the study.
Once the study was complete, a total of 318 articles had been read and recorded from 156 issues of the three newspapers, an average of two per issue.
Findings
During the course of the research, each of the
articles carrying religious content as defined in the previous chapter
were categorized according to persuasion, subject, and origin.
"Persuasion" means that religious group with which the article deals in most part. Subdivisions here include Roman Catholic, Anglican, other Protestant, Jewish, Islam, inter-religious, and other. When more than one religious group was involved, a subjective decision was made about which group was dominant within the article's context. This was a question only rarely.
"Subject" means the nature of the content itself. Classifications are theology/liturgy, worship, social or political action, charity, education, and other. Theology/liturgy refers to discussion within the religious group concerning its beliefs and how those beliefs should manifest themselves in life outside of the communal worship experience. Worship is a category of its own, and is restricted to the meaning of regular, corporate adoration, celebration, and praise. Social/political action includes those stories which concern the efforts of a religious group to come to terms with social or political issues. Charity encompasses the traditional charitable work of religious groups, including relief, missions, soup kitchen-type ministries, and the like. Education includes church education, Sunday schools, and, in the case of Roman Catholics, separate schools.
Finally, when classified by "origin," stories are slotted according to the location where the news was being made or the focus of the stories was. Classifications here are foreign, national/regional (it was often difficult to distinguish between these two, hence a common umbrella), and local, meaning in the immediate circulation area of the newspaper.
Total articles
The first discovery of this study - and something
of a surprise - was the numbers of articles involved in carrying it through
to completion. At the outset, I expected that I would be dealing with several
dozen stories in which religion was a major theme, especially when I thought
about examining only 156 newspapers. The average of two per issue was unexpected.
It was also interesting to discover that the Sault Star, the smallest of the three newspapers in the study, carried the most religion content when compared to the others on a per page basis. In both 1981 and 1985, the Star either surpassed or nearly equalled the London Free Press in terms of total articles. And at an average paper size of 24 pages, it would have outstripped the Free Press on a per page comparison.
Total religion content jumped significantly between the years 1981 and 1985 - up 19 per cent. Although some of that increase can be traced to the growing controversy surrounding separate school funding in 1985, it probably cannot be completely attributed to that fact. After all, 1981 had its share of blockbuster religion stories as well - the rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and the shooting of the Pope, to name just two. It is conceivable that other events in the intervening years, such as the visit of the Pope to Canada in 1984, may have contributed to a greater interest or sensitivity to the importance of religious news among editors and others within the industry.
Content by persuasion
The Findings Summary on the following page outlines
the results of the study in terms of content by religious persuasion. Some
of the results were predictable, others quite dramatic.
One "measuring stick" by which to judge the amount of religion coverage devoted to any given religious group might be to compare the percentage derived from this study to the latest Canada census figures regarding religious affiliation within the province. Such a comparison would look like this:
According to the 1981 Census, 35.6 percent of Ontarians were Roman Catholic, while 38 percent of religion content was Roman Catholic. For Protestants, the figures were 51.8 percent and 20 percent; Jewish , 1.7 percent and 14 percent; and Islamic 0.6 percent and 7 percent.
These figures show that, if percentage of Ontario's population were a guide to editorial space given to religious groups, some of them are greatly under-represented in newspapers, others are over-represented.
While the Roman Catholic percentage in this comparison matches fairly well, the Jewish and Islamic communities get news coverage which is out of all proportion to their actual numbers. However, much of this content is foreign in origin, and does not indicate that newspapers are giving extraordinary amounts of column space to these communities as they exist in Ontario.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 and after, the on-going quest to hunt down Nazi war criminals on a worldwide scale, and the Zundel and Keegstra trials of 1985 would all have distorted these figures.
What remains troublesome about these statistics, however, is how little coverage Protestant groups in Ontario receive. The Findings Summary on the preceding page indicates that, in this study, the Anglican church got 8 per cent of total religion coverage, while all other Protestant groups garnered 12 per cent. Here again, there is cause for concern. As the largest Protestant denomination in Canada as well as Ontario, the United Church of Canada should have claimed a respectable showing. It did not. In fact, closer examination of the findings indicates that the Pentecostal community received more. These results might point to a challenge for, and perhaps even an indictment of, Protestant communicators, especially of some of the "mainline" churches.
