The hands on how to report religion book

The hands on how to report...

In darker moments, critics of the reporting of religion might wonder when someone will write Reporting Religion for Dummies or Religion for Idiot Reporters. But as anyone who has spent time talking to reporters will know, journalists are seldom dummies or idiots.  Instead, the discrepancies and errors that drive newspaper readers and TV news viewers wild usually stem from ignorance. Judith Buddenbaum knows this, and her Reporting News About Religion:  An Introduction for Journalists, could be easily subtitled:   “All-you-reporters-ever-wanted-to-know-about-religion-but-were-too-afraid-to-ask.” Buddenbaum is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Technical Communication at Colorado State University, and has devoted her studies to writing and researching religion and news media.  She’s also worked as a journalist herself, and it shows. Reporting News About Religion is grounded in the daily American experience, with opening sections on the first amendment (separation of church and state), and the varieties of religion in America.  But there is much in this book that can be easily applied to more northerly reporting, and it belongs in every Canadian newsroom – at least until a home-grown analogue appears.

Buddenbaum includes a classification system of world religions comparing basic concepts of the divine, the scriptures, and the main sects.  She discusses the divisions within Christianity, and manages to suggest where American Protestants fall along a “conservative-liberal continuum,” suggesting phrasing other than just “evangelical” and “fundamental” to properly describe world-views.  She includes a discussion of the audience for religion reporting, which is crucial to journalists wishing to do a better job reporting – or for anyone trying to convince the editorial powers that be that religion reporting can benefit a news organization’s bottom line.

But Buddenbaum refuses to critique religion reporting and leave it at that.  Instead, there are all sorts of hands-on materials to aid specialist and general reporters with a subject both vast and complex.  The final third of the book is all about actually reporting, with tips on staffing, space allocation, story ideas, ways to exploit the relationship between religion and other beats, how to find and choose sources, and the all-important and contentious issue of word choice.  The text is peppered with examples of writing and quotes from journalists who have themselves worked the religion beat.

After each chapter, Buddenbaum suggests further sources for readings, with annotated bibliographies.  The short glossary at the back of the book is the perfect quick look-up for everything from Aaronic Priesthood to Yom Kippur.

Readings on Religion as News is co-edited by Buddenbaum and Debra Mason, associate professor in the Department of Communications at Ohio’s Otterbein, and the executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association.  Touted by the back-cover blurb as telling “the story of American faith and religion reporting’s ascent to one of the hottest newspaper beats today,” the differences between the American and Canadian situations are immediately obvious.  With few exceptions, the religion beat in Canada doesn’t exist, much less is it the “hottest.”  The biggest news this side of the border has been the naming of Michael Valpy to a resurrected beat at the Globe and Mail.  Canada has yet to see anything close to the proliferation of religion sections and programs that our neighbours to the south enjoy.

The Mason-Buddenbaum collection is wide-ranging, following a chronological order (the earliest excerpt is from a 1690 issue of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, and the most recent is from 1997).  The selections are an excellent reminder that despite snide remarks about the abilities of journalists, reporters do in fact write “the first draft of history,” recording not only events, but the emotions and perceptions contemporary with those events.  The collection should also remind critics that there never existed a golden age of reporting, when only the facts were reported, without attendant commentary and biases.  While not immediately useful for the Canadian journalist or media scholar, Readings on Religion as News is perfect for the old newspaper addict, who can enjoy a few hundred years of reportage without worrying about crumbling, dust-mite-filled paper.  (This book, however, would have benefited from an index, making it easier for readers to identify the journalists, religious groups and newspapers featured.)

By shining a light not just on the content, but on the activity of reporting religion, Buddenbaum succeeds in illuminating the intersection of news, politics and religion in America, an exceedingly busy thoroughfare in past, present and no doubt future centuries.

Judith M. Buddenbaum, Reporting News about Religion:  An Introduction for Journalists (Ames, Iowa:  Iowa State University Press, 1998), 230 pp and Readings on Religion as News, Judith M. Buddenbaum and Debra L. Mason, editors (Ames, Iowa:  Iowa State University Press, 2000), 501 pp

This review first appeared in Christian Week magazine, 2 May 2000 edition.

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