Panelists: Evangelicals can help with their portrayal in news
- Nov 22, 2006 - comment
Not only do the news media need to change in order to report more accurately and justly on evangelical Christians, but evangelicals themselves can do things differently to affect their portrayal, panelists at a recent theological meeting said.
A panel consisting of a Southern Baptist ethics leader, a Christian radio talk show host, an ABC News producer and former religion writers for two major news magazines discussed evangelicals and the media during a Nov. 17 session of the annual Evangelical Theological Society meeting at the Washington Hilton.
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and Janet Parshall, host of “Janet Parshall’s America,” said there is media bias but evangelicals could help themselves by choosing what shows to appear on and what topics to debate.
Land said he thinks “the general performance of the media in this country at the national level has gone down over the last 20 years and is more biased and is more sensational.”
Parshall said, “I’ve often said to some of my peers that if we stopped [playing] the role of the blow-up clown that maybe we wouldn’t be so stupid in the media. … I think the challenge for evangelicals in particular is to probably exercise that muscle known as discernment a bit more and to start being a little bit more judicious about the kinds and types of debates we do engage in … the ones that are really reflective of biblical truth and moral absolutes, the ones that really will be reflective first and foremost, last and always of Jesus Christ. And if it isn’t, then maybe we should stay home.”
Land said he has turned down invitations to appear on television programs panelists described variously as “shouting matches” and “food fight shows.
“[F]irst of all, the media’s responsibility is to get it right,” Land said in a comment endorsed by the other panelists. “They need to know as much as they can about the people they are covering, and they need to do as good a job as they can of being as balanced as they can.
“Balanced journalism is not getting the two most strident voices on the opposite ends of the perspective that you can find and have them shout at each other for 15 minutes,” he said.
While journalists have a responsibility to get the news right, evangelicals have a responsibility “to sort of keep a dialogue open,” said Jeanmarie Condon, a senior producer for ABC News.
“You know, you have to engage us with a little bit more respect, I think, just as you would like the media to engage” evangelicals, she said.
Parshall challenged evangelicals “to try to encourage the media when they do the right thing and also to let them know when we think they do the wrong thing.”
The news media could help by adding evangelicals to their staffs and by listening to those who faithfully represent the evangelical community, Land and Parshall said.
“I do think there is an extreme dearth, an extreme dearth, in the electronic and the print media at the national level of people who are serious evangelicals,” Land said. “There’s just no question about that. What difference does that make? Because human beings can never be completely objective. It makes a difference, for instance, whether you believe there is an absolute truth or you don’t believe there is an absolute truth.”
Parshall said, “Number one, get somebody on retainer on the networks who knows this stuff. Let him be your point man or woman on these issues. ‘Hey, what does the Bible say about x, y, z? What does the church believe about x, y, z?’ And number two, how about hiring more reporters with a biblio-centric world view?”
Land said he would encourage the news media not to invite people in who will tell them about evangelicals “but actually have some evangelicals in” to learn about them.
Condon said she believes the three-fold role of ABC and the rest of the news media is:
- “To take seriously the fact that religion is a major mover and motivator for people all around the world and that it needs to be considered carefully in our coverage of almost any story.
- “Not to treat it like an anthropological study, but to cover it from the inside, to look at what ideas people are debating, what causes conflict within various movements, what people agree on, what’s bothering them, what people are talking about around their Sunday dinner table.
- “And the third thing is to provoke discussion.”
Condon recalled an incident that happened when she was helping report on the 1993 standoff between the Branch Davidians and the FBI near Waco, Texas.
She produced a documentary on the event and “had a lot in it about … what the people actually believed inside the compound. And some of my bosses were saying, ‘Well, that stuff’s boring.’ There’s like an entire country west of the Hudson River that know these Bible passages and talk about them all the time to each other. They don’t think this is boring. After a while, people started to believe us.”
Jeffery Sheler, freelance journalist and former religion writer for U.S. News and World Report, said he believes the news media have improved their coverage of religion in the last 10 to 20 years, but he acknowledged evangelicals tend to be “stereotyped much more frequently than a lot of other groups.”
“I’m saying there’s a learning curve here, that things are getting better, not quite fast enough to suit me, but things are improving,” he said.
Panel moderator Darrell Bock, professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, asked the panelists what kind of role the media have in modeling a proper type of dialogue for society.
Sheler said he believes much of the coarse dialogue is a result of the need by cable news operations to fill 24 hours of programming.
“Of course,” the media should model the right kind of dialogue, Sheler said. “Are they doing a good job of it? Not very, and I don’t know what they do about it.”
Richard Ostling, a panelist, recently retired religion writer for the Associated Press and longtime religion writer for Time magazine, agreed that “the public discourse is very coarsened in our society,” but he pointed to evangelist Billy Graham, not a news organization, as a model.
“Graham has always turned away wrath,” he said. “He’s always had a charming way of not responding personally with questions and attacks and so on. His charming way, I think, of dealing with public controversy and debate and back-and-forth probably helped the evangelical movement a lot and is very different from what passes for religious and political discourse in a lot of American life today.”