ybvdadminuserEDITOR’S NOTE: After years in hard-news journalism, Will Norton moved to higher education, serving as chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi before becoming dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska. He then returned to Oxford, Mississippi, as dean of the School of Journalism and new media.
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During World War II, when I was a young boy in the Belgian Congo, Dad would turn on the large radio console and listen to BBC News.
Years later, he explained to me that Charles DeGaulle, a French general, was in exile in Brazzaville, the capital of French Congo, across the river from what was then Leopoldville, now Kinshasa. We were upriver, in the Ubangi Territory, the extreme northwest corner of Belgium’s largest African colony.
My father said that many ex-patriates and Congolese were worried that Adolph Hitler was going to send troops to Central Africa to capture General DeGaulle and occupy the region. North Africa already had been occupied by the Axis powers.
So, the BBC provided our family with important news for our daily lives. When we moved to the United States, Dad and I would listen to World News Roundup with Winston Burdett as we ate breakfast.
Because of this, I realized how important accurate news is, and that shaped everything that I did while working at newspapers and magazines and eventually teaching journalism at three universities.
The goal was to pass on to students the significance of accurate and complete reporting, and many have distinguished themselves in community and regional journalism as well as elite media.
To help students prepare for media careers, we often brought outstanding journalists and scholars (especially those who also wrote for mass media) to campus. One of these events helped inspire the creation of GetReligion.
After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, our journalism team at the University of Nebraska invited the legendary Martin Marty, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago. In many polls, Marty had been named as one of America’s most trusted religious leaders. He was a legend among religion-beat professionals — leading to the old saying that the formula for a front-page feature was a national study or poll, several local anecdotes and “a quote from Martin Marty.”
Marty, a native of Nebraska, came to lecture about religion in the mainstream press. We asked Terry Mattingly, a journalism professor and syndicated religion columnist, to respond to Marty’s presentation.
We did not ask them to define “religion news.” But, during his lecture, Marty asked a blunt question: “Is there any non-religion news after 9/11”?
Marty stressed that September 11 did not change anything. It simply made the power of religion more obvious and made it more difficult for journalists to avoid religion. He explained that, in the West, religion commonly has been expected to disappear worldwide, and that, if any religion remained, it would need to be “tolerant, concessive, mushy and so on.”
Instead, the impact of religious faith has increased — maybe not in North America and Europe, but in the Global South and the rest of the world. Moreover, the prospering religions are “intense,” in terms of their beliefs and practice, he said.
People care a great deal about their religion. Most of the areas of conflict in the world are where Muslim, Christian or Hindu peoples are clashing: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Indonesia, Kashmir, Palestine, Israel and Sudan. Indeed, militant religious fundamentalism is increasing, often resorting to terrorism or military action.
Marty provided us with insights on all this. He told us that journalists now need to know how to cover the complex and emotional world of religion. Mattingly echoed all of this and, during lunch, we discussed ways to try to critique mainstream religion-news coverage, while urging newsroom leaders to take this beat more seriously.
That has been the emphasis of GetReligion. For the last 20 years, its team has asserted the same point that Jeff Sharlott made in The Revealer, a progressive weblog on religion and news: “Religion in the true, broad
sense underlies, controls, permeates at least half the stories in the news, probably a lot more.”
Writers at GetReligion have often noted that each day millions of Americans get news in which something seems to be missing or distorted. Usually, the facts relate to a topic or person in religion. However, reporters often do not see the issue. The stories are “haunted” by religion.
Roy Peter Clark bluntly wrote about this at Poynter.org. He wondered: “ … as a journalist and a citizen, if there is something fundamentally myopic about how I see the world. …
“I am not taking seriously the theory that we mainstream journalists are different from mainstream America.
‘Different’ is too pale a word. We are alienated. …. The churched people … are more than alien to me. They are invisible.”
When Marty spoke to us in Lincoln, Neb., he had been observing that “alienated” mindset for decades. That day at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications was a key moment in the process that led to Mattingly’s decision to begin GetReligion.
For 20 years, Mattingly and Richard Ostling, Julia Duin, Clemente Lisi, Douglas LeBlanc, Ira Rifkin, Bobby Ross, Jr., and many others have been helping media professionals see the invisible religion facts, symbols and stories of religion in the news. Did this website need to exist? Of course it did.
As we say goodbye to GetReligion, I am reminded that our mass media have not failed all the time. I recall that the BBC, my early source for news, also devoted many programs to what C.S. Lewis later published as “Mere Christianity.”
As GetReligion closes its doors (surviving as an archive for journalists and researchers), I trust that media professionals will have learned from the the analyses of GetReligion and will follow the BBC example from the 1940s in an attempt to provide accurate and fair coverage of all aspects of news.
MAIN ART: The Meek School of Journalism at the University of Mississippi, in a photo featured at its Linked In page.
