Faith in the Newsroom: Can a reporter be a person of faith and still be a good reporter?
Faith in the newsroom	A workshop at the June 7-9, 1998 Faith and the Media Conference.  Panelists:  Debra Gyapong, CBC Newsworld Mohammed Azar Ali Khan, former Ottawa Citizen journalist Lesley Hughes, former CBC Radio host and reporter

But I had an encounter with Jesus Christ in my adult life that totally produced a 180 degree change in my thinking. I think I got my job at the Digby Mirror as a result of divine providence because I hadn't really planned on a journalistic career. Having the ability to speak that language of my secular humanist or materialistic rationalist colleagues enabled me to get in the door, in a sense, and it had its advantages and disadvantages because it enabled me to be somewhat like a chameleon. I knew how to fit in with them. It also made me sharply aware of how much derision there is towards people who hold a religious faith, especially one as fundamentalist as mine. And that derision I knew about because I had once felt that way. I had active derision towards people like Billy Graham or towards anyone who went to church regularly and believed literally in the Bible and so on.

It's been over the course of a long time that I have become bolder in expressing my faith in the workplace. At first I was not comfortable in doing so because I was very aware of how it would be perceived and I was also being very careful because there is a certain expectation for all journalists that you check your personal biases at the door. So if somebody came in with a strong environmentalist position or a strong feminist position, they would have problems just like somebody trying to advance a strong religious position. So I had to learn how to make sure that I could discuss things in a rational way without getting too overly concerned about what the results or the outcome was going to be, not to be personally attached to it.

I also felt the discomfort because I didn't feel like I was particularly any great example of a Christian, so I didn't want to call attention to my beliefs because people could look at my life and say, "If that's what Christianity is all about, then they're all a bunch of hypocrites and who wants to be like that?"

So I was trying in a way to straddle two worlds. Then I began to look at witnessing and expressing my faith in a different way and I started to see that there were needs--people going through crises in my work place, people who were experiencing tragedy, sickness, things that were so difficult. Everybody around me, all these rationalists, were in such despair and so hopeless when they encountered some of these things that they wanted to avoid the people to whom these events were happening. I found that because I have a hope and a faith that I could go alongside of someone who's going through these difficulties.

So my Christian witness has not been one of a kind of doctrinal evangelizing, but more of just being willing to be there for people who were going through some rough times and being more willing to witness about what a great God I have rather than what a great Christian I am because it's all about Him and it's not about me.

As for whether a person of faith can be a journalist, I think that we definitely need to have more people of religious faith. I think that all of us, no matter how rationalist we think we are, all have a priori assumptions that are based on faith. Even to say that there is such a thing as objective truth, that one can achieve a kind of objectivity as a journalist, requires a certain a priori assumption because there are people that don't believe that it is possible to have objectivity, that everything is relative. Some of us have had to examine our assumption a little bit more carefully because we have a minority opinion. There needs to be more people to have a genuine diversity in the newsroom. There needs to be more people who understand the various different faith dimensions.

My experience in CBC has generally been a good one, that people have welcomed having a lone dissenting voice at the table when there were story meetings. Now, sometimes you're going to run across people that are not going to like you because of your particular religious belief, or they're going to have stereotypical ideas towards you, but I think that you're going to have those difficulties no matter what background you have. People will assume that if you're of a certain racial grouping that you cannot cover your own group objectively, even though the reason why you might have been brought into the newsroom was to be a contact with that community. So you're always going to be fighting against stereotypes. And since I knew about the active derision that I once had, I was very aware that there was that possibly operating against.

The thing about Christianity is that since so many of us had the background that I had, where you were sent to church, you think you know something about it. And therefore, because you think you know something about it, you're in a position to criticize it. I've been a Christian since 1973. Yet after all these years I know so little about the faith. It's not just a simple "now God said it, I believe it, no more argument."

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Mohammed Azar Ali Khan
There has been some talk of bilingualism here so let me say that a friend of mine told me at the University of Michigan that I was bilingual--that I spoke English and Rubbish quite fluently.

I was exposed early to the stereotyping against Islam in Michigan when my landlady asked me what was my faith and I told her that I'm a Muslim. She started laughing and asked me how many wives I had. Now, I was in my early twenties and I told her with a straight face that I had three wives back home and I was looking for a fourth one. She became very red and stopped laughing because she had a daughter and the daughter thought that the East was quite exotic.

I should point out that I am neither a scholar nor a priest. There is no priesthood in Islam. I am simply a Muslim of faith and that is only how I can be described. And I'm going to tell you of my experiences, a little bit in Canada and a little bit in Pakistan, because my faith has shaped my approach to my profession. As a Muslim, I believe. In Islam there is no separation of religion from other aspects of your life and you cannot say that in the mosque I am a Muslim, I must observe Islamic conduct, and outside I can do whatever I want. In my life as a Muslim, I have to practice the totality of my religious teachings and principles.

