Media and Religion

The Medium
Is Not the Message
A reporter and a filmmaker discuss the challenges of covering religion in print and on film

by Lisa Mahowald Galalis

In recent years, even the most secular media channels have come to acknowledge that religion makes big news, in the wake of the emergence of the “religious right” as a force in U.S. politics, as well as political Islam, especially after 9/11.
But media coverage is almost never about religion as religious people practice and experience it. The media usually focuses on religion as a function of something else: as a political motivator, a source of social values, a source of cultural identity, or in conflict with modern science. Few in the media seem to grasp what religion is really about–namely, the deepest questions and needs that make us human, at that level of our experience that Msgr. Luigi Giussani called the religious sense. People’s ideas about and experience of religion are not usually considered newsworthy. And few in the media seem to suspect that they are missing anything that is worth exploring–which is that religious people share the same questions, but their answers can be very different and interesting.   
These reflections led Crossroads Cultural Center to bring together two people who are evidently moved in their work to explore the nature of religious experience itself and its meaning in human life:  New York Times religion columnist and Fordham professor Peter Steinfels, and award-winning ABC and PBS film producer Helen Whitney. The discussion, held on September 17, 2008, at Fordham University’s Pope Auditorium, was moderated by Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete and co-sponsored by Fordham’s Radius club, in collaboration with Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.

Structural problems
Mr. Steinfels began by noting that people of different religions are united in at least one thing: a loathing of how they are portrayed by the media. In order to give some insight into why the media so often fails to cover religion well, he pointed out several problems with the conditions in which journalists work.
First, major newspapers usually have at most one reporter covering religion, and this one person is expected to cover all religious events. Imagine, he said, expecting a single sports reporter to cover every sport from baseball to stock-car racing to yachting; to know all the rules, teams, performers, and history; and to cover the major events such as the Olympics and the Tour de France. We would find that an impossible task; yet the religion reporter is expected to do at least as much.
Second, media and religion are by nature in tension. He stated a few reasons:  Religion is based on what is eternal; the media lives off of novelty. Religious people revere mystery and respect hierarchy; journalists are trained to question everything and expose hypocrisy. Many religious people believe one cannot understand a religion until one commits oneself; the media prizes neutrality. Much of religious experience is interior and nuanced; the media reports on what is tangible and can be expressed concisely.
Mr. Steinfels acknowledged that some of the tensions arise from editors’ misguided notions of a good news story. As every newspaper reader knows, when the Pope speaks about politics, it’s a good story; when the Pope speaks about sex, it’s a great story. Many editors, Mr. Steinfels said, underestimate their readers’ interest in religious topics like worship and translations of liturgy. As a reporter, he often had to “sell” a religious story to his editors, when it did not fall within the media’s stock formulas of politics or sex.
A third problem, Mr. Steinfels said, is that reporters and broadcasters on deadlines simply do not have time or expertise to do justice to a long religious speech or encyclical with obscure historical references and philosophical complexity. As examples, Mr. Steinfels cited the oft-misunderstood remarks by Pope Benedict at Regensburg, and the “obtuse Greek thicket” in parts of Pope Benedict’s encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi. When he was a reporter, Mr. Steinfels said, he would receive a 100-page encyclical at 9 am and had to summarize it in 1,200 words by 6 pm. And those 1,200 words, Mr. Steinfels warned, will likely be as close to that encyclical as almost all Americans–including Catholics, and most priests–will ever come.

A media culture
One drawback is that a few journalists wield a disproportionate amount of influence. When a Rome correspondent for a wire service, such as Reuters, reduces a lengthy reflection on the Eucharist to a headline about sex, that wire service story often turns up verbatim in newspapers and TV news broadcasts across the U.S. In this way, Spe Salvi was mischaracterized by the press as a screed against atheism.
It is time to face the fact that we live in a media culture, Mr. Steinfels said. Why should papal encyclicals and speeches not be prepared with an awareness that most of their intended audience will encounter them through the lens of reporters with limited theological training, working on deadlines? Mr. Steinfels suggested that the Vatican could issue shorter, bite-sized versions of encyclicals for reporters, and homily-sized versions for priests–much as scientific researchers publish paragraph-long abstracts of longer works. The Vatican translates its works into many languages, he said; why not “speak media” too?
The idea of adapting one’s presentation to one’s intended audience is not new, of course; St. Paul boasted about it in his first letter to the Corinthians: “I have become all things to all men, to save at least some.”
But should the Church prepare encyclicals and speeches that are shorter and simpler, in order to make it easier for untrained and rushed journalists to understand them more easily? One has to wonder: would these journalists–who Mr. Steinfels says are trained to distrust authority–be interested in printing an official Vatican “sound byte”? And even if they would, what good would it do?

Reflections on faith
On the heels of Mr. Steinfels’s provocation about “speaking media,” Ms. Whitney offered a different perspective on presenting religious faith in media, in her case, as a documentary filmmaker. She showed the audience a 20-minute segment from her film: John Paul II: The Millennial Pope.
When she made the 2.5-hour documentary, Ms. Whitney wanted to give her audience a chance to reflect on the questions raised by the Pope’s life. So, she devoted the last 20 minutes of the film to an exploration of faith itself, through a series of interviews with scientists, clerics, authors, and actors. They recounted events in their lives that made them ask whether there was meaning behind them, and whether there was a God who cared about them. They talked about experiences of beauty that “tempted” them to faith: one spoke of studying life’s origins in the ocean depths; another recalled music sung by a choir. Others spoke of experiences of suffering that either drew them to a deeper faith or drove them away from faith. One of the people interviewed was Msgr. Albacete, who reflected in the film that Pope John Paul II, even as his body seemed to fall apart at the end of his life, was determined to make a public “spectacle of himself,” giving witness that even suffering and death cannot take away the value of life. Ms. Whitney said that she had to fight her executives to include this segment on faith in the film, perhaps because it did not fit their stereotype of what a documentary about a pope should be.
In addition to convincing skeptical executives, however, making a film about faith presents unique artistic challenges, Ms. Whitney said. For example, to collect material for that 20-minute segment, Ms. Whitney interviewed 800 people. It isn’t easy, she explained, to get 800 people to talk with poetry and precision about something as ineffable as their religious experience, without slipping into jargon. She also had to find film images that would be apt, concrete metaphors for the experiences articulated by the interview subjects. And finally, she wrestled with questions of tone: How could she, as a filmmaker, explore the interesting paradoxes of how an iconic figure such as Pope John Paul II could be equally fiercely loved and hated, without falling into either extreme of hagiography or reflective critique?

Resisting the reductions
Ms. Whitney’s account of her artistic struggles to make the film would resonate with anyone who has been frustrated by film treatments of religious topics, which usually seem to be either sentimental (if made by believers), or cynical (if made by critics of religion).
But Ms. Whitney’s difficulty in convincing her executives to include this 20-minute segment on faith in her film reflects a common mentality in our time, which reduces faith to politics, morality, or sentiment.
This discussion about the media’s difficulties in covering religion may be a reminder that only a Christianity that becomes an invitation to “come and see” has the potential to resist the reductions of the media and reach our media-saturated world. It doesn’t take a graduate degree in theology to understand that something is happening, or to recognize whether or not the invitation to follow corresponds to one’s heart.