Spiritual News

Religion and the News

The impact of Greg Burke, journalist-turned Vatican spokesman, reflects a much more general recognition by key religious faiths and institutions in the twenty-first century of the central role which communication plays today. The study of the news process with regard to developments in the world of religion is important because the public, religious clerics, and governmental decision-makers are dependent on the media in order to glean accurate information. Clearly, errors can occur further down the line, so that even if the news is accurate of the initial stage of information, policy will fail. By corollary, if the information initially is inaccurate, biased, or incomplete at the outset, it will certainly lead to errors in judgements and policy decisions. This makes a book analysing different aspects of religion newsgathering—in different media forms, in different regions of the world—and their influence on religion, as well as the media’s role as a lobby, to be of value. Religion news has many similarities to other categories of news reporting. These include news values, audience interest, specialist reporters, and news sources. But unlike other categories of news, religion news has its own special characteristics as a news theme because it is not based solely on the rational. It draws on the spiritual. How is the infinite, the spirit communicable? So, unlike other categories of news reporting, religion reporting is locked in an unresolved dilemma: News reporters require objectivity, rationality, and therefore fail to broach the question of the fabric of belief—although it is true that much religion news is concerned with day-to-day decisions of religious leaders and religious institutions, thereby comprising rational content.

The second half of the twentieth century showed a trend in Western countries for appointing specialist religion reporters—even if in some cases in the past these were ex-church figures rather than professional journalists who moved from general reporting to become specialist religion reporters. And, undoubtedly, religion news has become a bigger story because the world is more compact and has become a wired global village as major religion stories like 9/11 get broadcast around the world.

Another development has been a shift in some Western countries, including the United States, towards religious themes about spirituality and values and away from religious institutions (Vultee, Craft, & Velker, 2010). It reflects the individual’s quest and longing for tracing his or her roots and origin, and a desire to control personal destiny. Partly it reflects that the printed newspaper lost its role to broadcasting as a source of breaking news. Against this development, the printed press has gone more for feature writing, including religion feature writing like faith and belief. The move towards faith and belief was reflected, for example, in the Dallas Morning News which at one stage in the closing years of the twentieth century had as many as eight religion reporters and staff, who also prepared a six-page section on religion (Willey, 2008). The move towards spirituality and values in religion reporting gained impetus in the age of Internet and social networks, characterised by its interactive, and anti-hierarchical, nature.

Yet, it is difficult to gauge precisely audience interest in religion news. In Western countries, emptying church pews—not only in Europe but also in the United States—are a clue to a decline in religion interest. By contrast, the growth of different branches of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism, and Pentecostalism, in Latin America, Africa and Asia, are clues to greater audience interest in religion. As the media in developing countries grow, so do the news coverage—including interest in religion news. Academic researchers underestimate the level of interest in religion and news reporting outside the West. Partly, this book attempts to shed light on religion reporting beyond the United States, the focus of much of the research about religion and the media.

Religion news coverage may have declined in quantity in the traditional media in some Western countries partly as the print industry faces major challenges owing to the falling newspaper circulations and competition with the electronic media, which provide breaking news much faster. Most of the religion specialists in Western countries, including the United States, work in the print media, with few in television, given both that typical television newsrooms have fewer journalists, including specialist journalists, than some of the larger papers and that there are far more newspapers than television stations with news-gathering operations. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the aftermath of massive cuts in journalistic personnel in the print media, among the first to face cuts was religion specialism.

Research on Religion News

Much of the research on news reporting and religion has focused on the United States and reflects a number of approaches. Hoover (1998), Marshall, Gilbert, and Ahmanson (2009), and Underwood (2008) analysed contemporary religion coverage in the US media. Buddenbaum and Mason (2000), Schultze (2003), and Sweet (1993) offer a historical approach to the coverage of religion by the US press. Silk (1995) and Winston (2012) provide a descriptive approach in surveying the US media, while Badaracco (2005) offers a dialogue between academicians and practitioners.

Research has also appeared about news and religion elsewhere. Hjarvard and Lovheim (2012), and Sumiala-Seppanen, Lundby, and Salokangas (2006) each examined religion reporting in Scandinavia; Knott, Poole, and Tairu religion reporting in Britain (2013), and Cohen religion reporting in Israel (2012). Mitchell and Gower conducted a dialogue between religion journalists and clerics (2012) in Britain.

Not a little focuses on a ‘divide’ between journalists and clerics, with the latter claiming that the media are anti-religious. Partly the perceived anti-religiousness of the media is due to the propensity of news values to focus, among others, upon conflict and social breakdown. Quite a bit of research has sought to explain the perceived media–religion divide through such structural questions like the knowledge level about religion, or religious identity itself, of the journalist rather than penetrate the construction of religious reality itself. The online review Religion in the News critiques religion coverage, mostly in the United States. The 1990s featured discussions in the professional literature in the United States like an entire issue of Nieman Reports entitled ‘God in The Newsroom’; a study on religion coverage by the Freedom Forum: Bridging the Gap (Dart & Allen, 1993), and occasional articles discussing religion coverage appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, The Quill, and Washington Journalism Review. Two primers towards advancing religion writing appeared (Dart, 1995; Buddenbaum, 1998). But like Underwood, Silk argues that journalists have religious roots—even if this does not necessarily find expression in the coverage itself.

Overview of Spiritual News

Spiritual News: Reporting Religion Around the World traces religion news through its various stages of production, and its effects and impact. Necessarily eclectic, the book’s contributors provide a variety of approaches—theoretical, empirical, and historical. With its comparative and international orientation, the book throws light upon a variety of faith traditions and how these are reported in the media. Indeed, one of the book’s goals is to go beyond the United States—which is much of the focus of existing media and religion research—to other regions and countries.

The editor acknowledges the enthusiasm and encouragement throughout the project from Mary Savigar, and Kathryn Harrison of Peter Lang.

In a tour d’horizon, Stewart Hoover—examining trends, present and future, in religion coverage—argues that it is not so much the form or content of religion that is changing but rather the mediation and the contexts of circulation. With the capacity for new channels, voices, and practices increasingly being interactive, entirely new forms of religious and spiritual interaction can take place, across a range of scales, from national and global media to very local and micro-media. New channels and sources of religion news, the author argues, are, therefore, challenging the traditional structure of religion coverage.

Another clue to the changing nature of religion news is its international dimension. Far from the days of the nineteenth century when religious news comprised little more than local church news, it has, as Joyce Smith argues, taken an international leap, including terrorism and conflict in the name of religion. This raised the need for foreign reporters to not only have knowledge of politics, foreign affairs, and economics but also of religion. Globalisation is today as true in religion news as in other categories of news—joining distant parts of the globe together through satellite and Internet and enabling people to follow distant religious events.