Chicago.

Religion and the media is a topic surrounded by hypersensitivity, if not downright paranoia. I recently received a newsletter from a conservative Christian group charging that religion was invisibile in the media. That is actually relatively uninflammatory language as far as this discussion goes. But is it true?

I decided to conduct a little survey of articles that dealt with religion in the New York Times between Saturday, May 28 and Tuesday, June 7 [1994], an eleven-day period. Now it happens that this period included a major series of articles on the Catholic Church in the United States--four articles involving months of work that, starting on Sunday May 29, ran on page one with a full page or more of text, graphs, photos, and sidebars, on the inside of the paper. But there were also thirty-six other articles dealing with groups ranging from Orthodox Jews and mainline Protestants to Muslims, Mormons, and self-styled witches. A number of these stories began on page one, alongside photos with religious content, whether portraying John Paul II meeting with the Clintons or a church in Rwanda that had been the site of massacres. Other stories were to be found everywhere from the foreign and domestic news pages to the Metropolitan Report, from the business section to "Arts and Leisure," from the editorial pages to the Sunday Style section.

All of this indicates, I believe, that religion is at least visible in some parts of the media. It suggests that we should approach this topic in a measured mood. It does not, however, demonstrate that all is well with the media's handling of religion. After all, the New York Times is a huge paper. Acres of trees are sacrificed to produce each Sunday's edition, and carrying that paper around can easily cause tennis elbow if not outright hernia. Even though we ran a lot of stories about religion and an exceptionally lengthy and thorough examination of the Catholic Church, at the same time we were nonetheless devoting far more inches to the Knicks and the Rangers and their fortunes in the basketball and hockey playoffs.

And other findings lend credence to the charge of invisibility:The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, surveyed ABC's "World News Tonight," CBS's "Evening News," CNN's "World News," NBC's "Nightly News," and the "MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour." They didn't include Waco or the World Trade Center bombing stories, except where theology and religion were stressed. They found that of more than 18,000 story segments on those broadcasts in 1993, not counting weekends, only 212 dealt with religion. Furthermore, a quarter of those stories were aired during Pope John Paul II's trip to the U.S. About 60 percent of the stories were about Catholics, with Supreme Court church-and-state cases and reports on the religious right in second place. Islam, incidentally, did better than Jews or specific Protestant or other religious groups.

The same study looked at ABC's "Good Morning America," CBS's "This Morning," and NBC's "Today": each had two hours of airtime daily. Religion was the subject of 197 stories, less than half of them interviews or reporter-based reports as distinguished from brief stories narrated by an anchorperson. That is out of more than 23,000 stories, again not counting weekends. On magazine shows and Sunday talk shows, only 18 segments in 1993 covered religion, again with Catholics dominating, except that here clerical sex abuse or celibacy outran the papal visit. Although the study's conservative origins naturally influenced its further examination of how the media treat certain topics like abortion, these numbers are fairly objective--and telling.

As far as the print media go, there are reasons beyond numbers and column inches for the anger, distrust, and complaints about religion coverage.

Journalists considerably overestimate readers' attention to the distinctions between editorials, opinion columns, criticism reviews--and straight news stories. Encountering in the New York Times's editorials, columns, and criticism, for example, almost unrelievedly liberal opinions and attitudes toward traditional morality that range from indifference to derision, these readers naturally expect the same in our news columns--and they will find it regardless of an our protestations, and indeed practical efforts, to the end of keeping editorial and reportorial treatments separate.

The Times was almost alone, for example, in deciding that, in the absence of more impressive evidence, the lawsuit charging Cardinal Joseph Bernardin with sexual abuse was worthy of no more than three or four paragraphs on page twenty-seven, and when that lawsuit was withdrawn by the accuser, the paper, a bit mechanically in my opinion, reported the dropping of charges in a similar low-key fashion. Nonetheless I have learned of readers complaining that we played the accusations on page one while relegating the retraction to a tiny article.

Gus Niebuhr, before joining the Times as a fellow religion reporter, had a similar experience at the Washington Post. The Post received an accusatory letter from a prominent Washington Roman Catholic, who said the paper had not run any coverage of World Youth Day in Denver. The letter writer accused the paper of only printing stories calculated to divide Catholics and stir controversy. Niebuhr went back and found that the Post had run eleven stories on World Youth Day, ten of them in the front section, four of them on page one. The headline of the lead story on the event, accompanied with a photograph, had read: "Youths Gather in Denver to See Pope; `Catholic Woodstock' Is Replete with Virtues and None of the Vices."

We are faced, then, with a mixed picture. Complaints about the media's treatment of religion have a sound basis. But they are also frequently exaggerated or inflated. Nonetheless it is widely recognized in journalistic ranks that the news media's presentation of religion is less than satisfactory. The more controversial question, and one that will govern our search for improvement, is why this is so.

There are three standard explanations for the media's shortcomings.

First, ideology: journalists are ideologically opposed to religion or unusually influenced by negative stereotypes of most faiths and believers.

Second, the three "i's": ignorance, incompetence, insufficient resources.

Third, the framework of journalism itself, the working definitions of news, and the practical conditions under which it is carried out. .

First, ideology. The media, it is charged, have a protracted case of H. L. Menckenitis. In 1980, as part of a study of media elites, S. Robert Lichter, Linda Lichter, and Stanley Rothman surveyed a sample of 240 journalists at seven major national news outlets in Washington and New York: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the three major networks, Time, and Newsweek. Eighty-six percent said they seldom or never attended religious services. Half said "none" when asked "What is your present religious preference?" These results swiftly came to rival biblical inerrancy as part of the basic belief system of many conservative Christians and political true believers.