One of the first things my faith tells me is that I must always tell the truth and that telling lies is at the basis of many problems. Whether I'm in politics or in journalism, I have to tell the truth always. That has been one of my guiding principles in life and certainly in journalism.

The second thing that God teaches me is that God is just and he wants us to be just. So I cannot, whether I am in the media or anywhere else, practice double standards--be just towards some and unjust towards some, because that would be injustice. So therefore I have to be guided as a journalist not only by truth but by a sense of justice.

The third thing that God teaches me is that I have to be God conscious. I am told that whatever I am doing, whatever is in my heart, God knows everything and God is watching me. So I cannot hide. I can hide from my parents if I'm a young boy, I can hide from my employer, but there's no way I can hide from God. That gets written in the book and forms my total record as a person and one day it will be given to me to show what I did. I am reminded of this because not only do I have to go for my private prayers, but I have to pray five times a day. I often prayed in my office when the time for prayer came and in my prayers I told God that I want your guidance, but the burden is not on God to guide me alone. The burden is on me also because God has told us what He wants us to do. So, with that reminder, I have to be God-conscious all the time so that everything I do as a reporter is guided by God.

Another thing I am taught as a Muslim is that there is only one God, that it's one God who has created the universe and everything that is in it, and whether a person is born a Hindu or a Muslim or a Christian or Jewish or Aboriginal or whatever, or whether he's Black or white or whatever, all of them have been created by God and it's the same God who has created everybody. God says again and again in the Holy Koran that God loves his creation. God does not say that "I love Jews and I love Muslims and I hate everybody else that I've created," because then God will be unjust because it's He who has created everybody.

And this applies not only in the Islamic faith to human beings, but also to everything that God has created. So we are told not to cut a tree without reason, unless we have a reason to do so, and we are told to be kind to animals because He created animals. We are also reminded in our faith that I was not asked by God whether I wanted to be born a Muslim or a human being or something. I could have been born a crocodile or a monkey or a dog or a pig or whatever; it's not something that I have done. So God has told me, for example, that pigs are unclean animals, don't eat them, but God has not told me that God has not created pigs, pigs have been created by some other God.

So God has told me to be kind to all his creations. It is a part of my faith and a part of my approach to my media work and to every other work that I might do. God also tells me that I have to be honest and a person of integrity and the truth. I have tried to apply this in journalism and also and in every other area.

Then, finally, God says do not pray to anybody but God because it's God who controls your destiny. This is very important. If you are in the media, you are under pressure from many sides.

So these are principles that have guided me in my life and in journalism here and in Pakistan. I'll briefly tell you what impact this has had in my work. In a sense I had to leave Pakistan because of these beliefs--because I believe as a journalist you have to tell the truth. You see people's problems and you write what you see. In Pakistan there was martial law for some time, and after martial law was lifted they created a national press trust under which the government took over many newspapers, including mine. The theory was that newspapers should not be owned by the industrialists who will push through their own interests; they should be owned by the people through the government. It's a very good theory as a theory, but in practice it doesn't work.

What happened is that I was under tremendous pressure because I was the news editor of the only paper that was published in east and west Pakistan at that time. I was also the correspondent in Pakistan of the Christian Science Monitor. Because of that, I was very visible. Whatever I wrote became immediately known to the people, from the president down. I was under enormous pressure to bend the stories, to write what the government wanted, what the authorities wanted, and I was almost in a total state of friction. I felt that rather than compromise my principles I should live somewhere else. So having been educated in Michigan, I had no problem getting job offers from Canada. I chose Canada rather than the U.S. where I had studied because I believe in family life and I don't believe in racism and I believe that a job is not the only thing that is important, family is important, and your community is important. So I chose to came to a country where I felt I could be myself and I have not regretted the decision ever.

In Canada I had, in a sense, a similar problem. Soon after joining the Citizen, I became foreign affairs analyst for the paper and remained foreign affairs analyst of the paper for a long time. That means that I was writing on very controversial topics. I was to write as honestly and objectively as I possibly could, which meant that I got into trouble with a lot of powerful lobbies. There's a lot of powerful embassies in Ottawa. Indeed, I was once kicked out of the house of the Pakistan High Commissioner because I had disagreed vehemently with the Pakistan government's policies towards what was then East Pakistan. At that time I was under a cloud at one time or the other -- I don't need to go into detail -- but many governments, many lobbies were very angry with me. I told myself that I did not defy martial law over there to surrender here. So I said, "I'm going to keep writing to the best of my abilities, to the best of my integrity, and if people don't like it, so God's will will be done." Fortunately, I had God's help and I had the support of my editor and publisher who knew me and who had faith in my integrity. And so I was able to survive for 25 years.

