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New Study: Increased Media Focus on Religion, Values
CHICAGO (February 21, 2000) - Religion, spirituality, and values are topics receiving more media coverage these days than previously thought, according to results of a study by Northwestern University.
Limor Peer, project director of the university's Garrett-Medill Center, shared the results of the two-year research project at a gathering of nationally known religion journalists from television, radio, Internet, newspaper, and newsmagazine media companies.
Stories addressing religion, spirituality and values make up between 11 and 20 percent of all stories in a given daily newspaper, weekly newsmagazine issue, or television news program, according to the study. Many of these stories were presented as news, but most were not prominently featured and lacked depth, Peer observed. The findings further suggest that three major Western religious traditions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - nearly monopolize the news, with other religions rarely mentioned.
University researchers selected four seven-day periods in late 1998 and early 1999 to evaluate 2,349 stories from television, newspapers and magazines. The 378 news items from television came from CBS, NBC, ABC, WBBM, WMAQ, and WLS. Newspapers included The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Times, and USA Today,accounting for 1,814 stories. The 157 magazine stories came from Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report. Stories were placed into three groups that rated the emphasis placed on religion, spirituality and values: primary focus, secondary focus, and incidental to the story.
With respect to television news, stories about religion, spirituality and values were the first story in the broadcast 14 percent of the time, many of them revolving around international crises.
In the four newspapers studied, only eight percent of such stories made the front page, although between one-half and two-thirds of the stories were in the main news section. Only two percent of stories were in a special religion section, with human-interest stories comprising 39 percent of those sections.
Among newsmagazines, Newsweek gave the most coverage, averaging 24 percent per issue, compared to Time's 21 percent and US News and World Report's 16 percent. However, only one percent of cover stories had information regarding focusing on religion and values.
The study was criticized by some as failing to evaluate radio and Internet news reports, including Steve Waldman, chairman and editor-in-chief for Beliefnet.com, and Lynn Neary, correspondent for National Public Radio.
Peer admitted that categorizing spirituality stories was difficult because "the term spirituality is ambiguous, not only for the public but for journalists... some people feel they're spiritual because they've watched two episodes of Touched By An Angel. It's also hard to do spirituality stories unless some group has done something and people will go out and cover it," Peer noted.
Keynote speakers and panelists stressed the responsibility on the part of journalists covering issues related to religion, spirituality and values to understand the bigger issues surrounding these topics and the biases they bring in their own reporting.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago, warned that too often "we're looking at an event so specifically we don't get a general context of a movement." According to Clark Wade Roof, professor of religion and society at the University of California-Santa Barbara, establishing what meaningful religious and spiritual words mean and examining how one's own faith journey plays into a story are two other important considerations as journalists look at issues of spirituality in news coverage.
What will the future look like for journalists covering religion, spirituality and values? Michael Smith, associate director of NU's media management center, says that newspapers in particular will need to provide more well-researched stories, noting 60 percent of home-delivered newspapers are being read after 2 p.m. when news has already aged. The reading public wants more depth about particular stories from newspapers.
Roof says that until we are able to see religion and spirituality as interconnected, we will short-change how spirituality is affecting certain population groups. He believes journalists understand that doubt and religion can be compatible in a faith journey, noting this type of struggle is often viewed as the centerpiece of many people's religious experience.
Copyright © 2008 The Evangelical Covenant Church. |
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