Content by
subject
As shown in the Findings Summary, the hypothesis
that the daily press carries more articles related to the social and political
activities of religious groups was, by and large, borne out. In fact, these
numbers should be consideredminimums. When the category of education is
added, as some might argue should be the case since that category contains
articles dealing with separate school funding and other activities of a
semi-political nature, the figures are much higher. Using that kind of
configuration, the numbers would be 54 per cent during 1981 and 63 per
cent for 1985, for an average of 59 per cent.
Coverage of the proposal to extend full government funding to separate schools boosted the content percentages under the education category from 6 per cent in 1981 to 21 per cent in 1985. So the full funding debate seems to have merited exceptional attention throughout Ontario's newsrooms.
This part of the study brought another surprise, in personal terms. I had expected the theology/liturgy category to be very low - not above 15 per cent. With a final tally of 24 per cent, there is more "backgrounding" of church news and coverage of theological issues, debate, and evolution being carried than I would have guessed.
But the most remarkable set of numbers in this part of the study came from the worship and charity categories. With totals of 7 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively, some of the most traditional acts of religious communities - and perhaps some of those closest to their reasons for existence - are being given scarcely a glance by the daily press.
While it can justifiably be argued that worship and charity are not great "newsmakers," their ratings at the city desk are astonishingly low. The Sault Star carried more stories related to worship than the Globe and Free Press combined. In the category of charity, it held its own, running a full one third of these articles.
Content by
origin
The content analysis shows that the greatest
plurality of articles in Ontario's daily press comes from foreign sources
- an average of 45 per cent. Yet a dramatic swing can be seen between the
years 1981 and 1985 for the numbers for this category. In 1981, foreign
religion content accounted for 66 per cent of the articles in the study.
Four years later, that figure was only 26 per cent. National and regional
stories, which in 1981 accounted for only 15 per cent, had grown to represent
54 per cent by 1985. The amount of local religion content remained almost
static at 19-20 per cent.
There were three major factors in this shift. First, the Iranian revolution, which brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979, was high in the news in early 1981, as release of the American hostages coincided with President Reagan's inaugural in January of that year. However, the revolution continued to be played prominently as Khomeini consolidated his power, and forced religious moderates and liberals from the offices of government.
Following the firm establishment of his grip on government, the new leader of Iran turned his attention to other religious groups within the country, especially the Ba'hai community, and began persecutions. All three newspapers gave a fair amount of space to these events.
By 1985, Khomeini was less of a novelty. Although the sample size increased by 19 per cent, the shift from the international scene to national/regional concerns was primarily due to the trials of Ernst Zunde and Jim Keegstra plus the coming of the full-funding-for-separate-schools debate in the province. Both were classified as national/regional stories in the study.
Another interesting facet of the content-by-origins section was the coverage of local religion. Here the Sault Star compared favorably with the other papers, running nearly as many local religion stories as the Free Press and Globe combined.
However, even with the dramatic swing to the national/regional scene during '85, nearly half of the study's religion articles originated overseas; only about a fifth were home-grown. And even with two hatred trials and the full funding controversy in the news during '85, national/regional coverage amounts to only about a third of the total sample. One wonders what the numbers would have looked like without William Davis' famous proclamation, or what they will look like after the current debate is settled. Will Ontarians once more get two-thirds of their newspaper religion content from foreign sources?
Other Voices
Such a study of religion content in daily newspapers
would be incomplete without including some of the voices of those who have
been near and around newspapers, or studied the interrelationship between
language and religion.
Among the latter, perhaps none has had the impact of Northrop Frye, who, in his book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, identified three phases in the evolution of language.
The first, Frye says, is the poetic phase - the ancient, primitive use of language, where the user is anthropomorphically attached to the things and actions which language describes. It is a hieroglyphic use, a metaphoric use in which little separation exists between the things the speaker speaks about and himself.
Frye's second phase is more allegorical, separating subject and object. It involves a separation of the individual from external reality. Language becomes a story-teller in which the words and phrases used point to realities greater than themselves. Literal meaning is subservient to symbolism. Frye places this period historically between Plato and the Enlightenment - the soil in which most world religions took root.
