John Allen has a very good piece in the National Catholic Reporter this morning entitled Lessons to learn from the papal trip He hits on a great many topics but he really hits on the reporting of religious news. A sort of ok where do we go from here!!! This is a topic I talked about a good bit. My comments will be in red:
Of course, being pope is not a popularity contest, and Benedict didn't come to America to boost his poll numbers. His fundamental task is to bear witness to the faith, which he did in spades. His capacity to draw rave reviews while doing so is, nevertheless, impressive.
That said, it's worth reflecting for a moment on how easily things might not have turned out this way. Recent experience suggests that discussions of the Catholic church, and of religion generally, in the media and in the public square don't always have such a happy ending.
Indeed, the enterprise of church communications faces a daunting series of challenges. While the pope's trip was an exception to how these dynamics often play out, it didn't make them go away. If we don't learn the lessons of the trip, there's every reason to believe that soon we'll be back to business as usual.
Those challenges fall both on the side of the press and the side of the church -- and since I inhabit both worlds, I'll say a brief word about each.
With regard to the press, the problem is not bias against Catholicism or religion, although one can find isolated cases. The real problem is that religion is not taken seriously as a news beat, which means that it does not draw the same systematic, daily coverage as politics, finance, sports and even entertainment. The secular press covers big religious events, in addition to controversy or scandal, but often ignores the daily warp and woof of religious life.
Ok let me say I do think there is in part a bias Against Religon is some quarters. I am not so sure it is isolated. I saw that as to how people of faith were reported on as to the Huckabee Presidential race. Think back to such things as the Vatican Statement on what is a Church, the International Theological Commisions report on what happens to unbaptized Children, the Pope's off the Cuff statements on Hell he made last year. The media largely went for the misleading headlines. I got to think they knew better
Here's a quick way of making the point. Consider the following three questions:
If there's a Democratic primary Tuesday night, would you expect a story in Wednesday's paper?
If there's a college football game Saturday, would you expect a write-up in Sunday's sports section?
Do you instinctively turn to Monday's paper for coverage of what happened in places of worship over the weekend?
The usual answers to those questions -- "yes," "yes," and "no" -- speak volumes what counts as news in the mainstream press. (This is a sweeping generalization to which there are many notable exceptions -- but precisely as a generalization, I think it holds up.)
As a result, coverage of religion is often episodic, random, and superficial. To be clear, it's not that the reporting is excessively negative. On the contrary, critical digs on religious subjects are just as infrequent, probably more so, than "good news" stories. In either case, we often get the individual story right, but miss the context in which that story ought to be located.
I would agree with that
One classic example is coverage of the sexual abuse crisis during 2002, when it dominated national headlines. That focus was entirely appropriate -- it was a classic case of the press playing its traditional, and critically important, watchdog role. Yet there was no equivalent attention to the fact that in the same year: 2.7 million children were educated in Catholic schools in the United States, a disproportionate share of them in inner-city areas abandoned by other institutions; 10 million Americans were given assistance by Catholic Charities, many of them low-income women and children; Catholic hospitals provided $2.8 billion in uncompensated charitable care, once again much of it directed to low-income women and children.
Anyone wanting to tell the whole story of the Catholic church's track record with regard to the welfare of children would have had these points in the mix. The fact that it generally wasn't, in my experience, is not due to anti-Catholic bias, but rather because routine religious life often flies below the media radar.
On the side of the church, our communications capacity is often hobbled by at least three factors.
First, we sometimes speak an insider's Catholic argot that is difficult for the outside world to understand. As Benedict XVI has repeatedly observed, the church is a culture unto itself, with its own language, history, and psychology. All of that may be second nature to those who move within the culture, but it has to be translated for people on the outside.
He has a point here. This is especially true as to the Catholic Church but this also can be applied to other religious groups. Perhaps the media should go after people that have degrees and Knowledge in these subjects and perhaps have journalism as a minor.
In Brooklyn, I described a moment during CNN's coverage of the papal Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral when I caught myself using words such as "dicastery" and "ecclesiology," and realized that I had just left 99 percent of our audience behind.
Second, the church sometimes fails to make even a basic level of commitment to communications. In Rome, for example, the Vatican Press Office closes each day at 3:00 p.m. -- God help a reporter if a story breaks at 3:30 p.m.! Under John Paul II, the Vatican spent millions building a state-of-the-art center for press conferences, which is utilized maybe two or three times a month. The Vatican's daily news bulletin is simply plunked down on a counter in the Press Office -- the Vatican spokesperson does not come out of his office to take questions, to do some basic rumor control and to provide context for understanding the day's developments, which the spokesperson for any other major global institution would do as a matter of course. One can often find similar patterns at lower levels.
Amen Amen Amen!!!!!!!!. Good grief I could go on for days about this. What is not helpful is often the Vatican will release some of it most important and controversial documents on a Friday!!! We deal with days of misleading headlines and especially the Sunday Paper and the Vatican Press Office is closed!! It is the damnedest thing I have seen. It seems all so Italian inefficient.
(By the way, this is not because spokespersons for the Vatican are lazy or incompetent. On the contrary, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who held the job under John Paul II, and now Fr. Federico Lombardi, are talented professionals who understand the dynamics of the modern media, and are very decent men. The problem is structural and cultural, not personal.)
Third, spokespersons and leaders in the church still too often come off as defensive and closed. In a famous 1984 address, John Paul II said that the church should be a "house of glass," so that everyone can look in from the outside and see what's going on. That implies a level of transparency and readiness to respond to public curiosity that, alas, one doesn't always find in practice.
More at at his link. Good stuff.
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