Focus on the Family Citizen March 2009 : Page 12
Book Review Attitude adjustment Reporters who cover religion could use a little humility, a new book argues. That, and true diversity in the newsroom. by Matt Kaufman P eter Jennings knew the me- dia had a big problem cover- ing religious folk: He called it “the faith gap.” The late anchorman said he saw it over and over when natural disasters struck. Report- ers would ask survivors what got them through the ordeal; survivors would answer “God” or “prayer.” Usually, a moment of awkward silence would follow. “Then,” Jen- nings said, Reporters (would) ask an- other question that, even if they don’t come right out and say it, goes something like this: ‘Now that’s very nice. But what really got you through this?’ ” The story’s one of many told in Blind Spot: When the Press Doesn’t 12 © KEN CEDENO / CORBIS Get Religion (Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert and Roberta Green Ah- manson, editors; Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2009, 220 pages). The book has more than a dozen con- tributors. Most of them are scholars and journalists, and you probably won’t know their names going in. But each has stories to tell which, together, add up to one big story— a story about not just media bias, but also media cluelessness. To take a few examples: • Political scientists C. Danielle Vinson and James L. Guth exam- ine media treatment of religion’s role in the 2004 Bush-Kerry con- test. Not surprisingly, they find a clear pro-Kerry pattern: “Stories … persistently pitted Bush’s blind faith against Kerry’s intellectual ra- tionality with a clear assumption that religion and reason do not coexist,” they write. Beyond that, OBAMA SELLS The Washington Post and other newspapers prof ited from the new president’s election, but their long-term pros- pects look dim without more balance in the newsroom. though, they also find that efforts to understand voters’ motivations were amazingly clumsy. (The only choices the major networks’ exit polls gave voters were: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Other Christian, or Something Else.) • Journalist Jeremy Lott walks readers through media accounts leading up to the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ— the predictions of financial failure and anti-Semitic violence. What actually happened, of course, was a different story. (Actual U.S. box-of- fice take: over $370 million. Actual violent events: nada.) How could so many in the media have been so wildly off-base? Lott’s conclu- sion: Because of “the estrangement Citizen
Book Review: Blind Spot: When the Press Doesn't Get Religion
Matt Kaufman
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