Irish Media and Irish Religion

These charges are hotly denied by people who work in the media. It is surprising how rarely media professionals are willing to admit that they do anything other than merely report what is going on, and this stance applies to much more than religion. A decade ago, Bob Collins, then Director General of RTE, made an admission during a radio debate. He said that there are lessons to be learned by broadcasters. With regard to coverage of the divorce referendum, he said, “I don’t believe, I don’t mean in the campaign period of the (divorce) referendum, but over the last number of years that one would have inferred, if one were a Martian visiting Ireland, that 49.8% of the people were going to vote against divorce”. Thereby, Collins joined a very select group – media professionals who are willing to admit that they do anything other than just reflect reality in their daily work. Geraldine Kennedy, Editor of the Irish Times, has also stated her belief that newspapers do more than report events. In the context of an apology for Kevin Myers’ notorious column about unmarried parents, she said with regard to social change of recent decades, that “Much of this change is for the good and has been led by The Irish Times”. This caused Harry Browne, formerly of the Irish Times, and now a columnist with Village, to comment dryly, “Note how they take no blame for the bad stuff ”.

Media Mirror of Media Bias?

Be that as it may, both Mr. Collins and Ms. Kennedy are to be congratulated on the fact that they acknowledge that the media do more than “hold up a mirror to society.” The latter image is much beloved of media professionals. A good example of this is found in Dermot Mullane’s address to the Church and Media in Modern Ireland conference held in 1997.

On a daily basis, and indeed from hour to hour for twenty-four hours a day and for three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, the news services of RTE hold up a mirror to society. There may be occasional and, I would argue, minor flaws in the mirror…If the image is not that which we had hoped to see, human nature being what it is, we then tend to blame the mirror rather than ourselves. The result, too often, is a criticism of the broadcaster arising not from his or her actual failure, but from a perception of failure stemming from the bias, or prejudice, of the critic.

Thus Mr. Mullane, then Executive Editor of RTE News, neatly manages to clear the News Division of all responsibility for any flaws in its reporting, by attributing them to the bias of the viewer or listener. He is not alone. It is common to hear media people appealing to others: “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The roots of this phrase, the practice of killing a hapless messenger who brings bad news, presumes that the media only carry the message, that they have no role in selecting, amplifying, or even sometimes distorting the message. This is a naïve view of media activity, one that is not borne out by even the most cursory examination of how media work. (In the context of this essay, media is taken to mean primarily radio, television, newspapers, and magazines dealing with current affairs). For starters, the limitations of space mean that vast quantities of potential news items are never carried. Someone has to make decisions regarding what will be covered, and the people who do, range from reporters, sub-editors, editors, to media owners. If there is a strong sense that some aspects of Irish life may be dealt with inadequately, in this case religion, it may not merely be due to the bias or prejudice of the critic, but may in fact, reflect a deficiency in how the Irish media operate.

Lack of Expertise

Indeed, the sense that religion and media co-exist uneasily is not confined to Ireland. News coverage of religion was the subject of a great deal of discussion during the 1990s in the United States. Among the publications that ensued was Bridging the Gap, which draws on interviews with nearly 1,000 American journalists and clergy in order to establish “the sources of discontent between religion and the news media”. Dart and Allen, authors of Bridging the Gap, found in their survey of Catholic and Protestant clergy in America, that a high percentage of clergy felt that religion news is biased and unfairly negative. The authors’ own conclusions were somewhat different.

We found, in general, that rather than exhibiting an overt bias or disinterest (sic) in religion stories, most news professionals were simply reluctant to go much beyond familiar-formula stories on religious celebrities, sectarian tragedies, sexual scandals and off-beat claims of supernatural activity. We determined that one primary obstacle to good religion reporting was the lack of expertise and experience in handling this complicated topic in a news framework.

Peter Steinfels, former religion correspondent with the New York Times, examined what he regards as the three greatest criticisms of the media’s coverage of religion. He called them the three ‘i’s’: ignorance, incompetence and insufficient resources. In other words, those who report on religion are lacking in knowledge, lacking in skills, and that there is also unwillingness in those who control media to allocate proper funding for it. (In common with others who write about the topic, he is speaking more about the general reporter sent to cover a story than about specialist journalists). He found that the question of ignorance recurs most regularly, with the most common analogy being that one would not be allowed to cover sport if one had no interest or knowledge of it, but this occurs often with regard to religion. Here in Ireland, Liz Harries, former press officer for Archbishop Robin Eames of Armagh, provides evidence of this kind of ignorance when she cites a colleague of hers who received a request for an interview with John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who died in 1791.

