Religion and the News

Owen Gower, Jolyon Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317067771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Religion and the News journalists and religious leaders reflect on their interactions with one another and their experiences of creating news. Through a series of original contributions, leading practitioners shed light on how religious stories emerge into the public domain. Experienced journalists and religious representatives from different faith traditions critically consider their role in a rapidly evolving communicative environment. Aimed at journalists, faith representatives, religious leaders, academics and students this book offers a timely exploration of the current state of religious news coverage and makes an original contribution to the emerging media, religion and culture literature, as well as to media and communication studies. Religion and the News presents insights from leading journalists and religious leaders, many well-known figures, writing openly about their experiences. Contributors include: Jolyon Mitchell, Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues Edinburgh University; Christopher Landau, Religious Affairs Correspondent, BBC World Service; Andrew Brown, The Guardian; Professor Lord Harries of Pentregarth, former Bishop of Oxford; Dr Indarjit Singh, Director of the Network of Sikh Organisations; Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, Director, Jewish Information and Media Service; Imam Monawar Hussain, Muslim Tutor, Eton College; Charlie Beckett, Director, Polis; Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent, The Times; Catherine Pepinster, Editor, The Tablet; Riazat Butt, Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Guardian; Professor the Worshipful Mark Hill QC, Barrister and Fellow, Centre for Law and Religion, Cardiff University.

SECTION 1
Understanding Religion and the News

Figure 1 News and Religion. Courtesy of Shutterstock.com and David Wright.

Introduction to Section 1: Understanding Religion and the News

What is the relationship between religion and the media in the UK today? In particular, what is the relationship between religion and the news?

All of the contributors to this volume engage with these central questions. Later on, we will hear media experts talk about their experience of engaging with religion (section 2), and religious representatives talk about their experience of engaging with different media (section 3). The purpose of this first section is to ground that later conversation by providing a broad overview of the relationship between religion and news media in the UK.

Jolyon Mitchell investigates the different approaches to religion and the news, through a study of how the St Paul’s protests were covered. He argues that it is important to go beyond analysis of the evolving story, to consider the cultural, political and historical contexts in which the news emerges, as well as the roles of creative journalists and active audiences. Teemu Taira, Elizabeth Poole and Kim Knott provide a statistical picture of how religion is treated in British television and newspapers. A more detailed summary of their argument is provided at the start of their chapter. Brief summaries are also provided before all the remaining chapters. Robin Gill discusses what news coverage reveals about developing and differing perceptions of religion in the modern world. Paul Woolley closes the section by arguing that the relationship between religion and media is ‘worth getting right’, and making some constructive suggestions for how it could be improved.

The chapters in this section raise several important issues for the discussion that follows in sections two and three. These include questions relating to representation, authority and communication. First, representation, reporters covering religious stories in the news media face a tension between presenting the ‘story’ and presenting the religious community in a balanced way – a tension that often causes significant frustration for both religious leaders and reporters, as we shall see later on. The second issue concerns media authority, and the question of what makes religion reporting sufficiently informed and authoritative. