From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press

Preface

preface A few years ago,my former editor at the SeattleTimes, Mike Fancher , issued a directive to his newsroom subordinates: pick a church, go to church activities, interview church members, and find out what is going on out there among churches and the people who attend. However, writing in his Sunday column in the Times, Fancher said he hoped to dispel a rumor that the Times was requiring its journalists to become churchgoers. The exercise had nothing to do with the newspaper’s concern about its employees’ spiritual lives, he explained . The purpose was to help the newspaper get a better handle on how churches in the community work, how they involve themselves in politics, and how to do a better job of covering the religious lives of readers.1 As I read Fancher’s column, I found myself struck by a number of ironies that might occur to anyone who has had a career in the daily newspaper business. American journalists can seem most awkward when they face news stories that take them far outside their professional culture and their normal frame of reference .Somehow I just could not keep from smiling at the odd prospect of a group of wary, reluctant journalists, notebooks in hand, fanning out around the community to attend church, like anthropologists heading off to visit the natives. Beyond this image of journalists as modern-day Margaret Meads and the churches as some sort of primitive culture to be studied and probed, I found myself asking the broader,philosophical questions that come up whenever critics examine the press’s attitude toward religion. How can organizations devoted to clear-eyed pragmatism and hard-nosed fact gathering cover the ineffable, the unknowable,essentially the collective life of the soul of their audience? How can a news business whose professional values grew out of the Enlightenment ideas of Voltaire and Thomas Paine, with their rational skepticism and their undisguised hatred of religious dogma and Christian orthodoxy, report in a balanced fashion on a religious community that in many quarters still harbors the most traditional of religious beliefs? Besides, who is to say that the Times journalists weren’t already going to church on their own? What does it say about 00.FM.i-xviii/Unde 1/15/02, 9:39 AM 9 x Preface the culture of the newsroom when editors simply assume their journalists have no contact with church-going people? I also found myself wondering if this newfound interest in religion among the Times management sprang from the agenda that has become the hallmark of modern-day, market-oriented journalism—how to stay in better touch with readers. Religion has seen an upsurge of interest among Americans, particularly aging baby boomers, and U.S. media organizations everywhere have been wrestling with how to better cover an issue that has long been relegated to the Saturday religion page.2 I have written extensively about the impact of “market-driven” or “readerdriven ” journalism on today’s media organizations and the new generation of newsroom managers who let audience research guide their news judgment.3 Religion plays a powerful role in the lives of Americans and to a much greater extent than the news media generally recognize, but I also found myself asking: is it possible that all this hoopla over religion coverage—by the Times and other media organizations—amounts to little more than a marketing ploy? If that is so, how can religion reporting become better if the motives are thoroughly commercial at the core and, at some fundamental level, at odds with the true meaning of religion? At this point, I must acknowledge that, in the nearly fifteen years since I left the daily newspaper business,the subject of religion has come to hold more than passing interest for me. When I read Fancher’s column, I was set to embark on an unlikely odyssey for a veteran of the daily newspaper reporting business: a year of study at a Quaker seminary, the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond ,Indiana,where I hoped to learn more about the faith in which I had been raised but with which I had lost touch during long stretches of my adult life. My growing interest in religion coincided with my exit from journalism and my entry into the academic world—and I suspect that the two events were not unrelated.In one respect,I was happy to leave a business that I felt had lost sight of its public...