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chapter 9 “I Will Show You My Faith by What I Do”: A Survey of the Religious Beliefs of Journalists and Journalists’ Faith Put into Action Ralph Cipriano is the prototype for the modern religion reporter , at least in the minds of those who believe the media have become secular in orientation, implicitly anti–church establishment in outlook, and interested in covering religion only when it involves the bizarre, the entertaining, or the shocking. “I hung out with a voodoo group and watched them do a goat sacri fice,” Cipriano told the American Journalism Review in explaining his editors’ desire that he “liven up” the religion beat he covered for the Philadelphia Inquirer . “I wrote about a 300-pound former night watchman who was a Baptist preacher and would proselytize with prostitutes, a story about a rabbi who rap sings and a Mormon who spoke Vietnamese to get converts. I didn’t want to do stories about anybody sitting around a table talking about theological stuff.”1 It is difficult to tell which troubles the critics of the media’s coverage of religion more: journalism’s Enlightenment values of skepticism, rationalism, and empiricism, which has led conservative critics to label journalists the “secular humanists” par excellence, or the commercial press’s fixation on controversy, which tends to put religion in the news mostly when it pits science against religion or involves contentiousness, scandal, or the offbeat. In this context, journalists routinely have been portrayed as unchurched social liberals who are indifferent , if not antagonistic, to religion, particularly Christianity. The conservative press critic Marvin Olasky, for example, has called press coverage of American evangelicals “the result of a materialist world view hostile to Christianity. . . .Most journalists see leftist guerillas,homosexual parades, and anti-Christian textbooks as the good news of our era.”2 Olasky, like many conservative Christians, believes that the press has substituted a humanistic perspective for a God-centered one and that there is little hope for the main09 .130-147/Unde 1/15/02, 9:41 AM 130 “I Will Show You My Faith by What I Do” 131 stream media’s redemption. “If a person who had not had that experience [of the Christian person] is unwilling to accept the testimony of others, and thus assumes internally-generated psychological change rather than God’s grace, he will see Christian fact as imagination, and Christian objectivity as subjectivity ,” Olasky stated. “In the long run, journalistic differences between Christians and non-Christians are inevitable.”3 For years, these critics have relied on a 1980 study by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter, who surveyed 238 journalists in top media positions and found that 86 percent of them seldom or never attended religious services and that half said they had no religious affiliation.4 Critics have also accused the media of lacking a basic understanding of religious matters or covering religion only when the subject involves conflict or can be sensationalized. A common critique is that three impulses tend to motivate journalists when covering religious issues: ignorance, indifference, or downright hostility.5 However,this picture of journalism as identified with secularism,agnosticism, and cultural division has been questioned by other researchers in more recent years. A 1993 Freedom Forum study, for example, found that 72 percent of the 266 editors surveyed said religion was very important or somewhat important in their lives.6 A 1992 study by David H.Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, who found similar results in a nationwide survey of 1,400 journalists, led some observers to wonder whether modern journalists, contrary to their public image, may be more religiously oriented than previously believed.7 Even Rothman updated his assessment of journalists’ irreligiosity in a later study, which indicated that the proportion of major journalists who regularly attended religious services had jumped from 14 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 1995 and that journalists who reported no religious affiliation had dropped from 50 to 22 percent in that same period.8 No matter what their conclusions, none of these studies examined the nature of journalists’ religious values in great depth or probed the relationship between journalists’ expressed views of their religious beliefs and the ways those beliefs may be translated into their professional activities.In particular,the studies have tended to draw conclusions about journalists’ religious orientation based on narrow measures, such as church attendance or church membership, and all have relied on what journalists say about their...

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