Other Irish media professionals have also been frank about the lack of expert knowledge regarding religion. In research conducted by this writer for a Master’s thesis, Mary Curtin, a highly experienced radio producer who worked for a year as a communications officer for the Dublin archdiocese, and then returned to RTE, was interviewed. She also compared religion coverage to sports coverage. She admitted freely that if she had as little knowledge about sport as she had about religion when she was starting out, she would have been laughed at if she had sought a job in the Sports Department. However, her managers never saw it as an obstacle to her working in the area of religion. Interestingly, Mary Curtin is recognised as having made strenuous efforts to upgrade her own knowledge, including by taking courses, in her own time, in theology. The analogy with sport is one to which other people interviewed for the thesis returned. For example, David Quinn, currently religion correspondent with the Irish Independent, but at the time the editor of the Irish Catholic, and a columnist with the Sunday Times, made a similar point. He says that it is as if sport were covered by referring only to rows between managers and players, or off the field incidents, but never by covering a match. He also compares the coverage of education with that of religion. Education coverage does include clashes between institutions, such as between unions and the Department of Education, but it will also include positive developments that are of interest to educators. Conflict is not the only lens through which education is viewed.

Anti-Clericalism

Desmond Fennell, in an open letter on public service broadcasting, provides a useful comparison between the prominence given to religion by broadcasters in Italy and Ireland. Italy is a much less overtly religious country than Ireland, yet the six main television channels, three public and three private, deliver ‘regular peak hour programming of matters of Catholic religious and cultural interest”. Fennell goes on

It is not only the case that RTE has failed to operate like the public TV service of a culturally Catholic country: its general coverage of public affairs has won the reputation of having an anti-Catholic bias.

The latter is a point which Professor J.J. Lee also makes, but in a slightly different way, not only with regard to RTE, but Irish media in general. He says that there is an anti-clerical streak in Irish media, which manifests itself as anti-Catholicism. He is also deeply critical of the conformity of viewpoint in Irish media. One of the problems which he sees is that the media is primarily Dublin-based, but a Dublin in which even Dubliners may fail to find themselves, a Dublin remote from the everyday concerns of most Irish people who do not move in the tight-knit circle of the media.

Ardently though it proclaims itself liberal, still exulting in its escape from what it sees as traditional claustrophobic Catholic conservatism, it is the reverse of liberal in the classical sense, in its reluctance to evaluate the evidence for all sides of arguments with an open mind.

There are many negative consequences from this lack of connection with the concerns of ordinary people, including the tendency to retreat into treating religion as if it were politics, with a left- and right-wing, or at the very least, two easily discernible “sides”. Many of those interviewed for Bridging the Gap talk about the simplification of issues so that they appear to be about two opposing sides, whereas the reality is much more complex. Dart and Allen quote one Baptist as saying that he wishes the media would seek out more than just the ‘radioactive people’ on the extreme right or left of an issue. In Ireland, the tendency of journalism to report on religion as if it were politics also irritates some people. Fr. Dermod McCarthy, head of religious programming in RTE, spoke of ‘imposing a political grid’ on religion and viewing it in terms of “a government and its opposition, [and] right or left opinions”. This, he believed, leads to religion being viewed in terms of the wielding of power, and to the playing down of its key role of service.

The coverage of religion is usually dealt with in predictable ways, such as the clash of powerful institutions such as Church, State and Media. There is almost no reference to the personal or community dimension of religion, perhaps because that is much more difficult to cover with a ‘political grid’. For example, Steinfels said that he had hoped when he took the job as religion correspondent with the New York Times that he would cover ‘the way that ordinary people lived out their religious faith in their work and family lives.’ That proved very difficult to do. Yet, the tendency to treat religion as simply the exercise of power by an institution leads to a distortion of what religion means to people in their everyday lives. Even when an approach is relatively even-handed, as in John Horgan’s excellent analysis of the relations of church, state and media in modern Ireland, it still fails to take this community aspect into account.

Some Irish journalists have suggested that religious people have unrealistic ideas as to what constitutes news, and that they fail to realise that “good news is no news.” Stewart Hoover, one of the pre-eminent American scholars of religion and media, rejects this characterisation as too simple. His research shows that religious people are newspaper readers, who understand the news process fairly well and who ‘see much that could fit in the newspaper, but does not.’ These readers want to see religion ‘mainstreamed’ as opposed to ‘ghettoised’.