In a study completed in 1993 for the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, John Dart, veteran religion writer for the Los Angeles Times, and the Reverend Jimmy Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, traced the misuse of the Rothman-Lichter data. They quote an editorial in the Evangelical flagship journal Christianity Today observing that "Studies have shown that news journalists are among the least churched, least religiously informed groups in the United States." (Rothman and Lichter had, of course, found nothing at all about their elite journalists' level of religious information. An article in the same issue of Christianity Today declared that "86 percent of the journalists in a typical newsroom seldom or never attend a church or synagogue." In fact, these statements are mild extensions of the data compared to others in more polemical sources.

Dart and Allen contrasted these findings to their own poll in which only 4 percent of the nation's religion writers and 9 percent of the editors surveyed responded to a query about religion with "none," slightly less than the 10 percent found in most polls of the public. Of the religion writers, 75 percent said religion was "very important" in their lives; of the editors, 72 percent said either very important or somewhat important. The specialists, in effect, were somewhat more religious than the public-at-large, the editors somewhat less but not at all the secular-minded crew portrayed in the Rothman-Lichter study.

Allen and Dart argued that their results matched a 1985 study by Ernest C. Hynds of the University of Georgia and another study by, Judith M. Buddenbaum of Colorado State University, as well as yet another study in 1982-83, repeated in 1992, that phoned 1400 journalists at papers, broad cast outlets, news magazines, and wire services. In 192, 72 percent of those surveyed said religion was very or somewhat important, 17.5 percent said not very, and 10.7 said no at all. hi defense of the original study, Stanley Rothman replied that it was sampling a different group of journalists than Allen and Dart's study. It did not focus on religion writers at all, for instance, and on the other hand covered television people.

Here it might be worth underlining that another element in the Allen and Dart report, an analysis of religion stories in four papers (New York Times, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Atlanta Constitution, and San Francisco Chronicle) in March and November 1992, showed that their own religion reporters as well as religion specialists on the wire services accounted for between 41 and 23 percent of the religion stories. Rothman was saying in effect, that Allen and Dart were surveying a special group plus smalltown editors rather than national communicators, who were setting the media agenda. He further criticized their low return rate and failure to test whether it might be causing biased results. And finally he pointed out the apparent contradiction between all the religiosity that Allen and Dart found among journalists with the newsroom ignorance and indifference that the same writers and indeed many journalists themselves reported as obstacles to good reporting.

Turn for a moment from these efforts to quantify to the personal testimony of people in the business. Both Kenneth Woodward at Newsweek and Richard Ostling at Time have said that the Lichter-Rothman findings pretty much matched the environment they worked in. Bryan Healy, senior political producer for CBS News, told a conference at Columbia University a year ago: "It is the rare executive or senior producer who wakes up on any morning with a thought of theology or theocracy on his or her mind. And if they do care about religion at home, it rarely survives the commute to the office."

Healy thinks this is due to bias and lack of openness. "I think partisan, personal, and political biases of liberal journalists often dominate newsrooms. Most of my colleagues are one-minded, and it's a mind that's made up; there is rarely any debate in most television newsrooms on abortion, birth control, celibacy, curriculum oversight, gays in the military, premarital chastity, or condom distribution in high schools."

Saying that he had to disagree with Healy and with another speaker at the Columbia conference, Gus Niebuhr drew on his experience at the Atlanta Constitution as well as "among the editors that I've dealt with at two national newspapers," the Wall Street journal and the Washington Post. "There is an interest in religion," he said. "There is a willingness to take religion seriously, and there's a feeling that it has its place on the front page." My own experience is closer to Niebuhr's than to Woodward's, Ostling's, or Healy's.

A part from being deeply antireligious or simply areligious, is there an ideology at work in the media, or maybe simply a para-ideology, that affects religion coverage?

I think that there is. Modern journalism was born in the decades before World War I. Muckraking was that era's typical form of rebellion against both the gilded violence of the Robber Barons and the faded gentility of nineteenth-century Victorianism, against Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly and Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. From that period's Progressive muckraking, the press inherits its suspicion of figures in authority and of all high-minded statements. Practice can be counted on not to measure up to preachment, and preachment is, of course, a specialty of religion.

What is peculiar to this para-ideology is a debunking attitude to all authority and ideals, rather than only religion. Religious stereotypes operate in the world of journalism. Fundamentalists are imagined to be half-literate at best. The Catholic Church is something like the Marine Corps, with papal documents and statements by cardinals constituting marching orders and anything less than immediate submission equivalent to mutiny in the ranks. Rural Methodists are harmless teetotalers who live for church picnics. But these stereotypes are probably no more than those that exist among Americans-at-large. Don't forget that more caricatures of religious positions are probably broadcast from pulpits on one weekend than from television in a year. I have found little evidence that churchgoing or religiously observant journalists are less likely to entertain stereotypes of others' faiths than their nonbelieving colleagues.

Newsrooms are also caught up in the contemporary culture wars. Roughly speaking, American society is torn between two broad perspectives. One sees traditional morality as enshrining a legacy of wisdom about how we should live together and therefore challengers to that legacy as deserving of a skeptical or jaundiced examination. Another view looks on traditional morality as enshrining a host of prejudices from which we need to be liberated-indeed it considers the proudest moments of recent history to be those when people were liberated from inherited prejudices. Accordingly it looks on those who defy that traditional morality as at least deserving sympathetic attention, and as probably exhibiting a degree of bravery.

This cultural divison is reflected in our fights over abortion, sexual morality generally, and a lot of other questions. The Catholic Church and the more outspoken Evangelicals have often taken highly visible positions that make them representatives of one side in this conflict. Compare, for example, the treatment of the Catholic Church in the media to the coverage of the Salvation Army, which holds equally traditional or even more traditional positions on controversial questions of personal morality but has chosen to stress social service and direct assistance rather than interventions in the public debates.

