Superstition and Fairy Tales - the Stereotype of Religion Still Survives in Newsrooms
By Paritosh Bansal
Chris Lehmann
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Newsrooms have come a long way from the days of cigar-chomping editors who approached religion as superstition and fairy tales, and insisted on sticking to “just the facts,” said Chris Lehmann, feature editor of the New York Magazine, but journalists still struggle with their own suspicions and unconscious assumptions (or what Lehmann termed a residual “H.L. Mencken belief") when it comes to covering religion.
Rod Dreher, editorial page columnist of the Dallas Morning News said a recent study found that one-third of newspaper editors and news directors thought evangelicals and fundamentalists were a “threat to democracy.”
“How do you begin to think in real serious terms about turning matters of philosophy and religion into copy?” Lehmann asked. “That we are here discussing this topic means there is an urgency felt about how we think about religion and how we handle it.
“There is an understanding because religion has invaded our political world in a way that was not imaginable 40 years ago,” he said. “It is a self-conscious actor in our public world.”
Lehmann, Dreher, and Krista Tippett, producer of Speaking of Faith on public radio were panelists at the Western Knight Seminar session called, “Deconstructing the Newsroom Culture: What are our IQ and EQ when it comes to religion and politics?”
Tippett, who brings religious leaders to speak about a range of issues on her radio program, said her approach is to invite religious people “to speak in the vocabulary of their faith.” The results have been heartening, she said, noting listeners get excited about the “language and tone and intelligence” of religious guests.
The lack of access to the media has been a problem for religious leaders, Tippett said. “Up to now, in order to enter the public sphere and be quoted by journalists, religious people have squeezed themselves into political boxes and political modes of discourse, which in fact diminished what they had to say and impoverished our common life.”
She gave the example of human rights, saying it was not a religious concept. “It is not natural even to a Christian perspective; the Bible does not talk about rights.”
But now that religious leaders have taken on the struggle for human rights, for land reform (as in Latin America), or the whole reproductive rights debate, the results have been explosive and divisive.
“What we usually see in the media are the two extremes,” she said. “Religious people in that vast middle, who are not content to be assigned to this extreme position or that extreme position, can really enrich all of our deliberation on issues which are of wide interest.”
Tippett said journalists had shied away from this approach because they think that religious ideas and perspectives are subjective.
“That is true,” she said, but added, “If you are not willing to respect that fact and get close to that subjectivity, you will not get close to how powerful and important this aspect of life is.
“We have accepted subjectivity in many other spheres. Political punditry is not objective and empirical and scientific. Economic analysis and economic forecasting is something we engage in, and it is like predicting the weather.”
“Religion should be in the mix in the same way,” she said. “I think, basically, I am taking religion seriously.”
Lehmann said that although journalists seem to want to know why religion has had such a controversial resurgence in the last decade, they stop short when it comes to addressing some fundamental questions.
“Claims about the way the universe works and the nature of reality and all these things feel way too heady and metaphysical for people who are just trying to meet a deadline and get the facts,” Lehmann said. “It is too harsh to say that [the newsroom] is an anti-intellectual culture, but it is a culture that is distrustful of ideas as social forces.”
Dreher said editors tend to miss the importance of groups that are outside the media elite. Moreover, editors assume that their own secular and liberal stance represents normalcy, failing to see the bias in their approach.
He cited a study conducted by political scientists at the City University of New York as saying, “There is real media spin on the emergence of the secularists within the Democratic Party, and the religious traditionalists within the Republican Party as defining blocks.”
The study found that although “anti-fundamentalist voters” had emerged as important a voting block for the Democratic Party as organized labor, its rise has not been sufficiently documented.
“The study examined coverage in the Washington Post and the New York Times from 1990 and 2000 to see what Americans would have learned from these two agenda-setting newspapers about this development,” he said. “Their answer: Almost nothing.”
There were more articles published in the Times about the influence of the evangelicals in the Republican Party in 1992 alone than were published by both the Times and the Washington Post throughout the decade about the importance of secularists to the Democratic Party, he said citing the study.
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