Mainstream journalists avoid religion news, blogger says

Mainstream journalists are reluctant to cover religion news, a Poynter Institute blogger reported June 11. That information has implications for RCC members. The council’s mission is to promote faith perspectives in public discourse.

Writing for “Diversity at Work,” Angie Chuang said CNN Producer Eric Marrapodi, writer of the network’s Belief Blog, made that assessment. He maintained that religion was often the untold story behind the day’s biggest news. As one example, he mentioned signs along roads in Plaquemines Parish, La. They said, “Pray for our fishermen,” as the region deals with the growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Reporters often avoid making faith perspectives the primary story subject – even though readers, listeners and viewers have indicated they wanted more religion news, Marrapodi said. Journalists didn’t want to appear biased.

That echoed remarks Terry Mattingly, author of the weekly Scripps-Howard News Service “On Religion” column, made to RCC’s New York Chapter Feb. 16. He told religion communicators that to be effective in their work, needed to understand and work around media biases about faith topics.

In April Mattingly said in his “Get Religion” blog that religion news in the United States was "on life support.” That was because newsrooms had significantly reduced the number “Godbeat” reporters.

Mattingly told Chuang dwindling resources were a real obstacle to adequate reporting about faith. Growing content online had not replaced the enterprising work of knowledgeable beat reporters.

“We’re running out of sites that actually report new information," Mattingly told Chuang. “And we have this tsunami of opinion-based writing coming along. The Internet does opinion really well. It does tiny niche audiences. What it doesn’t do is create broad-based neutral information.”

As a result, Mattingly said, readers don’t see insightful reporting concerning faith. Reporters writing about terrorism, for example, don’t understand the theological and historic roots of Islam’s Sunni-Shiite split. Consequently, their stories don’t address the importance of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb. His philosophy “produces the violent component” of modern-day Islam, including al-Qaeda, Mattingly said.

Instead, he continued, reporters oversimplify Islam in contradictory ways. It is either a “religion of peace,” or a religion in which “fundamentalist Islam” promotes terrorism. But fundamentalism is a Christian, not Islamic, concept.

Chuang, a former newspaper reporter who now teaches at United Methodist-related American University in Washington, said she had talked to many journalists over the years who were religious. They said they felt pressure to be “in the closet” about their faith or religious practices. Otherwise, they feared they wouldn’t be seen as objective enough to cover stories that addressed moral issues.

Poynter Online’s Diversity at Work encourages journalistic storytelling from different perspectives. Chuang is one of at least 12 contributors. She worked as a newspaper reporter for 13 years (The Oregonian, The Hartford Courant and Los Angeles Times). She became an assistant professor of communication at American University in 2007. One of her classes is “Race, Ethnic and Community Reporting.”