But there is another ideological factor that enters into religion coverage, and that is the professional ideology of journalism, the ethic of objectivity or balance. This should never be discounted. Let me give one example.

On the day that a Supreme Court decision about abortion was handed down--I can no longer remember which decision it was or which side it gave comfort to--a colleague was asked to write a sidebar to the main report. From previous conversations it was my impression that she was vehement, not to say vitriolic, on the question, and I held my breath to see what her story would be like. Well, if the result was biased, in my judgment it was biased, at the very most, 55 to 45 in the direction of her beliefs. Why? Simply because she had abided by the rules of good journalistic practice, contacting both sides and quoting them accurately and in fair proportion.

I will return to ideology, but let me proceed for now to the second reason for news media failings in covering religion, the three "i's"--ignorance, incompetence, and inadequate resources. Let's take them in reverse order because a lot could be done about ignorance and incompetence if there were adequate resources.

The best estimate is that fewer than 70 of the nation's 1,500 daily papers have religion specialists. That is not as bad as it looks. Many of those specialists work on the larger dailies in our major cities (a few of which have two reporters on the beat) and also on the wire services that are used by papers, radio, and TV throughout the country.

But television has long been a wasteland as far as religion specialists go. Recently ABC hired as the first network religion correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer, who had been one of the very few reporters covering religion for a local station, the ABC affiliate in Dallas. National Public Radio assigned a reporter to cover religion, and its "Talk of the Nation" program with Ray Suarez began giving intelligent attention to religion. But perhaps as critical as the limited number of knowledgeable reporters is the lack of religion expertise in the editorial ranks that propose and edit the articles done by other reporters, especially foreign correspondents.

Second, what about incompetence? Many smaller and medium-sized papers have treated religion as a beat anyone pulled out of the newsroom can do. "Overt antireligious sentiments are rare," Dart and Allen concluded, "but uninformed reporters are too often intellectually lazy about getting their facts straight when assigned to cover religion stories."

Last spring Monsigner Francis Maniscalco, who heads the media office for the Catholic bishops, recounted a call from a reporter who said he was interested in finding out more about the pope's apostolic letter restricting priestly ordination to males. Msgr. Maniscalco replied that since the papal statement was only a few pages long, he'd be happy to mail or fax the reporter a copy. The reporter replied, "Well, I'm not that interested."

Then there is the tape, broadcast on National Public Radio, of the briefing a Baylor University religion professor conducted for reporters during the Waco standoff between government agents and David Koresh's Branch Davidians. The professor was explaining the sect's reliance on the Book of Revelation. One reporter interrupted.

Reporter: Where do we find this book of Revelation? I'm not very knowledgeable.

Professor: Okay, it's the last book in the Bible in the New Testament.

Reporter: So it's in the Bible in the New Testament?

Professor: Right, uh huh, uh huh.

Incompetence in the press is rife, and we do far too little about it. Public self-criticism is inhibited by professional chumminess but the inhibition is reinforced by the fact that media people are not only chums but competitors, and criticism of a competitor's performance appears embarrassingly self-interested. As a profession we are actually more concerned about bias than incompetence, because frankly it is a more interesting problem to examine. So too the various watchdog groups, each with its own ideological axe to grind, concentrate on bias rather than incompetence, and some operate in any case with little sense of the media's working conditions.

Third, ignorance. It cannot be overestimated. In the Allen and Dart study, nearly 60 percent of the religion writers surveyed reported having had no formal training in religious studies. Over 75 percent thought such studies would be helpful, and another 14 percent judged them essential. Only 10 percent considered them not at all necessary.

In fact, we are all, almost inevitably, ignorant. Covering religion is a special problem in the United States. In many countries, religion is a one-church story or a one-and-a-half-church story. In England, the Church of England plus the others. In France, the Catholic Church plus the others. In the United States we have a score of significant Christian groups, and hundreds of smaller ones. Many have ethnic or regional variations. We have four Jewish denominations, and several significant strands among the Orthodox alone. There is Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American religion, each with its subdivisions. There is Santeria and goddess-worship and Scientology and Fundamentalists Anonymous and so on.

I have compared the lone religion reporter's situation to the absurdity of asking one reporter to cover all sports, from baseball and boxing to yachting and stock-car racing, from cricket to ski-jumping, with responsibility for knowing all the rulebooks, the teams, the outstanding performers, the history and lore and behind-the-scenes squabbles, covering the weekly contests as well as the championship events, from Super Sunday to the Indianapolis 500, from the Stanley Cup to the Kentucky Derby, from Mike Tyson's trial to the baseball strike.

With diligence many religion reporters do their best to overcome their inevitable lack of knowledge, especially the lack of that kind of knowledge that only comes from direct contact and empathetic experience. The problem is more difficult on the level of editors, who by nature of their primary assignments cannot turn to educating themselves in the multiple forms of American religion. Quite often one encounters editors who are not at all hostile to religion, who may be active churchgoers or observant Jews, who may be well informed about their faith, but whose exposure, commitment, and knowledge remain limited to the faith of their upbringing.

The worst ignorance, of course, is the ignorance that's too dumb to know it's ignorant.

Third and finally, the framework of journalism itself: its conceptual framework--the way that news is defined--and also its practical framework, the conditions under which news reports are produced.

The news media were developed primarily to report on politics, sports, and business--and to entertain. From these primary preoccupations we have inherited certain forms and expectations. There are winners and losers, the ins and the outs, who's up in the stock market and who's down. None of that applies very well to religion coverage. So what does this really mean? Is there going to be a schism in the church? Are women abandoning religion? Are young people returning to religion? Is the pope blessing capitalism? Are the Gospels a cover-up?

When you have to spell out the nuances and qualifications attached to almost any religious statement, when you have to tell an editor that we may not know the outcome of this struggle for several decades or perhaps several centuries, enthusiasm for the story definitely tends to flag.

Father Avery Dulles recently tried to analyze some of the sources of tension between the news media and the Catholic Church and his insights can be extended to religious faiths generally (America, October 1, 1994). Religion centers on a mystery to be approached in a posture of reverence. The press is investigative, iconoclastic, and primed to expose pretensions, falsehoods, and hypocrisies. Convinced that its message is permanently valuable, religion shuns innovation and seeks commitment to truth. The press lives off novelty and "itching ears"; it stays neutral. Religion seeks to reconcile, or at least to suppress discord. The media stress conflict. Religion deals with interior matters. The press looks to the tangible. Religious bodies are frequently hierarchical and authoritative. The press is democratic and questioning. Religious teaching is often compex and subtle. The media want things short and simple.

Journalists have great room for creativity in conceiving stories, pitching them to editors, reporting and writing them. Nonetheless it is hard to escape certain elements: for example, the need for conflict, the unexpected, or the unusual. And it is hard not to get trapped by the very elements that one has invoked to win column space or broadcast time, not to let these elements be highlighted to the point of distortion.

Turn to the practical conditions under which news must be gathered and presented. I certainly remember the shock of space limitations I felt when I arrived at the New York Times. One column was about 900 words and it's even less now that we have conceded to the realities of modem eyesight the need for additional space between columns and lines of type. A page in a magazine like Commonweal, the New Republic, or the Christian Century is about 1,000 words. I used to be only clearing my throat in that space.

In addition, since any given story is probably the only one I'll be doing on Christian Science or African-American Baptists in eight months, or maybe in two years, I have to devote a great deal of space to capsule explanations of Christian Science theology or black Baptist history, so that it seems there are only sixty or seventy words left over to report the specific development that was the basis for the story in the first place.

Then there is the pressure of time. Fortunately, I can devote several days, sometimes a week, to many religion stories. But there are frequent cases of getting an assignment at 10:30 A.M. or even 12:30 P.M. and having to produce a story by 5 or 6 P.M. The pressure of time is related to the problem of preconceptions. It is very hard, under those constraints, to embark on a general, exploratory fishing expedition or risk what, to mix metaphors, might prove a wild goose chase. What authorities are you going to call? Theologians, representatives of women's groups, politicians, historians, anthropologists, sociologists? You are practically forced to begin with a strong hypothesis, a kind of shadow story in mind. Suppose your hypothesis or imagined story turns out to be wrong? The ethical and professional thing to do is stop and reverse directions even if it's now 4:30 or 5:30 in the afternoon. The harder case is when you turn up something more ambiguous, say, that the story line you're pursuing is not false, but also not as important or relevant as some other related direction. It's virtually impossible to switch gears in midafternoon and even when you have more time, you have already invested a lot of effort into exploring one possibility.

I remember when I was pursuing the question of how much Muslims in the United States were divided by their ethnic loyalties and the differing political concerns in their Muslim homelands. Then a very well-informed Muslim told me, well yes, that was all true, but what really stirred divisions in most of the Muslim communities she knew was disagreement about which day marked the beginning of Ramadan. There was no room in my story for perhaps the most interesting thing I discovered, how Muslims in the United States were reinventing many of their religious institutions to fit the American environment and often imitating the established patterns of churches and synagogues in the process.

The usual solution is to put such belated discoveries on a list for the future. But the end result of working under tight pressures of time is that we abide by the law of journalism that says the news media do not in fact tell new stories as much as find new ways to retell old stories.

How do I finally apportion degrees of responsibility for media failures in religion coverage among the factors I have described? Of course, I cannot really quantify these matters, and, of course, the reality actually varies from one form of media to another and from one outlet to another within each form.

But for the sake of argument I'll assign responsibility symmetrically to the three sorts of causes: one-third to ideological hostility; one-third to ignorance, incompetence and insufficient resources; one-third to the inherited definitions of news and the inherent constraints of time and space.

On this three-legged stool I rest. Thank you. Don Wycliff: I keep on a bulletin board next to my desk a quotation from Hamlet, a line spoken right after he and his friend Horatio have seen the ghost of Hamlet's father. Horatio, a modern man of the world, is astonished at the sight. Hamlet says, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." That line points to an epistemological divide: on one side, religion, and on the other, whatever there is that we deal with in the modem world. A certain amount of interpretation is involved in bridging that divide, but the beginning of the whole thing is a certain amount of respect for one's ignorance. The worst ignorance is that which doesn't know it's ignorant. I know there's a lot of ignorance among journalists.

My experience for the last ten years or so has been on the editorial opinion side of things, at the Tribune but previously at the New York Times. I find two facts predominate. First, appalling ignorance of religion. I don't claim to be a theologian, but I know enough to be respectful of what I don't know, and a lot of people are not. Second, there is also a kind of a puerile attitude among a lot of journalists. They grew up and were told: Don't do this; don't do that; you'll go to hell. They've been in rebellion ever since. So as soon as anybody or anything religious comes up, they're hearing those voices from their childhood, not appreciating that there may be something substantive there.

The fact of this epistemological divide came through most clearly to me after Waco. I remember the morning afterwards going into our editorial room. We talked. Everybody was appalled. All I could think was that there had been a huge gulf in understanding, in communication, at work in Waco. I don't mean communication in that Cool-Hand Luke failure-to-communicate way. These people were perhaps using the same language but talking about different realities seen in radically different ways.

I think that is the same thing that's at work in most newsrooms. A lot of journalists don't appreciate that religion is not a different reality, but a different way of seeing reality. There is thus not the inclination to try to understand it on its own terms.

Aside from those high-minded philosophical differences, there's some plain old animus. I say this, as a Catholic myself: the Catholic Church's position on abortion has not won it a lot of friends. It has made it a lot of enemies. I've seen that at work in newsrooms and editorial board rooms where decisions are influenced by an animus born of that policy disagreement. Carol Marin: I come to you as somebody who is not a religion reporter nor have I ever been one. When I started in 1972 with WBIR-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, we had a five-minute Billy Graham news segment, a syndicated religious discussion. The first religious story I ever covered was the snake handlers of the Holiness Church of God in Jesus' Name. Those two events taught me two things. The Billy Graham segment taught me that the media are not monolithic. They are a continually evolving and truly varied representation of many approaches. The snake handlers taught me that there's no room for contempt on any level for any article of faith or any believer. Whatever I might have thought about drinking strychnine and handling snakes, which they did and which they believed was biblically justified, the two men I met were like me, like any number of people who have a belief, who live in a community, who support the community, and who are often misunderstood.

What Peter offered in his speech was comprehensive, fair, and accurate: there is incompetence, there are insufficient resources, there's profound ignorance. I don't very often find contempt for religions or religious people. What troubles me is litmus tests, such as the studies that Peter talked about, where it's judged meaningful if [a reporter or editor] regularly attends religious services, whether you consider yourself religious, whether you belong to an organized faith. I take the position that one of your obligations as a journalist is to give up, for the time that you're a journalist, some of your rights and privileges as a citizen in order to have the privilege of being a reporter. And that means in whatever faith I was raised, or whatever faith I do or do not hold these days, that I don't carry that as baggage or as an attitude into the stories that I cover.

So if I'm a Protestant, I do not bring Protestantism to my story. I may have a greater understanding of what that faith is, but there is great care and great deliberateness in saying that what I am personally is something that should not be imposed professionally. I'm not speaking now of columnists or people who do analysis. I'm talking strictly about reporters. By their natures, reporters are mostly not joiners. They didn't belong to sororities. They didn't belong to fraternities. They don't join clubs. They don't go to Tupperware parties. They don't go. And, yes, they are suspicious of authority and I think that's appropriate: Not to be contemptuous of authority, but to remember that authority, including cardinals, bishops, popes, are people who work for their flock, just like presidents work for us. It's not to deny them the faith or the respect that they deserve, but it is to explore who they are and what they do.

There are no debates in newsrooms about abortions or the death penalty. Insufficient resources have shrunk most newsrooms, certainly television newsrooms. You don't see your colleagues until the end of the day. You are racing in. When I started, we would sit and watch the newscast together after we'd edited our pieces. The amount of work that reporters now do, the different places to which they are sent, the multiple stories they may do in a day militate against that. If there is an absence of discussion, that is because there are fewer of us. We are expected to cover more, and I think that's part of what is perceived, and rightfully so in many cases, as the shallowness of our coverage.

I live in a newsroom where one of the best reporters we have most regularly covered the controversies of the Catholic Church. She has been excoriated for doing so because she broke some of the pedophile stories before the [Chicago] archdiocese was as open as it currently is about this subject. That reporter sits with a picture of herself, her husband, and the pope on their wedding trip as they're kissing his ring. She exists in a profoundly Catholic personal environment. She has been criticized by mainline Catholics, including members of the archdiocese, for being someone unfaithful to her religion; but, in fact, she's understood that the search for some basic truth in some ways is a transcendent ethic and is the ultimate morality. David Neff: I get phone calls from reporters who are trying to figure out what Evangelicals are up to. A frequent question I am asked is what is an Evangelical. Heck, we're still trying to figure that out in our magazine, and I've got several, many definitions. We do face a major problem in educating those who are working in the press about Protestantism, in general, and about Evangelical Protestantism, in particular, because it is a rather shapeless movement. There are certain things that hold Evangelical Protestants together, but they are very, very diverse. When I read a political story, as I did this morning in the Tribune about the elections in Iowa and Virginia where Evangelical Protestants are supposed to be playing a major role, I don't recognize myself as part of that political force that's being characterized.

Let me say just a little bit about Evangelicals and some conservatives who raise the question of visibility or hostility when it comes to media and religion. Among some of them, there's a sense of being dispossessed culturally. At one time, the Fundamentalism that preceded Evangelicalism in this country was not only culturally dispossessed, but economically dispossessed. It was very much a working-class religion, and there was a kind of coming up through the ranks, a bootstraps sort of thing that happens through education and other ways. A lot of Fundamentalists shed that term Fundamentalism and became Evangelicals. They chose that term for themselves, and now while there's plenty of food on the table, while their children go to some of the best colleges in the country, while they have multiple vehicles in their garages, there is still a sense that somehow they don't really belong. They don't really have a place in the power structures in this country, whether that's in the universities or in the media or wherever.

Evangelical Protestantism is changing, and it's changing rapidly. David Bennington, who's a historian of religion at the University of Sterling, in the British Isles, has argued, I think very persuasively, that Evangelicalism is very adaptive. That it isn't just one thing that can be traced from year to year and decade to decade. And here is how he is right, right now. The therapeutic culture in this country really has thoroughly permeated Evangelical Christianity. This is something that I'm not particularly fond of reporting. But I think it's a largely unreported story. And whereas the world was once seen largely in terms of the simpleness of human beings and the radical saving acts of God, and that eventual, otherworldly destination, it is very much now a this-worldly kind of experience, seeking some sort of therapeutic religious salvation in the present. All the old language is still there. But the focus of the experience is quite different. That's a very hard thing to communicate, I think, to many reporters. And it shows a major shift in the way Evangelical religion is experienced.

Let me say another thing about another grossly underreported story. And this is where that invisibility factor comes in. Perhaps some of you read a book by sociologist David Martin several years back which reported on the spread of Pentacostalism in Latin America. It was a very solid book. But there was a section in the preface in which he pointed out that he simply could not get his peers in sociology to pay attention to what he was saying, because in the academic arena in which they were moving, where religion was happening in Latin America was liberation theology. No one bothered to notice all the little storefront churches that were popping up all over the cities of Latin America. There was no key spokesperson for this movement. There was no hierarchy. There was nothing except this tremendous ground swell. And if you didn't happen to ride down the streets of major Latin American cities and actually look to see what was happening, you could miss it entirely. Well, he rode down the streets. He found it. He reported it, and he was roundly criticized. Daniel Lehmann: Peter talked about the difficulty of dealing with an issue, given the space limitations of the daily newspaper. Well, from my standpoint of working for the Chicago Sun Times, Peter works for the Shakespeare edition, I work for the Cliff Notes version. That's a point that's forgotten too many times among writers of a specialty beat. What we do is simply a glimpse at a subject.

What we do, I believe, at most newspapers, what we produce everyday is a daily art form. We write stories that are extremely transitory. We are, indeed, sort of one-hit wonders of once every nine months to a year on a particular topic.

In many ways our editors, certainly mine, are increasingly driven by marketing and market shares. And that means turning out the editorial product and responding to what readers say they are interested in. And, therefore, in a city such as Chicago, and I think much the same is probably true in New York, with 40 something percent of the population being Roman Catholic, easily 40 percent of the stories that appear in the Sun Times and the Tribune are Roman Catholic.

There is a tremendous burden on the reporter to try to write, shall we say, pan-issue stories. I think we all fall into these. When you do a story on Protestantism, say mainline Protestantism, for example, you try to touch as many of those denominations that fall within that definition as you possibly can. At the same time, we then spend a fair amount of attention and focus on stories of the major religious group of the area, which is Roman Catholicism. The sheer number of institutions and services that the church as a whole delivers in this area are unavoidable.

That brings us back to the issue of what is news. My definition, the one that I recall from the first day, my first job, in Marquette, Michigan, was that news is something you don't know. It's just that simple. And news is also names. It's generated by names. And, therefore, we pay an inordinate amount of attention to names. I want to specifically respond to Peter's comment on the New York Times treatment of the Cardinal Bernardin story. I participated in a similar conference to this one at Northwestern University two weeks ago, sponsored by the Law School and the journalism School, at which both the legal profession and journalism took their share of lumps for the coverage of that particular story. And in some instances, I think justifiably so. But I would still challenge the editors of the New York Times. Substitute the name John Cardinal O'Connor for Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. Would that have been three paragraphs on page twenty-seven? I simply refuse to believe that the Times would have treated it the same way. Steinfels: There are all sorts of things going on here. There's tremendous antimedia feeling. If we're going to talk about the bashing of religion, Catholic-bashing, Evangelical-bashing, and Fundamentalist-bashing, I think we also have to acknowledge that there's media-bashing, and this creates a certain immunity among media people to fair criticism.

In the wake of the massacre in Hebron which was then followed by the shooting of Hasidic young people on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the Marble Collegiate Church had a dialogue sermon in which the pastor was joined by a rabbi and an imam. I obtained a tape recording. At one point, one of the clergymen said something about the media's reports of violence. The whole congregation went into cheering and clapping. I thought, now wait a minute. It wasn't reporters who shot at people in Hebron. It wasn't reporters who shot up people on the Brooklyn Bridge. There's a great deal of frustration displaced onto the media about dealing with some of the uncomfortable realities of our lives. Marin: It is easy to be a biased reporter. It is not so difficult to be a biased viewer or reader. We all hear the bells we hear and we each have a responsibility to try to go beyond that. As I read religious writers in their analyses, what I keep hearing is the word secular, the secular world, the secular reporter. I thought I understood what secular meant, but in the context in which I was reading, it almost sounded godless. And I'm curious if that is the perception of those who represent religious interests or of religion writers. Does the secular reporter now mean a reporter who is irreligious or disinterested in religion? Neff: I think that most of the people that I hear use the phrase [secular] that way usually mean godless, a person who doesn't have any kind of religious feeling and commitment. I think you see it used that way. It seems to me it's often used much more of the process of secularization that our society has gone through. And, therefore, that the categories for reporting news tend to be nonreligious, nonspiritual categories, that tend not to touch that major portion of people's lives. Marin: When we do stories and ... I will preface this by saying that many of them are very quick hits, they include tourist attractions like weeping Madonnas, the traffic jams that surround churches where they exist, which is not what I consider to be a religious story. We approach them sometimes on that level. Interwoven in many of our stories is the fact that there's a feeling in the mainstream media that faith is not regarded as a reasonable basis of discussion. But if you look not at the stories about religion, but at a story in which religion is an element, I think your surveys would really be quite different. If you cover the killing of a police officer in Chicago, it is almost inextricably linked with religious observance, the sermon, the music, the pageantry, the respect, the reverence of what his faith brought him, how he served his profession and so forth. Neff: One thing that is often missed is that newspapers have to do very short stories and the electronic broadcast media generally do the very quickest takes on things. How can we help the reader get inside the religious experience, the religious world view of a particular group? I grew up in a sect which was apocalyptic in its origins and had a lot of that apocalyptic overlay, so that when I saw what was happening in Waco, I could really understand how people could barricade themselves inside a building like that and be willing to the rather than surrender to the ATF. I don't think that there was any reporting that I saw that helped anyone understand the apocalyptic mind set. Steinfels: You mentioned the amount of time ... I am reminded that public broadcasting, Channel 13, the PBS station in New York, is going to embark on broadcasting programs in which there are fifteen hours of discussion about the origins of humanity and humanity's purpose in the cosmos. It is the American version of a program which was made and broadcast originally in the Netherlands where it was a great hit. The series is called "The Glorious Accident," which, in itself, is a kind of metaphysical/religious statement.

All the people on the series are fascinating individuals. They have a variety of views that often conflict in interesting ways. They're all scientists. Now, there is something about the word secular, which can simply mean a kind of neutrality, but I think that it often works in our society to refer to a substantive set of world views and what is proper for discussion and what isn't. Why was there no theologian or philosopher from one of the great metaphysical or philosophical traditions?

At the New York Times we have postmortems of every issue and somebody wrote an article, in which they included a profile of the subject: where he lives, what kind of a laptop computer he uses, where his last vacation was, the car he drives, and then his religion. In the postmortem this was circled and a correction put in: The New York Times does not report people's religions unless it's relevant to the story. Now that's something that has been developed over the years to prevent stereotypical presentations of religion. On the other hand, the little box said that he drove an Alfa Romeo. That wasn't relevant to the story either. There is something then about religion being eliminated from the picture of this major Washington figure. So, this is a really complicated and fascinating question about what secular means and how it operates in the media.

Lehmann: When I used the term secular and secular education and a secular newsroom, I was talking specifically about the world view that by my definition is not parochial. By secular I mean a way that looks at the world as all parts being equal. And each issue in our age of reason is subject to whether it is rational, whether it makes any sense or not. Marin: I think that's how I use it, too. But we are now in an era where we debate virtually every word we use. I made a list. There are people who object to the use of the words Fundamentalism, Evangelical, cults, sect, religious right, prolife, main-line, mainstream. Secular humanism is not a compliment for many people. As a result, we almost have to define our terms as we walk along; political correctness has gotten us into a terrible bind. Some of it is quite worthwhile. Some of it is just maddening in terms of what you're allowed to say, what you are uncomfortable in expressing for fear of offending or of not getting it exactly right. John McDermott: [President, John A. McDermott & Associates, a public policy and urban issues consulting firm] We're all being too nice, so let me invoke the spirit of Saul Alinsky, a great Chicagoan, and say I think it's time to open the sores of discontent. Many religious people in this town feel there's a cultural war going on in the United States, a real battle over the future and makeup of society and the quality of our country. And they're angry at the media. They're angry at you because they think most of the time your coverage is hostile. When you report on the cultural war, you talk about Pat Buchanan and the religious right. Most of the religious people I know think they're on the defensive, that the aggression is coming from the left, from the very militant secularist movement, which sees religion as purely a matter of personal and private opinion. This defines the world view in which religion really isn't necessary, therefore religious figures and institutions who seem to be asserting certain common values or certain moral principles, are regarded by this mind-set as inappropriate. Richard John Neuhaus calls the result the naked public square. And if you look at our life, it does seem to me, at least, that most of the action, most of the aggression, the pressure, is coming from the left.

We just saw the end of the Good Friday holiday in Illinois public schools after fifty-three years of undemonstrated harm. We've seen the removal of religion, basically, from high school textbooks. Even the idea of voluntary prayer by students is now under attack by a strong national movement. Religious groups of students who wanted to use the school facilities, as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts do, had to go to court to get that upheld. The whole moral tradition of the West in the form of the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition, vis-a-vis sexuality, has been basically banned from public education. So that kids can be given condoms but they can't hear about the Ten Commandments. This is what a lot of people see: a militant, secularist movement determined to drive religion out of any expression in public life. And they accuse you--the media--of not covering it neutrally, but joining sides. When you report the culture war, when you report these issues, you record that aggression is coming from the right, the pressure is from the religious right who want to create a more conformist America, and you neglect the story of the left.

How do you plead? Lehmann: Let's take the Good Friday story. A suit was filed in federal court, I believe in March 1993, by a Chicago school teacher, who was joined by the American Jewish Congress, in challenging a part of the state's school code that dates from 1941. It mandated that all public schools in the state must observe Good Friday, along with Casimir Pulaski Day, Columbus Day, going down the line. Judge Ann Claire Williams, by no means a liberal jurist, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame Law School, examined this and applied the Supreme Court's twenty-year-old Lemon test, and found that it violated at least two of those points. Therefore, she chucked the mandated holiday by ordering a preliminary injunction proscribing its enforcement throughout the state. It will likely be appealed by the state attorney general's office.

In writing that story, I contacted what I thought was a nice broad spectrum of opinion. I contacted the National Association of Evangelicals, the Christian Coalition of Illinois, a priest of the Episcopal Church, as well as lawyers of different stripes. So you've got an amalgam of opinions. The only two who spoke out as I heard you, John, talking about fifty-three years of no harm, the only persons who objected were predictable, conservative elements within the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Coalition. Without exception, the rest of the opinion was based on our understanding of our culture today with its proliferation of pluralism, by no means monotheistic in tradition any longer. It's amazing that that particular statute, part of the school code, lasted as long as it did, that it wasn't challenged earlier. If that makes the reporter part of the assault on those traditional values, then I would plead guilty. McDermott: Let me respond. I don't think I'm talking about one story. Although it would be fair to say that filing this suit was not a happenstance event, it was organized by the American Jewish Congress. If you look at the ACLU, and similar groups' programs, you'll see tax exemption is next on the list, a challenging of the tax exemption of churches and church-related institutions across the country. I guess my point is if you don't cover that, you don't look at the war that's taking place; you've covered this simply as an event. I don't think the coverage of the Good Friday decision took into account the recent surveys which show that 85 percent of Americans define themselves as Christian in one way or the other. If it is reasonable to close schools, let us say, in Glencoe and Highland Park on Jewish holidays to accommodate the majority--in this era of multiculturalism, it can be an occasion to teach gentile kids respect and understanding of their Jewish neighbors--I don't see why it doesn't work the other way. Isn't it a reasonable accommodation for the majority who have respect for Good Friday to use the occasion in a positive way? You, in the media, do not cover that dimension of the story. Roy Larson: [Retired religion editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, now director, Center for Religion in the News Media, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University] In 1973 I went to a church as a visitor, just dropped in at the 1 1 o'clock service. It was the week before the Episcopal convention meeting in Louisville. That was expected to be a controversial event. During the service when announcements were being given, the priest said, "Now we're going to have a convention this week, it's going to be in Louisville. Don't believe what you're going to read in the press about that convention. If you have any questions, call me and we'll set you right."

The priest did not know I was in the congregation that morning and expected to cover that convention. I walked out of the church, went down to the comer drug store, bought a legal pad and a pen, and wrote him a note. I went back to the church and handed it to the usher and I said, "Will you please give this to Father after the service is over." Half an hour after I got home that day, the priest came to the house, his tail dragging, and full of apologies and he's been apologizing ever since.

The reason I bring this up is this: All my life, ordained and unordained, I thought of myself as a minister of the word. In this era of cheap media bashing (and that doesn't apply to what John just said), which is what the priest had been doing, I don't believe that people within the church appreciate the vocational discernment and the vocational integrity of many of the people working in journalism. In all my years of journalism, I would say that the commitment to truth, the commitment to working professionally in the true vocational sense, the journalists I worked with, most of them, were secular monks, in many ways, with as strong a sense of discipline as any priest that I ever knew. Steinfels: To pick up from both Roy's and Carol's remarks about the truth: I think that's what motivates me and it motivates a lot of the people I work with. Sometimes it means reporting very uncomfortable things about a group to which one feels great loyalty. You have to be convinced that it's better to know the truth than not to know the truth. There were certain things in the series about the Catholic Church in the United States [New York Times, May 29-June 1,1994], the results of this poll that we took, that absolutely startled me. I had mixed feelings about reporting them. I say to myself, on the one hand, this finding that a large percentage of American Catholics may no longer hold anything approaching a traditional view of the Eucharist, this could be an alarm bell for people who might want to start educating a bit more intensely.

On the other hand, it could set a new standard. A lot more people would say, well, that's what we believe, I guess that's what majority rule is. So, in the end, that was the finding and I didn't know what would be the consequences, good or bad. I just thought it was important that we had framed the question carefully and then we reported it and there was a little uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach when I wrote about it.

In terms of the earlier point about the way that the religious, cultural wars are reported, or the religious right is reported, I think I would agree with a good deal of what John McDermott said. When I read the headline saying "Religious Right Gains Influence and Spreads Discord in GOP," I was thinking, you know, why doesn't it say "...and Brings New Life to GOP"? We have defined the religious right as a problem in that story, rather than in neutral terms. Frank Butler: I'm with FADICA [Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities] My question deals with part of the Dart/Allen study which talked about the rift, if you will, or lack of trust, between clergy and journalists. To what extent is the religious coverage problem one of accessibility, information, cooperation within the religious community itself? Lehmann: Well, I'll try that one by asking Bishopl Imesch over here why he didn't return the phone calls that I made to him over the years? [laughter] Joseph Imesch: [Bishop of Joliet, Illinois] I just want you to know, if there's one thing I do, it is return phone calls. So if you called me, you got a response, but you were out. Lehmann: I've been out for a long time. Kevin Clarke: I'm from Salt Magazine. Why is it so difficult for the religious left to get much of its message, which is simultaneously critical and hopeful about American society, out through the mainstream press? Steinfels: In terms of the religious left, I'm not quite sure what that means anymore. I get immense amounts of material from every point of the religious spectrum, right, left, and center: press releases, invitations to cover things, and so on. One of the problems with what might be identified as the religious left is that as a reporter you're not very confident about how many of the grand statements about world issues are backed up anymore by conviction and emotion in the pews. It's been proven by the so-called religious right that they can mobilize large numbers of people. I don't want to go too far, but there's certainly segments of the religious left who seem to have lost contact with people in the pews. And therefore their pronouncements, not necessarily those cases where they're really engaged in action, but their pronouncements about world problems, I really can't convince the desk that these are things that they want to give space to. That's one difficulty.

The other difficulty is that--and this is only a difficulty for me as a religion writer--the religious left seems to me to have become habitually nervous or uncomfortable with stating its concerns in explicitly religious language. So, oftentimes, perfectly good concerns about hunger or world problems coming out of the religious left sound almost identical to the expressions that would come from nonreligious groups. Now, that doesn't mean they're any more or less reportable. But it certainly means that they're clearly not a religion story for me to report. Sometimes I'm puzzled by what's happened to the explicit religious dimension, which I suspect is there in people's lives, but some kind of self-censorship seems to have removed the articulation of what they're doing. Neff: I got a call recently that again showed this proverbial ignorance on the part of a reporter about religion, but one that I really welcomed, because for once it was exactly the right question. It was a real-estate writer, who had been investigating the community development going on at the Lawndale community here in Chicago. And he had come to see that there was a strong religious dimension to what was going on. And he specifically named one individual who had moved from North Barrington, where he had a very large house, huge income and moved into what was a dangerous and economically precarious community. And the reporter said to me, "I have two questions. Do Christians do this very often?" [laughter] And, I had to say, well, not as often as I'd like, but there are others who have made this kind of sacrifice. His next question was, "Why would a Christian give up everything to do something like this?" And I was able to give him a very theological answer. I was grateful for his ignorance. Martin Marty. Today, the voluntary association is the religion story. If you want to talk about voluntary associational life in America, 80 percent of it is being done by the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities and Bread for the World and so on. Robert Wuthnow's book On Acts of Compassion, notes that 56 percent of adult Americans volunteer for something every week, but that 70 or 80 percent of them do it through religion. I'd like to see the press notice that more. The voluntary associational life of religion is the biggest, single, undercovered story. That story isn't known; and without it, I think, the soul of America would be lost.