Media failures in covering religion highlighted in new book
|
Reviewed by Bob Zyskowski
Catholic News Service
In “Blind Spot,” six analysts – syndicated columnists, editors, academics, media sources and authors – point out flaws in journalistic techniques and systems that prevent the media from accurately covering religion and that contribute to mainstream media missing some of the biggest stories of our time.
Chapters focus on topics such as biased reporting on the religious right in U.S. politics; major media missing the importance of religion in international terrorism; and the tendency to simplify and stereotype complex religious identity, among others.
It may be that stereotyping people of faith leads to the biggest sin by media professionals.
Allen Hertzke, a University of Oklahoma professor, says “secular blinders” keep reporters and their editors from seeing religious people in anything other than their preconceived stereotypes.
The bias of journalists leads to “a reluctance to feature evangelicals in a favorable light,” Hertzke notes.
Even when religious groups or alliances are involved in human rights actions that journalists tend to approve of, mainstream media tend to dismiss the story or see it as an ideological one rather than a human story.
For example, The New York Times referred to the tragic plight of Sudanese refugees as a “pet cause of many American religious conservatives.” Hertzke counters: “It is hard to imagine the Times describing the plight of Soviet Jewry as a ‘pet cause’ of American Jews, or opposition to apartheid as a ‘pet cause’ of African-Americans.”
Authors and political scientists C. Danielle Vinson and James L. Guth show the extent to which journalists misunderstand religious voters in the United States, attesting that “the most significant problem is not media bias but media ignorance.”
The Christian right was seen as particularly suspect by mainstream media; in contrast, some reporters and editorial writers saw a broader agenda for some religious voters than just the “culture war” issues of abortion, same-sex marriage and stem-cell research.
This was particularly true in coverage of Catholics, who on occasion were seen as wrestling with a number of “moral” issues, Vinson and Guth note.
Catholic readers in particular may enjoy the chapter that tackles how the media treated Mel Gibson and his film, “The Passion of the Christ.”
Jeremy Lott, an editor as well as a press critic, writes, “News coverage of the movie was bad, the opinion writing was cliched, and the movie criticism was worse,” yet the movie was a huge success.
The reasons? Perhaps, Lott says, because of “the press’ failure to honestly grapple with the broader questions of religion,” but also because of “the estrangement of American journalists from their audience.”
The editors and contributors of “Blind Spot” offer a handful of examples of the press doing it right when covering religion. They also offer a number of ways the media can begin to correct what’s wrong with stories about religion, urging them to understand that religion is a motivator of human behavior; realize that religion is important to people; and disregard pack and “tribal” journalism, where journalists as a group tend to report the same stories and agree on what is good and right.
The editors of “Blind Spot” recommend that mainstream media hire people who practice their faith, who go to church, who know details about religion.
They urge reporters to take religion seriously and know about it to properly cover all the news, not just religious news, because they are missing the religious factors in much of the news.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but “Blind Spot” has a blind spot or two of its own.
In complaining how popes shouldn’t be described in terms of liberal or conservative, press critics shouldn’t pigeonhole Catholic bishops into those same camps.
And much of the analysis offered is about only the press giants – The New York Times and The Washington Post. Pack journalism admittedly leads to many other newspapers and media outlets taking their cues from the coverage from those big boys, but there are a lot of other newspapers and media across this country, and coverage may very well be different in newsrooms and locales where religion is more understood and appreciated. That would be an interesting study.
Bob Zyskowski is associate publisher of The Catholic Spirit, newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and president of the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada. He reviews books online at www.bobzbookreviews.blogspot.com.
|
|