Washington.

Forums like this--where journalists raise questions about what they do, sometimes engaging in that medieval practice of self-flagellation--have become so common that one begins to worry that journalism itself is going through its own crisis of faith, certainly questioning its infallibility. There's a danger, I think, of a lot of self-importance in these forums as if journalism itself were the center of the world. Graham Greene in his story -The Third Man" comments that we never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us. And I often think that journalists think that we are far more important to the proper running of the universe than we actually are, and assume that the whole world is interested in what we do; that they are as interested as we are ourselves. And our able critics actually may reinforce this hubris.

So before I say anything else, I want to make clear that I don't think that journalism is the alpha and the omega. Nor do I think that journalists are capable of bringing down the world's religious institutions or of endangering the faith. Understanding the limits of journalism, I think might be the first step toward understanding it better. On the other hand, I don't want to underestimate the depth of feeling, often hostile, that religious people feel toward the media.

I'd like to try to do two things today: First, I want to reflect a bit on my own experiences covering religion, especially the time I spent covering the pope and the Vatican. And secondly, I'd like to tack a few theses about religion and the press up on the wall. And I would like to lay out a few guidelines that we could argue about on what can and can not be expected, reasonably, from the press in its coverage of religion.

My favorite story in the entire time I was covering the Vatican took place in a town called Beminda, up country in Cameroon, during one of the pope's visits to Africa. The press had flown in ahead of the pope. We arrived in a pouring rain. It had been raining, I was told, for six days. We had some time before the pope got there, so I started talking to people from the area. And I fell into a long conversation with a bright young man who was a practicing Catholic and a representative of the provincial information ministry. He assured me during this downpour, that it would not rain on the pope. And I asked him, "How do you know this?" And he replied, "Because the rain doctors told me."

Now this story would prove to be an excellent vignette for a story I was working on about the relationship between Catholicism and traditional African beliefs. I convinced the New York Times Week in Review that a section of the paper that had taken all manner of ideas and religions seriously, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Marxism, liberalism, and all kinds of other ideas, ought to give animism a fair shot. But, of course, the story gets better and I bet you know how it turns out.

In the fullness of time, the pope's plane landed and the crowds cheered. The door opened up and suddenly it stopped raining. The pope got out and began saying Mass. And in the middle of the Mass the sun came out and shone on the pope at the altar. The Mass ended and the pope got some more cheers. He got back on the plane and the heavens opened and it started pouring. Now the young man who had told me about the rain doctor spotted me on the press platform, and he didn't care that he was getting soaked, he came running up to me with a big smile on his face, pointing to the heavens and saying, See, see, I told you so." The story I wrote began with the lead, -It was not clear who had done the work, but someone was clearly on the job."

In talking to journalism students I tell this story and ask them to consider what their assumptions are in coming to stories about spirituality and religion. Their working assumption, no doubt, would be that all this was simply a wonderful coincidence. The rain doctors couldn't possibly know anything about whether or not it would rain on the pope. But I would always ask them, How do you know that for

certain?" If a journalist is supposed to be a Joe Friday, just-the-facts-ma'am enterprise, the facts in that story do not necessarily point to the conclusion that this was the merest coincidence. Should not a fair-minded journalist leave his or her mind open to at least the possibility that the rain doctors know something we don't? Or perhaps that the pope was particularly blessed that day? Now I don't challenge the idea that coincidence is one possible explanation for what went on. I have no idea what the rain doctors' track record is over the long haul, or whether it's any better than that of secular meteorologists. But I do think that it is fundamentally opposed to the common assumptions that journalists say they hold to, to take this set of facts and rule out by fiat the possibility that something rather special just might have been going on.

A second story I like to remember concerns the problems involved in how the language we use in journalism colors everything we write and everything we do. And this involved writing what, on its face, should be the simplest of news stories, which was basically a piece about the pageantry of the pope celebrating Easter Sunday Mass. Late one Easter Sunday night, after I had covered the pope's Mass, I was staring at my computer screen facing what ought to have been a simple question, which is how do you describe Easter in a secular newspaper? If you say Easter, the day on which Christians claim Jesus rose from the dead, you make it sound like a lie. If you say, Easter, the day on which Christians allege Jesus rose from the dead, you make it sound like a crime. So I finally settled on, Easter, the day Christians revere as marking Jesus' resurrection from the dead, which may also be loaded, but I thought it was reasonably accurate. I might have done better to use the word believe. But I think which ever formulation is right, I think that journalistic constructions tell us a lot about how we actually feel about believers.

The issue here is not the one that concerns journalists actually more than it should, which is whom will we offend; rather, it goes to the more fundamental issue of fairness. Do we have any understanding at all of the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people? Are we conveying in the words we use in situations like that, hidden and often biased assumptions about what we think of those people?

A third episode is revealing about what we journalists look for when we cover stories. This also involved the pope's trip to Africa with a series of speeches in three different countries. It was like covering a presidential campaign in October, a few days before the election. He was touching down everywhere. We were handed a big packet at the beginning of the day, and having read through it, one of my colleagues, one of the best Vatican correspondents, looked up with alarm and said, "What are we going to write about? There's nothing but religion here."

Now he understood perfectly the irony of what he was saying, but his comments did raise some interesting questions about what journalists look for when they come to religion. If the pope can't speak about religion, after all, who can? If the pope speaks about politics, it's a good story. If he speaks about sex, it's a great story. A friend with one of the wire services once said that any story she wrote with the words "pope" and "sex" in the lead were guaranteed to be used in every paper all across America.

That day it seemed we had neither sex nor politics help us get into the newspapers. But, as you can tell, I like stories that get better and this one does too. Another colleague and I approached the Vatican spokesman and asked him to make sense of these speeches. Did he see any common themes that we might have missed? Now the spokesman, a very shrewd man, understood exactly what we needed. He argued that if you read the speeches very carefully, you could see that the pope was offering the leaders of these various African countries--this was his quote, "An implicit pact, that if they respected human rights and religious freedom, the Vatican was prepared to do all it could to plead their case to the world for relief from poverty." Now the pope never used those words "implicit pact," but it sounded like a wonderful idea to us.

Frank Greer, james Carvel, and Roger Ailes clearly have nothing on the Vatican spokesman. My friend and I left this conversation with big smiles on our faces. The words "implicit pact" appeared in the leads of both of our stories and my friend's story actually made it to page one of the Los Angeles Times. Who said there was no politics that day?

There are, I think, many lessons here. The first is that my friend was right. There really is "no news" most of the time in standard religious declarations. That is to say, we assume there is no news. Why should it be news that the pope should talk about Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and salvation? The Good News isn't, by any conventional sense, news. The other lesson is that religious institutions really are, in their way, thoroughly worldly and understand the imperatives in the world they are dealing with. Certainly our friend, the Vatican spokesman, did. He was not going to be naive enough to pretend that we'd write about standard religious themes and that those stories would make page one. So he figured out the best way to get his message across, and it worked, proving that even the Good News is subject to spin.

The last story I want to tell concerns the devil. One day I opened up my morning newspaper in Rome and discovered that the Archdiocese of Turin had named a panel of exorcists. The Italian press had great fun with this story and ran it under headlines like "Does the Devil Live in Turin?" I thought it was very important to find out and I'd never been to Turin, so I went. Two encounters were of particular interest.

The first was with a priest who was handling the press on this story. A lot of us had come to Turin to look for Satan. This priest was enraged at all the attention this story had received. He was from Turin and was upset that his city, with its reputation for rationality and efficiency, had come to be seen as a place of superstition and Satanism. The truth, he said, was that the Vatican had sent out a circular all through Italy. There had been a rise of satanic cults and the Vatican wanted every diocese to deal with this. They wanted to make sure that exorcists were on the job. The priest argued that because Turin was the most efficient and well-organized of Italian cities, the archdiocese had been the very first to name exorcists, and that's why they had gotten all this terrible publicity. And he said, mournfully, that as a result of its efficiency, the archdiocese had become the laughing-stock of the country. He was not pleased and so it should never be said that churches are indifferent to the judgment or logic of the secular world.

After that, I went off to a town in the mountains outside Turin to interview a priest who had long experience as an exorcist. I got there just as he was about to begin afternoon Mass, so I went to Mass and then interviewed him. He was in his seventies and was a very interesting man. He had been a worker priest in the factories of Turin and clearly had very progressive political views. Greed, he said, was the dearest sign of Satan's presence in the world. He had seen that every day, he said, when he was working in the factories. And then he described his various exorcisms, calmly, clearly, in very precise detail. He deeply believed he had encountered Satan, and while I'm not big on Satan myself, it was impossible to doubt that this man's description of what he had encountered was entirely honest.

To this day, I don't know what to make of our conversation, except that I am sure I was in the presence of a very honest and very rational man. I quoted him in my story respectfully, but I'm not sure my readers had any better understanding than I did of what he was saying. But I couldn't resist at the end of the story, quoting a Vatican official citing C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters in which Satan tells his nephew, and I quote roughly, "All we have to do is to get them to believe we don't exist and then we've won." I figured that would provoke a few conversations around breakfast tables.

I particularly like that story because I think it goes to the heart of the problem of the confrontation between contemporary religion and secular journalism. One thesis I'd like to tack up: There really is a fundamental conflict between the definition of truth used by journalists and the definition accepted by people of religious faith.

People of faith believe what they believe because they believe it's true. Christians believe that Jesus is God and rose from the dead. Muslims believe that there is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. Jews believe that there is one God who handed Moses the Commandments on the mountaintop. Christians, Jews, and Muslims affected by the modern world may seek to rationalize or water down these beliefs, but for the devout, they are quite simply true.

Contemporary American journalism, on the other hand, is the quintessentially Enlightenment profession. Saint Thomas the Apostle, doubting

Thomas, could be our patron saint. Our rules say, prove it. Show me. Give me the evidence. Where are the documents? Do you have two sources on the Virgin Birth? Why should we believe these guys who said they saw Jesus after he died, the journalist might ask. Where are the pictures? How do we know that the Ten Commandments came from God? Maybe the journalist might say they were written the way party platforms are written, and the guys who wrote them figured out the best way to sell them was to assert that God endorses the Ten Commandments.

I joke here, but I do think this is a serious problem and a serious source of misunderstanding between journalists and people of faith, precisely because religious people are profoundly convinced that what they believe is true. The basic skepticism of the journalistic craft strikes them--not unreasonably, from their point of view--as wrong and even ungodly. There is no simple solution to this problem. Religious people living in a free society cannot expect others to accept on faith that all they believe is true. A certain skepticism is an inescapable, and in most ways healthy, aspect of the modem journalist's mind. But believers do deserve to be treated without bigotry.

And so as a second thesis, I would suggest that secular people, including journalists, need to accept that religious belief is usually built upon an intellectually serious foundation. It is simply misinformed, bad reporting, if you will, to assume that religious faith is nothing but prejudice or superstition. There is a temptation on the part of some in my profession to believe that. Protestant fundamentalism, for example, has gotten a very bad press throughout this century. Protestant fundamentalism has had rigorous intellectual defenders, who came to their views as a result of a serious confrontation with modernity. The emphasis on biblical inerrancy, so puzzling to secular people, and even to nonfundamentalist Christians, was, in part, the result of a rational search for a form of authority strong enough to resist encroachments by liberal and modern ideas on traditional doctrine. One need not accept biblical inerrancy to understand how and why others do accept it. To refuse even to enter temporarily into the world of the religious believer reflects a lack of religious imagination that should be foreign to a journalist trying to do his or her job right.

Much has been made of the conflicting studies of the religious views of journalists. My own personal experience is that reporters are somewhat more religious than the Rothman study would suggest. But there may be less conflict in these contradictory findings than one might think. I have no doubt that the survey cited by Dart and Allen is right in reporting the strong religious inclinations of reporters who cover religion. And I have no doubt that Lichter and Rothman are broadly speaking right in seeing journalists as a whole as being less religious than other groups in the country. These are, I think, interesting questions, but I'm not sure that they are, in any way, decisive.

The real issue, I think, is not the precise figures on the religious inclination of journalists, but rather the way journalists, religious and nonreligious alike, regard religious news itself. Lots of journalists don't know how to cook very well, but they understand the importance of having recipes in their newspapers. Some journalists know a lot more about sports than other journalists, and Tim Russert knows more about the Buffalo Bills than anybody, yet I know of not a single journalist who would question the importance of having a sports section.

Thus, a third thesis I'd like to tack up, which is that whatever the religious proclivities of journalists, contemporary journalism needs to question whether it is confining the coverage of religion to a ghetto. In many ways, I think this is a more important issue than bias against religion in those stories that actually do appear. For tens of millions of Americans, and literally billions around the world, religion is a central fact of life. For many, it is more important than politics and, amazingly, more important than sports. For a lot of people, it's more important than sex. Yet religion is often covered most when it is an adjunct to something else, especially, as I said, politics and sex. As far as I know, neither the Vatican nor the Christian Coalition has fielded a sports team. This is the issue my friend covering the pope was getting at when he said, tongue-in-cheek, there was nothing but religion in that particular packet of papal speeches.

I suggest that the most important goal for those seeking fairer coverage of religion is the same as the goal George Meany set for the trade union movement--more. As Dart and Allen point out in their study, fewer than seventy journalists in the entire country cover religion full time. As Peter Steinfels noted in an earlier session in Chicago, being a religion reporter, even in a paper that takes religion seriously, is like being a one-man sports department. It's like being required to cover baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer, tennis, polo, track, gymnastics, wrestling, and lacrosse, and to be terrible knowledgeable about every single one. Try moving from Jews to Muslims to Catholics to Unitarians, Buddhists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Mormons, Hindus, and to be expected on a day-to-day basis to be expert in each of these faiths. Now no one expects a sudden explosion in employment for religion reporters. Probably not an explosion in any sort of employment in our profession. And no one expects a massive increase in the amount of space that newspapers, television stations, or networks devote to religion.

Yet, I do think, where religion is treated as a serious subject that provokes wide interest, the coverage is demonstrably better. The news magazines, for example, particularly Time and Newsweek, have given religion extensive coverage over many, many years. Judging from the outside as a reader looking at space allocations, layout, magazine covers, and the like, religious subjects are treated comprehensively, critically, and fairly, and on, at least, something approaching equality with other subjects.

But it must be said that the churches themselves may actually discourage, rather than encourage, more extensive coverage and treatment of religious subjects. They do this unintentionally when they take offense, not simply at generally unfair coverage, but also at quite normal, less than favorable coverage.

Thus another thesis. The churches cannot expect deference from the press, especially on those occasions when they choose, as they must, to intervene in secular, political controversies. Churches will get whacked from the left when they take a stand against abortion. They will get whacked from the right when they oppose the death penalty or economic injustice. The churches have every right to argue that their entry into these debates is legitimate. But those that call themselves religious do need to exercise some care in the kinds of assertions they make in the secular realm. When religious people make assertions in a dogmatic way about secular political issues, there is a great danger. They need to demonstrate a much clearer link than is often made about why such and such a subject, a secular subject, needs to be spoken of by religious leaders.

Religious people, I think, also need to accept that while faith is sublime, religious institutions are run by human beings, with human ambitions and human flaws. As the novelist James Carroll put it, referring to his own church in an essay for the Nieman Reports, "To Catholics who want to return to the idea of a church mystically exempt from the human condition, the reporting of a simple truth about church affairs can be an affront. But the Catholics who glory in the humanism of the church, understand that its limits and its sins, like their own, can be forgiven. For them, truthful and aggressive reporting of church affairs broadly defined, is not only welcome, but also essential."

Religious people, I think, cannot and should not want the media to exempt church leaders from criticism for the sorts of failures that are routinely criticized and brought to light in other human institutions. There is a flip side to this: that the media should not assume that certain outrages are automatically worse when they are perpetrated by people in religious institutions. It's true that religious leaders should hold themselves to the highest standards, since they preach those standards to the rest of us. Speaking as an individual and not as a journalist, I expect a bit more from people who are nuns and priests and ministers and rabbis. But as journalists, we have to be consistent. If we rightly ask religious people to understand why we treat the churches as human institutions, we should not suddenly raise the standards we apply to them to divine levels when it suits our purposes. We should not automatically believe any charge brought against any cleric or religious person--a lesson that we should draw from what was the terrible treatment of Cardinal Bernadin, who was subject to entirely false accusations.