I was against the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. I was also against the hostage taking of the Americans in Iran. I thought both actions were totally un-Islamic because my religion teaches me that, as it is written clearly in the Koran, that faith is a matter of opinion, that God, if He wanted, could have made everybody Christian or Jewish or Muslim if He wanted, but He did not do so. He left people to choose.

In any case, I survived, but the satisfaction to me was that I was able to live at peace with myself, that I had not compromised by integrity, but that I had not been arrogant either, that whether I was covering the Middle East, India, Pakistan, South Africa, El Salvador or Vietnam--in all of these things I was objective and I was writing with a certain degree of integrity. It gives me a lot of pleasure that even today, about eight years after taking early retirement from the Citizen, I still run into people in Ottawa who tell me that they still miss my pieces because they found that I had written with a certain integrity and a certain degree of objectivity which was hard to do when dealing with these subjects.

Needless to say, I have many friends from all communities. Needless to say, many people still disagree with me. They think that if you are born in a Muslim home you must always support the Muslim cause, however irrational it might be. But you have to make choices and my choice was to be a journalist. I found that my faith helped me to become a better journalist by being truthful and honest and doing the job to the best of my ability.

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Lesley Hughes
Can you be a person of faith in the newsroom? I promised myself I would be really honest, really honest with you today and Mohammed has helped me in my resolve to do that. Why? Because what I have to say I think is a little difficult and probably unwelcome. But nevertheless, it is my experience and so here it is.

My experience is that there is, indeed, a dominant faith in the newsroom, although it's never talked about, and that that faith is really the kind of fundamentalism that we need to be looking at these days. It is the fundamentalism of the corporate press. We have been speaking so far as if the press that we all are working for or relying on for information is truly a free and independent press. I honestly don't think that we can say that. I have sort of modified the expression to suit myself; I talk now about the free and independent corporate press, which makes much more sense to me.

Now just the briefest overview of this fundamental faith--an overview which you need, I think, to survive and to succeed in this world. One thing you must certainly believe in is that capitalism and democracy are the same thing. You have to believe that the most important freedom that we have achieved is the freedom to consume. I think you have to accept that the North American way of life is superior to any other. I think that you have to more or less agree that the status quo is so solidly entrenched that there is no alternative to it. I'm referring here, I guess to John Robson Saul and his Tina dance; "Tina, Tina, Tina," he sings and dances, "there is no alternative, there is no alternative." The less history you know, the less information you have, the more ideological you are in your approach to your work. And, of course, part of this faith is that faith, spirituality or religion -- after all, what's the difference -- have no place in a professional setting that is worth its salt, and that would include media and journalism.

Now, to be part of this faith, I think, is to be safe, to be seen as neutral and objective. To deviate from it is to be seen, I think, as naive and biased and possibly downright handicapped. I think Peggy really illustrated this beautifully last night when she told us the story of the political reporter who tried to corner her and force her to confess that she had been to church recently as a faith reporter and you remember that her most astute response was that he had voted in the last election. Just a little exchange there, I think, with big implications.

And speaking of implications, I think that the implications of this kind of fundamental corporate faith that most of us have integrated are enormous and I think that they represent the opposite of what journalists are trained to do and what journalists would be doing in an ideal world. That is to say that, in an ideal world, journalists world would be open-minded and would be overtly radical, radical in the sense of being right there at the root of things, understanding things, perhaps changing things. And perhaps maintaining a sane perspective no matter what else is going on in the world.

So the implications are pretty enormous. Just before I go into them, though, I promised --I think we all did -- to be personal and to mention how practicing or nurturing, sustaining a faith, affects your ability to do a job. I am a member of the Ba'hai faith. The Ba'hai faith is a relatively obscure faith in Canada, often perceived as some sort of bent out of shape cult. The cornerstone of the Ba'hai faith, as in all other faiths, is that the law is love. Or put another way, love is the law. Furthermore, Ba'hais believe that all the great faiths teach fundamentally the same ideas, that whatever divisions there are have been constructed or have been exaggerated and manipulated. We believe that what we have in common is much more important than what divides us. The big problem is not that we are of different faiths, but that none of us really practices the faith that we claim to belong to. This is, I think, important to understand about the Ba'hai faith.

Let me give you three very brief examples as to how my faith has affected my ability to do my job.

