ACCORDING TO a just-released study by the Center for Media & Public Affairs, the American news media have performed a minor miracle: They have managed to cover religion without actually discussing religious doctrines.
"Media Coverage of Religion in America, 1969-1998," by S. Robert Lichter, Daniel R. Amundson, and Linda S. Lichter, reports: "Overall, we found almost no consideration of theology in the media's coverage of religion. Out of the 3,144 discussions we coded, fully 93 percent contained no spiritual dimension. Further, theological referents were disproportionally connected to non-Christian religions with a small membership in this country."
I've spent 16 years working in a newsroom, so was hardly surprised by this disclosure. Generally, journalists are ignorant of all but the most basic precepts of Christianity and Judaism -- and this ignorance permeates their reporting.
The study did disclose one interesting trend. Among journalists at major news outlets, the share who say they go to church weekly increased from 8 percent in 1980 to 11 percent in 1995. But this is still far below the 37 percent of the public who say they go to church or synagogue at least once a week.
Even among the small minority of the media who are churchgoers, one wonders how many take religion seriously and lead lives shaped by spiritual precepts. In most newsrooms, employment policies increasingly dictate a quest for racial, gender, and sexual-orientation diversity, but your chances of bumping into an Orthodox Jew, a traditional Catholic, a Mormon, or a born-again Christian are comparable to your chances of encountering a rapper at a chamber music recital. On the other hand, the typical newsroom is crawling with devout secularists, ex-Catholics, and nominal Jews.
Coverage of religion from the average newspaper or newsmagazine is like music reviews from the tone-deaf or art criticism by the colorblind.
In 1993, during the Waco standoff, cult leader David Koresh frequently quoted the Book of Revelation. A number of reporters covering the siege wondered where this esoteric work could be found -- demonstrating that their understanding of the New Testament was comparable to their knowledge of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Concerning the religious divide in the State of Israel, stories regularly refer to "ultra-Orthodox Jews," a group the media esteem about as much as evangelicals. An April 14 article in the New York Times concerning military deferrals for yeshiva students had the subhead, "For the ultra-Orthodox, questions about equal obligations." Needless to say, "ultra" is not a term of endearment.
Yet, the coverage makes clear that the media are unaware of the diversity among traditional Jews, including modern Orthodox, yeshiva Orthodox, and Hasidim. All are lumped together according to the principle: You can always tell an "ultra" by his beard. From such reporting, the average reader wouldn't know that most religious Israelis do in fact serve in the military.
Such failures of reporting can be traced to journalists' bias against believers in traditional religion. People whose attitudes and actions are shaped by faith are viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility and contempt.
Believers are portrayed as provincial, fanatical, intolerant, and violence prone -- or, in the words of an infamous 1993 story about the religious right in the Washington Post, "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command." Thus, evangelical Protestants are "fundamentalists," Torah-based Judaism is "ultra-Orthodox," and Catholics loyal to Rome are, well, just plain weird.
By and large, members of the media are militant modernists. They view faith as primitive and the Bible as charming poetry but certainly not anything to be taken seriously. They can no more conceive of basing a moral judgment on a religious principle than of basing an investment decision on the phases of the moon.
However, this bias does not extend to liberal denominations (Reform Judaism, mainline Protestantism, etc.) or to traditional denominations when they take liberal stands. This can result in such amusing schizophrenia as coverage of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops can be either enlightened and compassionate (when they speak out against capital punishment and welfare cuts) or mean-spirited and a threat to the First Amendment (when they oppose abortion and same-sex marriage or promote education vouchers).
This pattern reflects one overriding reality: The media are agenda-driven. Reporters and editors are predominantly liberal, but nowhere more so than on social issues -- abortion, gay rights, pornography, and feminism.
A 1985 New York Times poll of people working in the print media showed 82 percent favored abortion on demand and 89 percent supported gay rights. The same survey found that while readers approved of prayer in the public schools by a margin of 4-to-1, journalists rejected it by a margin of 3-to-1.
Not surprisingly, most members of traditional faith communities tend to be traditional in their political outlook as well. Generally, they oppose abortion, resist the legitimation of homosexual behavior, oppose the full integration of women in the military, favor school prayer, and support the public display of religious symbols.
Journalists are well aware of this. They see traditional religion as a major impediment to advancing their social policies, and this view affects their coverage of the news.
Two stories in the March 30 Boston Globe illustrate the way the media's worldview intrudes on their reporting of religion.
An Associated Press story on a school prayer case before the Supreme Court begins, "Prayer in public schools, for 40 years a divisive and politically charged issue, split the Supreme Court anew as the justices heard arguments yesterday over letting students lead stadium crowds in invocations at high school football games."
Only your average reporter would describe an issue on which upwards of 75 percent of the American people agree as "divisive and politically charged." By the way, you will never see abortion or gay marriage characterized in most newspapers as "divisive and politically charged," even though the public is genuinely divided on the first and overwhelmingly opposed to the second. When the media say an issue is "divisive," they mean it divides majority opinion from their opinion.
The same day, the Globe also covered the endorsement of homosexual marriage by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinical arm of Reform Judaism. The story begins, "Breaking with more than three millennia of tradition, the world's largest organization of rabbis voted overwhelmingly yesterday to support ceremonies, including weddings, for same-sex couples."
The piece somehow neglected to tell us exactly what those traditions are (they include very explicit biblical injunctions against same-sex sex), nor did it mention, even in passing, how much of Jewish law Reform Judaism has rejected since its founding in the 19th century, or how the movement's policies are a reflection more of the liberal ethos than the Torah worldview.
Later, the article notes the development was "denounced by conservative and orthodox Jewish movements." It did not tell readers who objected (probably a bunch of ultra-Orthodox Jews), why they objected (other than the briefest allusion to "biblical teachings"), or what they said -- although it did quote Reform leaders extensively, discuss the evolution of their stand, and cover similar developments among the mainline Protestant churches. The piece was a brilliant job of selective reporting designed to advance one side of a religious controversy.
If the American Humanist Association ran schools of journalism, our coverage of religion could hardly be more biased.
Don Feder is a syndicated columnist who aspires to be an ultra-Orthodox Jew.