WASHINGTON (ABP) — Evangelicals want secular journalists to be more accurate in their portrayals of conservative Protestants, and journalists in turn want respect from evangelical leaders and an understanding that the news business is not the promotion business.
That was the bottom line of a recent dialogue in Washington between conservative evangelical leaders and some of the national reporters who cover them.
Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Richard Ostling of the Associated Press, conservative radio talk-show host Janet Parshall, ABC News producer Jeanmarie Condon and Jeffery Sheler of U.S. News & World Report participated in the discussion.
Condon agreed journalists have a responsibility to be accurate, just as evangelicals have the responsibility to “keep the dialogue open” between the two entities.
“We live in a world where religion does inform much of what people think and much of what they do,” she said. “And for a very long time, the broadcast media, at least, ignored that. I know that [late ABC News anchor] Peter [Jennings] believed — and I believe — that you cannot cover what's happening in the world without paying very careful attention to what is motivating people spiritually and religiously.”
When it comes to covering evangelicals, the panelists agreed, getting it right starts with recognizing the nuances within the faith. Evangelicals in particular tend to be stereotyped, Sheler said, so journalists must force themselves seriously and studiously to educate themselves about the group.
A simple way to do that, Land said, is to learn correct vocabulary.
“It would help if they got the term right,” Land said. “It's sort of a dead giveaway that they don't know what they are talking about when they don't know that [all] evangelicals are not evangelists. Billy Graham is an evangelical and also an evangelist. I'm an evangelical, but I'm not an evangelist.”
Parshall too agreed that accuracy in religion reporting takes careful thought — and that often doesn't happen in the deadline-driven world of the modern news cycle. Some media outlets' propensity to go for “bombastic” news instead of nuanced news isn't helpful, she said.
“There is a kind of ignorance of who we are,” Parshall said. “It's thinking they know who we are without talking to us and finding out what we really believe. When fundamentalist Islam is compared to fundamentalist Christianity, we've got some issues.”
For her part, Condon explained that working in broadcast news means meeting time constraints while struggling to find well-spoken representatives who may have to represent dozens of differing opinions on one topic, like the interpretation of a certain part of Scripture.
“In our job, can you ever present a perfectly balanced report when you're talking about religious beliefs?” she asked. “You would have to have 2 million voices in your documentary. It's sort of like an ink blot test — everyone sees it a little bit differently.”
Condon said what she can do is feature some of the most thoughtful voices to represent some of the main points of a particular religious view and then hope they provoke dialogue. And she assured Parshall, who said TV was completely ratings-driven, that her work at ABC was not solely about ratings, although they are important.
“We've done a lot of documentaries now, and believe me we could have got a lot higher ratings if we did something on the secret life of Paris Hilton,” Condon said. “A lot of us … really are trying to get it right.”
Still, Land said when it comes to the subject of religion, he doesn't think any electronic or print media publications do as good a job as they should. Besides the lack of thoughtful consideration of religious nuances, he said, another reason he believes secular news outlets aren't up to par is the lack of socially and politically conservative people in most newsrooms.
There is an “extreme dearth in the electronic and print media at the national level of people who are serious evangelicals,” he said, claiming that 24 percent of the population is evangelical but that evangelicals don't comprise 24 percent of any newsroom.
In the absence of evangelicals in the media, Land believes “there is a place for advocacy journalism,” a term for media outlets that push a political, ideological or theological agenda through the way they report the news.
Sheler, however, disagreed with Land's support of advocacy journalism. If there is a liberal media bias, he said, the answer is not to start an organization as a conservative answer to that bias.
“Expanding the marketplace of ideas is not accomplished by [fracturing] the media into little niches of ideology,” he said. “My guess is that there aren't a lot of non-Christians who tune in to Christian media. The point is that if we're going to have advocacy journalism … there's no marketplace anymore. It's just 'whose side are you on?'”
And traditional, balanced media does not require one to mislead on faith issues, Sheler said.
“In order to be true to my faith, it does not require me to be false about a person of another faith,” Sheler said. “When you're talking about religion in the secular media, you're attempting to broaden people's understanding, including Christians, about what people of faith really do believe.”
Ostling said that, while religion is a difficult subject to deal with in the traditional news media, there is a difference between news and propaganda. He has nothing against propagation of the faith, Ostling said, as it is something churches should do — but not expect journalists to do it for them.
“What news reporters do is distinct from [what churches do in relation to religion],” he said. “It's a different type of job that sometimes involves unhappy and unpleasant things … that need to be reported.”
The best tactic, Ostling continued, is to use the Golden Rule of journalism: “Instead of do unto others, I see our obligation as write unto others.” Basic fairness, he called it.
The dialogue came during the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, an association of evangelical religion professors, in Washington.
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