First, when Mother Teresa came to Winnipeg it was my great pleasure to be among those who met her and who interviewed her. This is the same Mother Teresa who has said it's much more difficult to meet the press than it is to bathe a leper, something I have never managed to forget. On that occasion I spent the morning with Mother Teresa, listening to her stories of the premature death of children from starvation. In the afternoon, it was my job to do the family grocery shopping and it happened to be the occasion of the opening of a brand new Safeway. It was like the opening of a Broadway show. There was music, there were lights, there was greenery, there were props--it was kind of a low-key spectacular community occasion.

But having come to that from my morning with Mother Teresa and her stories of helping children die, and then watching people accept all this and treat the food, for example, as if it were nothing, gave me a severe spell of heart-sickness, so much so that I felt I had to write a column about that. The day after I filed the column, the editor called me and told me I had a choice. Either I could pull the story or leave Safeway's name out of it because, of course, Safeway was our prime advertiser. So I did the sensible thing, I left Safeway's name out of the story because the story seemed to be more important. So whereas my faith inspires certain stories, then you find that when I look at my own stories there's often an empty space in them, there's a kind of a hole there.

Another example of that would be Joyce Milgaard. Here was a woman with absolutely no legal training whatever, who managed to move mountains. She managed to do this and with almost no resources except her Christian Science faith. She explained how it energized her, how again and again and again it gave her the courage and the strength and the good cheer to go back and forgive everybody who was resisting what she was trying to do, everybody, including herself and her own errors, and how she was able to persist until she got the changes that she wanted in the case against her son. It was interesting to see that in the stories about her, though, in radio and television, newspaper, that Christian Science didn't appear, probably because it wasn't accepted as an authentic answer.

I admire a lot of people in journalism who have tremendous energy and ethics and go into journalism for the best of reasons, but I also remember writing a story about Carol Shields and wanting to explain that the faith aspect was important not because she was motivated by faith but because she wasn't. Carol Shields is a lapsed Quaker, for anybody who's interested. In any case, Carol Shields told me that she has faith in two things, love and work. And during our lengthy interviews I said to her, but what happens if love and work abandon you, because that's life, isn't it? What then? Where's your faith then? And there was no answer at that point. I wanted to deal with that in the story and I did, but of course my editor at Chatelaine took it out because she felt that people weren't interested.

Now just getting back to the implications, then, very, very briefly, I think that the implications, as I said, are very serious. I think, for one thing, it means that we overlook a lot of very important stories, as we did the story of natives in Canada until Elijah Harper got involved on the Meech Lake front. We overlooked what is possibly the biggest story, the story of aboriginal history and conflict and tension, until very recently. We overlook, I think, the myth of poverty. The world has been sold a bill of goods that it's a poor place which, as you probably know, is not true. We've never been richer. We don't have a resource problem; we have a distribution problem, and, as far as I can tell, in the world of media that's perfectly okay. After all, it's very reasonable to serve the interests of the people who in fact own the establishment. So what else will we say?

The media produces a high level of cynicism and I think the effect on that is that it makes it more difficult for people to participate in public life because there is this sense that nothing can be done. And I think also it contributes to what is basically a spiritually dysfunctional society. That is to say, it doesn't work.

What is my advice? I was asked what would my advice be for anybody with a faith base who is trying to work in journalism, and I can only say -- it's not very noble advice, but you might do what I did, which is to go underground. That is to say, you keep your faith, you keep doing what you want to do, you just don't talk about it unless you're confronted directly or unless you get the opportunity to speak, in which case I think you have to do it. Otherwise, I think the less noise that you can make about it, the more useful, the more productive your faith can be. I'm sorry to say that, but I think it's the truth. What changes might be made? I think that we could make a lot of changes in journalism school and particularly in professional development in the large media outlets like the CBC, like the newspaper chains. When journalists of whatever beat who are clearly devoid of any understanding about the significance of faith in human affairs or how to deal with faith issues, how to communicate with faith communities, or how even to reaffirm that historic open-mindedness of journalists, their employers should take the initiative and see that that is changed. I think that would be a huge step forward.

I think it's really interesting, by the way, that we're having this meeting, this first of its kind meeting, at the almost end of the millennium. It's also very interesting to me that we're spending infinitely more money trying to correct the implications of the millennium bug than it would take to solve the problems of virtually every child on earth, with huge sums of money left over. I think maybe the most important thing that we could do as journalists, regardless of what our faith is, is to reintroduce into civil society the concept of interdependence because I think the biggest mistake that we are making as journalists is to go along with the idea that it is possible for a few lucky people to be safe in an unsafe society. The question is, how unsafe does it have to get for everybody until it becomes clear to us all that mutual security is the only kind of security that there is. This is the kind of thing I think journalists meant to think about.

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