And finally, according to Frye, there follows a demotic period, in which language is stripped of all but literal meaning, unable to speak more truth than the words themselves will carry. The result, according to Frye:
"With the general acceptance of demotic and descriptive criteria in language, such literalism becomes a feature of anti-intellectual Christian populism. This attitude says, for example, that the story of Jonah must describe the real sojourn inside a real whale, otherwise we are making God, as the ultimate source of the story, a liar." (Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1982, p. 45.)
Andrew Osler, journalism professor at the University of Western Ontario, has reflected on the influences of today's demotic language on religion and those within the mass media. The relationship between church and media at the end of the 20th century, Osler says, faces two challenges.
The press must adjust to the idea that the language of religion carries a meaning greater than the sum total of its parts, and the church (or religion generally for our purposes), must avoid the temptation of adjusting the communication of its message to demotic standards. Osler writes:
"The media - the press, in this context - came into being as a phenomenon of the Enlightenment. Newspapers have always been primarily demotic in their use of language and associated processes of thought. It is no accident that journalists down to the present day have always seen great ethical value in an "objective" approach to the information they treat . . . ." (Andrew M. Osler, Lenten lecture, Canterbury College, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, March 11, 1984, unpublished.)
These third phase media of ours, when they look at the church, cannot understand our concept of spirituality. It doesn't fit. Therefore, they ignore it, or display hostility toward it. On occasion, they even subtly ridicule it. Facing such rejection, the churches tend to say less and less about the faith in their communication with the world.
The implication of what Frye and Osler are saying is that religion content in our newspapers is shaped by the demotic phase of language in which we live. The pursuit of objective "truth" by reporters and editors in the context of this phase cannot include those "truths" which are at the heart of the existence of religion itself. And so the dilemma of the newspaper industry is to deal only with the observable, the empirical, or risk departing from the standards of language and news judgment it applies elsewhere in its product.
This can easily be seen in the study, where the focus of nearly half of the content is on the socio-political action exerted by religion, then secondly on the controversies surrounding theological disagreement, and lastly on charity and worship, which are least suited to discussion in demotic language.
However, controversy should not be avoided in reporting religion, according to Associated Press religion writer George Cornell:
"I wouldn't call the controversial aspects a problem. Controversy makes news. There's a great deal of controversy both inside religion and also in its views of social issues. Both are legitimate ingredients of news. But religion is sometimes passed over as boring. It can be boring as all get-out if reported only with the external trappings and not the substance. Incidentals such as clergy appointments, program announcements, church picnics and the like were about all you used to get on religion pages. Good newspapers have gone way beyond that." (Cornell: Religion Coverage Has Improved," an interview with United Methodist News Service Director Tom McAnally, UM Communicator, December 1984.)
One Canadian religion writer who has gone "way beyond that" and is widely considered to be the best in the country is Tom Harpur, of the Toronto Star. Harpur sees his task as commenting on religion in such a way that he will appeal to the sensibilities of both the religious and irreverent. "Naturally, I'm concerned about faith and its ability to be communicated properly, but my job, as I see it, is to make people think, not to preach to the converted," he says. (Mike Maser, "Harpur's Progress: The Spiritual Pilgrimage of a Religion Reporter," Ryerson Review of Journalism, Winter 1986, p. 41.)
Some of the challenges of religion reporting in the 1980s, then, are to find ways to communicate belief, ritual, motivation, and faith which transcends both the tools of the journalistic craft - the language - and the temptation to provide inadequate background information for readers to grasp the significance of the story they are reading. At the same time, the journalist must remember his audience - all of it - and write with the intention to motivate and enlighten.
Conclusions
This study of religion content in Ontario daily
newspapers confirmed one of my hypotheses and dashed the other. It also
has several additional, probably more important, things to say about the
way the newspaper industry deals with religion, and the way religious institutions
communicate about themselves.
My hypothesis that newspapers tend to gravitate toward the social and political activism of organized religion as subjects for news stories was borne out. Forty-five percent of articles in the study fell into this category. When one considers that most of the articles under the category of education, and many under theology/liturgy, also contain elements of social and political involvment, the figure is much higher.
