It’s nice, now and then, to read an article that totally “gets” what this website has been trying to do for the past 17 years or so. In this case we are talking about a op-ed feature in the Arizona Daily Star, which is in Tucson, that ran with this headline: “The press and anti-Christian bias.”
Don’t let that blunt statement scare you away. This piece wasn’t written by an angry local preacher. Instead, it was written by Renee Schafer Horton, a veteran journalist and community activist who is one of the newspaper’s regular opinion columnists. Click here for her Renee Wrote This weblog.
She was responding to a recent Clemente Lisi post that ran with this headline: “Catholic news outlets reporting on church vandalism when mainstream media won’t.” Here is the overture for Horton’s piece:
In late July, I received an article from GetReligion.org, a blog by former religion reporters who highlight both well-done and poorly executed religion coverage in the media. The article claimed that there was scant national news coverage of vandalism at U.S. Catholic parishes between July 10 and 16.
This destruction included the beheading of a statue of Jesus at a Miami parish, graffiti on a monument to unborn children at a New York parish, defacements of statues of the Virgin Mary in four different states and a man setting fire to a Florida parish on July 11 while a handful of parishioners were inside getting ready for mass.
I thought GetReligion had gotten it wrong. As a former religion reporter, I have a homing pigeon instinct for Godbeat news, and surely, I thought, if nearly a dozen Catholic churches were attacked in a six-day period, I would have heard about it.
Still, I don’t check my digital subscriptions to national papers every day, so I realized I could have missed the coverage. I did a quick internet search to check the accuracy of GetReligion’s claim.
It was correct.
Literally, the only thing that I would correct in that opening is that most of your GetReligionistas are, to varying degrees, still active as religion-beat specialists, to one degree or another — writing as columnists, freelancers or in the church press. This small team does have quite a bit of experience covering religion news (something like a combined 150 years or so).
Anyway, Horton jumped online and found that while there were quite a few reports on the “July attacks on Catholic sites, only seven were by nonreligious (or non-right leaning) media. Of those, most were small outlets located in the coverage area where the attacks occurred.”
Would that have been true if a similar blitz of attacks had taken place “against mosques or synagogues”? Good question.
Does it matter that, as she but it, the major national media responded to this trend with a “sigh”?
Maybe blue-zip-code pros will cover this update from Texas? Headline from The Sun: “Shock pics show how vandals DECAPITATED historic statue of Jesus on church altar.”
Horton’s answer:
The reason national coverage matters is because regional media outlets take cues about news trends from the big guns. When the New York Times or ABC Nightly News invest resources to do deep dives on an issue, smaller outlets pay attention and coverage spreads.
You need to read the whole piece, obviously, including her list of obvious questions that reporters and editors should have been asking after connecting the dots from a few of these attacks.
But let me sign off with another major chunk of Horton’s work to let you know what’s coming.
… Right now, I have the urge to whisper, as I would to someone whose slip is peeking out from under her skirt, “Hey, your bias is showing.”
That prejudice, although likely from ignorance and not malice, can make Christians feel, at best, misunderstood and, at worst, demeaned, dismissed and attacked by the press. …
As someone who spent nearly 20 years in journalism, I can affirm that most journalists are amazing people desperate to serve the public good through reporting accurate, timely news of local and national events. Unfortunately, I can also affirm that many journalists are woefully uninformed of religion in general, and dismissive of Christian people in particular. Neither speaks well of a profession that has long prided itself on objectivity.
So it may be time for a come-to-Jesus meeting about religious bias in the newsroom. I’m sure Catholics would be happy to provide the holy water.
Let us attend.