Of course, journalists also have complaints about religious people, and the way in which they can impede the legitimate concerns and questions of journalists. For example, the veteran journalist John Cooney describes the cult of secrecy as the “eleventh commandment” and “eighth sacrament” of the Catholic Church. When it comes to how the representatives of the official Church deal with the media, he may not be far wrong, although the appointment of professional communications officers has improved matters somewhat. However, legitimate though the complaint may be, we are back to “covering disputes between players and managers, and never covering a match.”

Paedophilia

Sexual abuse of children by priests and religious has featured strongly in the past decade. Firstly, it should be acknowledged that the media played a valuable and worthwhile role, and in a sense forced the Church to come to terms with the reality of child abuse. However, it is impossible not to feel that there has been a disproportionate emphasis on sexual abuse by priests and religious, given that the vast majority of abuse of children is not carried out by either priests or religious. John Horgan, Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University, queries whether the coverage of this issue may have had as much to do with an opportunity to criticise the Catholic Church, as with any desire to protect the vulnerable. To be sure, some journalists, like David Quinn and Patsy McGarry, religion correspondent of the Irish Times, have filed stories that are more sympathetic to religious orders. These have included covering false accusations against their members or former members, but in general, the coverage has overwhelmingly assumed guilt on the part of religious, both individually and collectively. This has carried over to the reporting and comment on the Residential Institutions Redress Board scheme, where the focus has almost been exclusively in the alleged failure of religious orders to pay enough into the fund created to compensate former residents of institutions. There has been almost no analysis of the fact that it was the state, in the form of the Department of Education, which established and supervised industrial schools. Indeed, John Horgan points out that, aside from a brief flurry following the publication of the Kennedy Report in 1970, the media in general let the issue lapse, as they did the atrocious conditions of Travellers which were revealed in an official report on at much the same time.

Travellers, or children locked up in institutions, remained for the most part out of sight and therefore out of mind, along with other vulnerable groups. The preoccupations of the media remained, for the most part, the preoccupations of the middle class.

While the media have been quick to excoriate the religious orders and the clergy for their failure to act more swiftly, there has been no donning of sackcloth and ashes that the issue of child sexual abuse by clergy and religious was not properly aired by the media until the 1990s. Surely there was a collective failure here, too?

Prejudice and Reality

The main difficulty with the coverage of religion is the almost depressing uniformity of viewpoint among journalists, which can be summed up as an Enlightenment bias, that is, the belief that as human beings grow in sophistication and knowledge, religion will fade away as something which is no longer required. This unspoken assumption underlies much of the coverage of religion, of which specialist religious journalism is only a tiny percentage of the total. Most religion stories are covered by people with no particular expertise, nor is there perceived to be a need for such expertise.

The belief in the “gradual decay of religion” is not borne out by the facts. Religion continues to be a potent influence. It is impossible to have a deep understanding of culture without an understanding of religion. Nor has the decline in belief in Ireland been anything like as steep as in the rest of Western Europe.

Despite the scaling down of formal religious practice, the vast majority of people continue to believe in God, to consider themselves religious, and to think it important to have religious ceremonies at births, marriages and deaths.

Surely anyone professing to reflect Irish reality should be curious as to why Ireland seems to be an anomaly in Europe, perhaps along with Poland and Malta? In order to understand Irish society, one needs to understand Irish people’s complex relationship with religion and belief. David Brooks, in Atlantic Monthly, hits out at what he terms ‘secular fundamentalists’, who even now make little attempt to understand one of the most important forces shaping our world.

A great Niagara of religious fervour is cascading down around them while they stand obtuse and dry in the little cave of their own parochialism – and many of them are journalists and policy analysts, who are paid to keep up with these things. 

Not that he is an uncritical cheerleader for religious fervour. One of the steps of his proposed recovery program for those attempting to “kick the secularist habit” is a recognition that greater knowledge and appreciation may, in fact, lead to more informed and valid criticism.

There is hope for the future in younger journalists. In a contribution to Studies, Eamon Ryan TD, says that one of the distinguishing features of his generation and younger, is that for the most part “my childhood was defined more by the freedom and hope that came from the Second Vatican Council rather than any sense of religious repression”  (He is in his early forties.) Younger journalists, particularly those under thirty-five, have very little negative baggage regarding religion. Sadly, and this is a reflection on our education system, they also have very little knowledge. However, that lack of knowledge often leads to openness to learn. The day may not be too far distant, when a genuine liberalism will allow religion to be examined on its own merits, and not primarily through a lens of somewhat dated prejudice.

Breda O’Brien is a wife, mother, secondary school teacher and Irish Times columnist.