I'd like to close by reading an excerpt from a forthcoming coming book by the late Christopher Lasch, who I believe lays out a constructive and ultimately very wise approach to religion that might inform us all as journalists, but also as human beings.

"Opponents of religion," Lasch wrote, "argue that it necessarily fosters intolerance, since those who embrace it imagine themselves to be in possession of absolute exclusive truths, irreconcilable with other truth claims.... Cultured despisers of religion suspect that religious tolerance, in short, is a contradiction in terms, a fact seemingly borne out by the long history of religious warfare." But, he goes on, "Instead of discouraging moral inquiry, religious prompting can just as easily stimulate it by calling attention to the dysfunction between verbal profession and practice, by insisting that a profound observation of prescribed rituals is not enough to ensure salvation, and by encouraging believers at every step to question their own motives."

He concludes, "Far from putting doubts and anxieties to rest, religion often has the effect of intensifying them. It judges those who profess the faith more harshly than it judges unbelievers ....If it is ultimately forgiving of human weakness and folly, it is not because it ignores them or attributes them exclusively to unbelievers. For those who take religion seriously, belief is a burden, not a self-righteous claim to some privileged moral status. Self-righteousness, indeed, may well be more prevalent among skeptics than among believers. The spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion. Because a secular society does not grasp the need for such a discipline, it misunderstands the nature of religion to console, but first of all, to challenge and to confront."

To console, but also and above all, to challenge and confront. I think that is not only a good definition of religion's role and purpose in our lives but I also think it's a very good definition of the journalist's task. And so, I'd like to suggest that in the end perhaps journalism and religion have much more in common than any of us might realize. Tim Russert: Thank you E.J. I'm in my third year as moderator of "Meet the Press." I learned early on, be very careful when you try to insert religion into a program. E.J. Dionne mentioned my passion for the Buffalo Bills. I was able to convince my employers at NBC that it was in their interest for me to bring "Meet the Press" to the Super Bowl the day the Buffalo Bills were playing the Dallas Cowboys. At the end of all the interviews, the director said in my ear, you have fifteen seconds to fill. So I looked in the camera and said, "Well, now it's in God's hands and God is good and God is just. Please God, one time, go Bills." As I walked off the set, my colleague, Tom Brokaw, said, "You can't pray on the air." [laughter] And I said, "I just did." [laughter] He said, "You Irish Catholics are shameless." I said, "You'll see, Brokaw." And so after the Cowboys squeaked by, 52 to 17, 1 moped back to the hotel and there at the corner bar was Brokaw, and he said, "Well, I guess God's a Southern Baptist." [laughter]

I'll begin with John Dart. John Darb: With the number of references that were made to "Bridging the Gap," I want to give a brief summary. It was done in 1992-93 at Vanderbilt, while Jimmy Allen and I were visiting professional scholars there. It was based on a survey, first, of Catholic and Protestant clergy and religion writers and newspaper editors; second, on an extensive review of scholarly studies and periodical literature on the subject; third, on more than fifty interviews with representative people in journalism and religion; and, fourth, on our own experiences.

The findings and conclusions: a high percentage of clergy felt that religion news is biased and unfairly negative, while newspaper editors and religion news specialists strongly deny such is the case. The percentage of clergy who were unhappy was high, even those who identify themselves as mainline clergy.

We [Dart/Allen Report] feel that religion news suffers from too many mistakes and mischaracterizations, and too many pertinent religious elements in stories are missed or avoided. Religion often, though not always, is a weak spot in the overall news package presented to most viewers and readers. We feel that the weaknesses stem not from overt bias, but primarily from a lack of knowledge of the subject, a deficiency that handicaps most news people from doing a fully professional job. If there are professionals on this beat, they will do a decent job. When bias does show up, it's most likely to be on public, perhaps clerical issues, writs by religious bodies.

Another finding is contrary to a common assumption in churches and religious circles: that the news media coverage is bad because of widespread unbelief. We feel that the premise is vastly overstated. The Lichter/Rothman report in 1980 was only of journalists, about 250 in New York and Washington, with the major broadcast and print outfits. I think that was true, as far as it went, but it is often misquoted as representing journalists nationwide. Our survey was nationwide. Newspaper editors in our survey, 35 percent or so, said religion was very important to them. A similar survey, done about the s