Why can't religion get good press?

A newspaper editor would never send a reporter who doesn't understand football to cover a football game. So why do inadequately trained reporters cover religion? Maybe its time for the television and print media to undergo a religious revival.

It seems that almost everyone is complaining about the quality of news-media coverage of religion. Catholic bishops complain about sensationalism in stories about priest pedophilia; Evangelical Christians complain that they are stereotyped by the media; religious leaders complain that the media don't take religion seriously; Norman Lear charges that the media don't understand spirituality; the press ombudsman at the Washington Post bemoans the state of reporting about religion; and the White House complains that the media trivialized the first lady's call for a public debate about values and the "politics of meaning."

Some of these complaints charge media bias against particular religions or against religion in general. Some say that the media don't understand religion and that religious leaders don't understand the media. Others complain that religion coverage suffers simply because reporters and editors don't do what they were trained to do - or should have been trained to do - as professional journalists.

"There is very, very little difference among Catholics, mainline Protestants, and fundamentalist Protestants in their view about how the media functions," says John Seigenthaler, former editorial director of USA Today and director of a project on media coverage of religion with the Freedom Forum, a foundation that conducts research on the media. "They all think the media is unfair to religion generally - and specifically unfair to their denomination."

How should we sort out all of these charges and countercharges? How bad is media coverage of religion? How does media coverage of religion compare with coverage of other areas? How much is bias a factor? The best way to answer all of these questions is to look first at the expectations and views of the major players involved - religious leaders, reporters, editors, and readers - and to look at the amount, topics, and quality of media coverage itself.

Religious leaders offer perhaps the broadest criticism of media coverage. Archbishop William Keeler of Baltimore, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, charges that media coverage of the Catholic Church is shallow and "preprogrammed" toward divisive issues. Reporters tend to interview people with extreme views on either side of the spectrum, he says.

When Pope John Paul II came to Denver for World Youth Day in 1993, Keeler says, the media focused on Catholic dissent on a few issues while missing the broader story of the pope's message. Similarly, a study conducted for the Knights of Columbus several years ago found that most coverage of the Catholic Church from the 1950s through the 1980s focused on the theme of dissent versus church authority.

Get my good side, please

Reporters who cover religion take a different view. There is a "culture clash" between reporters and religious leaders, according to a report from the Freedom Forum written by John Dart, a veteran religion writer for the Los Angeles Times, and the Rev. Jimmy Allan, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and founder of ACTS, a Southern Baptist cable network.

Reporters say their job is to "inform, not inspire," the report says. Reporters also say that religious leaders, like politicians, business leaders, labor leaders, entertainers, and sports figures, want to be seen in the best possible light. Jim Franklin, the veteran religion writer for the Boston Globe, says religious leaders have "unrealistic expectations" if they expect the secular media to advance their religious views.

But focusing too closely on the culture clash between reporters and religious leaders distracts from the focus on editors, who are the real decision makers when it comes to coverage. The Dart-Allan report found that there are only 67 full-time religion writers at daily newspapers in the U.S. and only one full-time religion reporter on a major television network. Editors decide who will cover religion, whether that person will cover it full-time, what kind of religion stories will be covered, and how they will be played.

Ralph Whitehead, professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, spoke at a conference on religion and the media sponsored by Commonweal magazine and FADICA (Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities). He complained that reporters can afford to be religiously illiterate because there is no professional penalty. It is editors - from the top management levels to the assignment and copy desks - who allow that to happen.

The area where religious leaders and those who cover religion are in the most agreement is that the amount of media coverage of religion is grossly disproportionate to religion's role in society. More than 90 percent of people in the U.S. believe in God; more than two thirds belong to a formal religion; 40 percent go to church in a given week; and religious institutions provide billions of dollars a year worth of education, health care, social services, and volunteer work. Yet it's possible to read a newspaper or watch a television news program for days on end without seeing a story about religion.

Run for coverage

But if there's widespread agreement that there should be more coverage of religion, there is far less agreement about what that coverage should look like. There are three major divisions of types of coverage that affect religion:

* Hard versus soft news. Religion is both public and private; it involves private beliefs that shape people's public actions. One way that editors and reporters deal with the private side of religion is to emphasize feature stories with a softer news focus than a hard-news lead, such as "Pope John Paul II said today..." Features are fine, but they're often lazy. The classic is the "me and Jesus" story about a prominent local personality who has been born again. These stories don't come after, say, a decade of changed living as a result of a religious experience. They come in the full blush of born-again fervor.

