All Blog Posts from Public Eye

This week, the Associated Press reported that a group called International Bible Society-Send the Light is "planning on spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to distribute Bibles with 11 newspapers during 2007 and 2008. New Testaments would be packaged in pouches on the outside of newspapers, much like soap or other sample products."

There are those who seem to support this idea: Tom Gross writes "[e]verything from detergent to DVDs are packaged with the Sunday newspaper. So why not Bibles?" But there are critics, too, who wrote into Fort Worth Star-Telegram reader advocate David House with their complaints.

Some said they did not want to be subject to proselytizing; others said the Bible should not be commercialized. And then there were those Christians who didn't like the idea of a Bible thrown onto a lawn and, potentially, thrown away by the disinterested.

The paper is going forward with the plan, assuming International Bible Society-Send the Light is able to raise the necessary funds. But it is in a difficult position: They're getting heat for accepting the request – which didn't, after all, violate their advertising policies – and they would have gotten even more had they turned it down, making this a literal case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

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As much as I hate ‘trend’ stories -- you know, the “here is a suburban housewife who is part of the growing number of women …. Yadda yadda” story or the “Yes, this high school student is (a) drinking more, (b) drinking less, (c) being more promiscuous or (d) being more promiscuous … and he’s not alone” story – I think I may have spotted one of my own in recent days. It was reassuring to see two separate mainstream media pieces this week that took the extra step of infiltrating and *explaining* the Islamic militant mindset.

In the days after 9/11, when we asked “Why do they hate us?” it was impolitic to go much further than “because they hate freedom.” To actually dig into the details and extremist ideology was not seen as explaining the behavior as much as it was excusing the behavior.

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Conservatives = God-fearing believers. Liberals = godless "secularists." OK, maybe that's an oversimplification. But that's the conventional wisdom put forth by the mainstream media, and there's got to be something to it, right?

Not much, says Paul Waldman. His group, the liberal Media Matters For America, has put out a study that claims that conservative religious leaders get far more play in the media than their liberal counterparts – despite the fact that, in America, churchgoers may be a lot more heterogeneous than many people think.

"When you look at those people who are asked to kind of represent what religious opinion is, the conservatives show up a lot more often than the progressives," Waldman told "On The Media." "And in our opinion, that gives a kind of a skewed picture of what the state of American religion is."

Reporters are natrually attracted to extreme religious figureheads like the recently-deceased Jerry Falwell, despite the fact that, as Timothy Noah points out, Falwell wasn't really a significant figure in evangelical circles past the late 1980s. (Noah writes that "[f]or 20 years, evangelicals have chided the mainstream media for treating Falwell's ghastly pronouncements as news.") Right-leaning evangelicals are a powerful force, of course; they were, as even a casual political observer knows, a large part of the reason that George W. Bush has been elected twice. But in focusing on religious conservatives and evangelicals on the right, the media may have paid insufficient attention to other people of faith and their politics.

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The Skinny Today: The LA Times looks at the phenomenon of finding religion in odd places ... like grilled cheese. Plus, another dire assessment on Iraq, Condi rejects recommendations of help from Syria and Iran on Iraq and finally, some good news about breast cancer. The Skinny is Hillary Profita's take on the top of the news and the best of the Web.

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Last night, there were two religion-themed specials on television: “The Mystery of Christmas,” an hour-long CBS special from the “48 Hours” team, and “Heaven -- Where Is It? How Do We Get There?,” a two-hour Barbara Walters-hosted special on ABC.



It’s hard not to be skeptical of national reporting on religion. The target audience of religion-themed specials is, in large part, people of faith, and ratings-conscious network executives aren’t looking to alienate that audience by doing anything too controversial. But when trying to deal in a serious way with a topic like religion, which is so sensitive to so many people, controversy isn’t easy to avoid. The result, too often, is that media outlets settle for unserious reporting, the kind that relies on inspirational music and stock montages of streaming clouds but never really poses serious or important questions.



To some extent, the problems of reporting on religion are unavoidable. Serious journalism requires a certain adherence to provable fact, after all, while religious belief is grounded in faith. The two often seem incompatible. “It's practically impossible to cover religion,” says Columbia Journalism Review’s Gal Beckerman, who recently wrote a piece asking why journalists don’t “get” religion. “You're using a form [in reporting] that demands a certain level of basis in fact. And faith is almost the polar opposite – the idea that the test of your belief is how much you're willing to give up the notion that it needs to be based in reality.”

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