Backgrounding religious news developments by newspapers is abysmal. During the entire period of the Iranian revolution, I read the words "Islamic fundamentalists" countless times, yet never once read an explanation of what fundamentalism within Islam meant, what its objectives were, or how the movement had evolved. The same applied to the "full-funding" debates of late 1985. The term was used ad nauseum, with never an intelligent treatment, within my sampling at least, of the history of Roman Catholic education in Canada, or the thrust of that education inside the school system, i.e. what goes on in these schools that make them different from public schools? Too much is taken for granted. Catchwords and phrases are coined or lifted from what must be denominational news releases, with little effort made to clarify or interpret their meaning for the reader.
A noteable exception to this rule appeared in the London Free Press in mid-1985, shortly after the Air India disaster, when Sikh extremists were being sought as suspects. The paper ran two articles on the history of Sikhism in Canada, and the movement's fundamental beliefs, including how they differed from Hinduism. It was an example of religion reporting at its best, linked to a current news story.
Although worship and charitable work are some of the most public and visible activities of religious organizations, they go nearly unnoticed - or at least unreported - by the daily press. Based on the reading of the province's newspapers, an individual with no religious connections could be forgiven for concluding that the religious groups among which he lives exist for the purpose of social and political advocacy and lobbying, organized for the sake of perpetuating their own convictions, about which, by the way, there exists much uncertainty, debate, and disagreement, sometimes hostility.
Contrary to my earlier belief, coverage of Roman Catholic issues and events is not out of proportion to the denomination's population in the province. Jewish and Islamic content is signficantly higher than census percentages. And Protestant content is dangerously low. Content, in terms of origin, appears to be highly volatile, dependent on stories which become "popular" among editors at any given time. There appears to be no consistent approach to the coverage of religion on a national or international scale, while local religion reporting shows a greater tendancy toward consistency.
A few other observations, more impressions than facts borne out by statistics, on religion content in the papers I sampled:
Small newspapers may be more interested in religion coverage than large. The Sault Star, in this study, certainly carried a higher proportion of religion stories than the other two newspapers. A quick survey of the Owen Sound Sun-Times and Brantford Expositor also showed a high visibility for religion relative to the other two papers in the study.
Newspapers may be suspicious of inter-religious or inter-church efforts and organizations. I was surprised that the "inter-religious" category in the content-by-persuasion analysis wasn't higher. Further, the study saw a number of articles on the division and discord within ecumenical organizations like the World Council of Churches, yet none on the work of these organizations.
There tends to be a slight tendancy among newspaper editors toward the sensational, the dramatic, and to assign religious figures more importance than the average "layperson." Stories about religious chains saving people's lives, robots performing weddings, and numerous articles about religious figures dying or being threatened are the basis for this observation.
In keeping with the idea of newspapers' use of demotic language, it was rare to find editorials expressing more than an opinion on a position which a religious group had taken on a social or political issue. Again, an exception from the pages of the Sault Star: Around Eastertime, 1985, an editorial went to great length on the importance of personal faith in God - highly unusual among other findings in the study.
There is much interest in the subject of religion by newspaper readers, judging by letters written to the editors.
Religion is an ever-present part of our culture. Whether or not they acknowedge it, most Canadians have been profoundly shaped by it. Values taught during childhood - or prejudices instilled during early years - have a lingering influence through life. These influences colour the way we view the world in which we live. And wherever values are concerned, there are also the residual effects of our earliest religious training, or lack of it.
Seen this way, there are few issues within Canadian society that cannot be treated, in one way or another, as religion stories. Abortion, unemployment, education, the nuclear arms race, the testing of cruise missiles of Canada, relationships between English and French Canada, between have and have-not parts of the country - all can be reported from the vantage point of the religion beat.
I'm not suggesting that the province's daily press be turned into a gigantic religion column. But much can be done to make religion more comprehensible, more meaningful, and more credible to the average news consumer. And it should.
The onus lies with readers to insist on more intelligent treatment. It lies with the industry in providing better coverage and better religion journalists. And it lies with the religious communities themselves, in providing access to their work and life, and meaningful interpretation of it, along with an openness to the press which will invite active interest.
Comments? Questions? E-mail: [email protected]
Last modified: 29 October 1999