But given the tremendous percentage of believers, it takes a great deal to justify focusing on one over another. Associated Press recently ran a story about a woman in Germany who went back to church after she survived being struck by lightning. Who wouldn't? But it isn't a story until the woman's experience involves something more substantive. The Washington Post recently ran a front-page story about older women joining orders of contemplative sisters. It was interesting enough, but it was the classic example of the exotic religion story that wasn't terribly relevant to the lives of most people, Catholic or not, in the Post's readership area.

In one city, readers have an unusual choice between two styles of religion coverage. Kate De Smet, who covered religion for the Detroit News for more than a decade, notes that her paper and the competing Detroit Free Press had different philosophies of religion coverage.

The Free Press, she says, spent more time on longer, in-depth articles. "I did more hard-news stories," De Smet says. "One day I'd write about a pedophile priest in Detroit, and the next day I'd write about an apparition at a Greek Orthodox Church in the suburbs."

* Local versus national and international news. Editors also seem obsessed with the notion that religion coverage should be primarily local. People obviously want to know what's going on in their own backyards, but not at the expense of more important coverage.

* Institutional versus noninstitutional religious news. More and more, religious news does not necessarily involve institutions. Sociologists speak of the "restructuring of American religion" in which spiritual interest remains high while commitment to religious institutions is on the decline. There's likely to be more interest, for example, in a New York Times story about the popularity of those little books of meditations than on a story about a meeting of the local council of churches.

"We need to see religion as something that can be described in more general, less parochial terms," says Stewart Hoover, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It persists as an authentic and vital component of the contemporary scene, expressing itself in social, cultural, and political spheres. It is a new kind of religiosity, no longer defined by the traditional institutional boundaries. It is now more diffuse, but no less important."

Once a religion story gets in the paper or on the air, how good is it going to be? The Dart-Allan study concludes that religion coverage is "sometimes superficial and often wrong." The study says that the low number of trained, full-time religion writers is a major factor. While the media treat religion as a beat - an area of specialized coverage like business, education, or science - there aren't that many specialists. The study concludes that coverage is much better when it comes from an experienced religion reporter.

"It makes no sense, there's just no logic in the fact that the media will send someone to cover a religion story who they know full well is not adequately trained," says Richard W. Daw, director of the Office of Promotion and Publishing Services at the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC).

"I can't think of another field where they would do that. If you sent someone to cover a football game who didn't understand football, they'd think you'd lost your mind. With religion, they think it's an advantage." Daw, who has served as USCC Secretary of Communication as well as director of Catholic News Service, previously ran several Associated Press bureaus.

Hoover complains that the low number of trained religion reporters leads to "a lot of reinventing the wheel" in religion coverage. He says, "Journalism needs to develop an institutional memory regarding religion."

Who's driving?

A related issue is the tendency for newspapers today to be more editor-driven than in the past. Jim Franklin notes editors at the Boston Globe are more likely to think up story ideas and assign them to reporters than to let reporters develop their own stories.

Some journalists argue that the religion beat is too complicated to cover. Peter Steinfels, the religion reporter for the New York Times and a former editor of Commonweal, has written that a single reporter is expected to know about a score of Christian denominations, at least four branches of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, goddess worship, and Native American rites. Steinfels' description of the breadth of what a religion reporter has to cover is accurate.

But the media expect that kind of range from other reporters. Reporters who cover the White House, governors, legislatures, and courts are expected to be able to write about the broad range of issues they come across - foreign policy, economics, poverty, crime, civil rights, the environment, science, and education. And there's as much diversity within other beats - business, science, environment - as there is within religion.

Joann Byrd, the press ombudsman for the Washington Post, believes that the "simplistic Journalism 101 answer" to poor religion coverage is, "Go back through a story and challenge every sentence for its factual basis." Her comments follow an article in the Post that describe followers of television evangelists as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command."

In a subsequent apology, the Post acknowledged that there was no basis for the statement. Byrd says that while reporters are sensitive to stereotypes about race, gender, and age, they aren't as sensitive toward various religious groups. "Journalists need to get serious about their presumptions regarding any group whose backgrounds and beliefs and backyard fences they do not share."

Some critics explain the poor quality of much religion coverage by saying that reporters and editors are biased against either religion in general or certain types of religion, such as Catholicism or Evangelical Protestantism. These critics often cite a 1980 study conducted by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter that found that editors at ten major news operations were far less religious than the general public.

