Keeping the Faith in the Newsroom

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 27, 1999 | by Aimee Howd

Within the highly secular culture of the media, Christian journalists often must defend to their colleagues their integrity, professionalism and commitment to objectivity.

During seven years as a hostage in Lebanon, Terry Anderson, then the Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, first heard the question that still is a loaded one for many journalists around the world. A Presbyterian missionary, one of his fellow prisoners, asked him, "How can you be a Christian and a journalist?"

Held in and out of solitary confinement from 1985 to 1992 by his Islamic Jihad captors, Anderson had plenty of time to think through an answer. Now a professor at Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, he seems to have resolved the question as far as his own experience is concerned.

"The search for truth is not in conflict with the truth that I know as a follower of Jesus," Anderson told 150 journalists gathered last month in Chichester, England, a little town south of London, to discuss how faith and the profession of journalism interact.

"You can be a Christian and a journalist," he told colleagues, "but you know, you cannot be a Christian and be a bad journalist. That doesn't work at all. You cannot practice Christianity and a journalism that takes away dignity, that has no compassion, that exploits pain and misery. That's not good journalism, and it's certainly not anything that Christ taught."

For others, though, the question still looms: Can a reporter with religious convictions of any creed be trusted to do the job truthfully and fairly? Ostensibly, the question should not even arise. Gallup polls show that eight in 10 Americans consider themselves Christians. According to George Barna, a sociologist of religion who prepared the Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators, three in four Americans say having a close relationship with God is "very desirable." Such statistics strongly suggest that religious belief still is a regular part of American life.

But how those personal beliefs, whether lightly held or life-changing, fit into the public square can be confusing and controversial, as evidenced by remarks made at the gathering in Chichester and in recent conversations Insight has had with other journalists. David Aikman, a retired senior foreign correspondent for Time magazine and host at the Chichester meeting, put it this way: "At the conference, what you heard, what emerged, was a variety of challenges to reporters who are committed Christians depending on what culture they are working within." The conference was sponsored by Gegrapha, a global fellowship of journalists which operates under the auspices of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington.

"In the highly secular culture of American newsrooms, which are far more secular than society at large, what Christians often face is outright bigotry," asserts Aikman. How secular are these newsrooms? A classic 1980 study by Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that in the most influential newsrooms in the country, half of the 286 elite media people surveyed "eschewed any religious affiliation" and 86 percent seldom or never attended religious services.

In a trade in search of objectivity predicated on cold, hard facts, faith can meet with suspicion. One religion reporter at a major secular news organization -- an American evangelical who asked that her name not be used -- told conference attendees about the time she was accosted by an investigative reporter attempting to write an expose on her personal religious background. "How can you possibly report objectively on religion if you teach in Sunday School?" he asked. The question, she recalled, hung in the air like an accusation.

"You're a political reporter, aren't you?" she returned. "Let me ask you, did you vote in the last election?"

Similar anecdotes punctuated discussions on and off the record during the three-day gathering. A young Christian Sudanese told of the decades-long struggle of his people in south Sudan against radical government forces in the north and of his "calling" for building a newspaper amid the destruction. An anchorwoman from India described her crusade to expose "dowry deaths," or the traditionally accepted murder of young Indian wives by their in-laws when their demands for a bride-price are not met. As a Christian, her task is complicated by the burgeoning power of Hindu nationalists, who propagate the notion that anyone loyal to Christianity is disloyal to India.

Less intense but also troubling was the tale told by an American TV-news executive, who said she was given a corporate command to stop leading Bible studies on her own time. In the end, she felt compelled to quit her job rather than compromise her convictions.

But Mark Silk, editor of the magazine Religion in the News and director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., maintains such stories don't necessarily indicate a trend toward marginalizing religion in all of America's newsrooms. "Comprehensive surveys of the religious commitments of journalists show that journalists are about as religious as the rest of the population by the standard measure of church attendance and affiliations," says Silk.