The Dart-Allan study came to a different conclusion. It found that those who cover religion regularly are actually more likely than the general population to be religious. Seigenthaler says, "It is important for the people of this country to come to understand that there are as many people of faith in this industry as there are in others - and to know that people who are assigned to cover religion are indeed more often people of faith than those outside."

Don't bias anytime

After interviews with journalists, Stewart Hoover of the University of Colorado found that even many who are personally devout don't necessarily know how to cover religion. He says that "some of the participants in this process might be very religious, personally. What they are not able to do is to see religion as a valuable element of news output." Hoover also rejects the argument that "no level of professionalism can overcome the fundamental misunderstanding with which journalists view religion."

Again, it's important to compare coverage of religion with coverage of other issues. Do we expect a Democratic reporter to be able to cover a Republican politician fairly? Do we expect a reporter who belongs to a union to cover business fairly?

Do we expect reporters who have personal opinions about any issues they cover - from abortion to elections to the baseball strike - to put their personal views aside and do a professional job covering the issues? The answer to all of these questions is yes, and we should expect the same of those who cover religion.

It would be impossible to say that bias is never a factor. But Seigenthaler and Daw agree that ignorance is much more of a factor in the poor quality of religion coverage. And some stories work against the bias theory. No publicist could have asked for better coverage than the Catholic Church received when the new catechism became a multimillion-copy best-seller. No publicist could have created better coverage.

What do readers and viewers of the news media want in religion coverage? Hoover has conducted two major public-opinion surveys on religion coverage since 1989. The first was conducted for Religious News Service; the second, published in 1994, was conducted for the Freedom Forum as a follow-up to the Dart-Allan study. Hoover's 1989 study found that Catholics and Pentecostals were most likely to want the media to portray their groups in a less stereotyped way.

At the same time, Hoover says, all groups "expressed a strong interest in general religion coverage, and knew not to expect newspapers or television to become forums for 'faith' or 'inspiration' so much as for information. And that was what was almost universally wanted - information.

"Most of them described their own sources of information about religion as flowing in two ways. For information about their own group or its tradition, they rely on clergy or lay leaders. However, for information about religion in general, or about other groups, they turn overwhelmingly to the secular media and want to see more of it presented there."

Give the people what they want

These findings show readers at odds with both religious leaders and journalists. Readers want information, not inspiration, from the secular media, but they feel they aren't getting it.

A Gallup survey conducted for Hoover's latest study found that newspaper readers rank religion behind education, health, business, and food, but ahead of entertainment, sports, the arts, and personal advice, in terms of interest levels. But they are less satisfied with the quality of coverage of religion than of any of those other topics.

Both the 1989 and 1994 surveys found that readers want broad coverage of religion and that editors who primarily want local coverage aren't giving their readers what they want. The 1994 survey asked respondents to use a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 meaning "very important," to rank the type of stories they wanted to see. Positions and pronouncements ranked first with an average score of 4.77. It was followed by ethical and social issues (4.63), local church news and announcements (4.34), local religious issues (4.29), religion in American politics (4.26), foreign or international policies (4.25), national issues and controversies (4.22), and national groups and denominations (4.11). Faith experiences ranked near the bottom (3.83).

What conclusions, then, can we reach about media coverage of religion? There isn't enough of it; there aren't enough trained, full-time religion reporters; editors are responsible for most of the problems; and ignorance is a bigger problem than bias. The professional standards of journalism require it to treat religion the same way it treats other beats, and it doesn't.

Two other thoughts are in order. First, the press is not the only institution that is uneasy about dealing with religion. Public schools begin by wanting to protect students from religious proselytization in the classroom and wind up afraid to even mention Christmas or Hanukkah.

The Supreme Court can't enunciate a common-sense standard to describe when government action violates the First Amendment ban on religious establishment and guarantee of religious freedom. Politicians and religious leaders alike stumble over the proper ground rules for bringing religious convictions into the public arena. So the news media are not unique in their handling of religion.

But there's a cost. Hoover uses media coverage of the deadly clash between government forces and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas in 1993 as an example. He argues that neither the media nor government agencies - the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms - understood the religious beliefs that were important to Branch Davidian leader David Koresh.

That lack of understanding may have contributed to the conflict that caused the deaths of dozens of people. Had either the media or the government understood religion better, those deaths might well have been avoided.

Jim Castelli, a freelance writer in Washington, D.C. whose seventh book, How I Pray, was released last year by Ballantine Books.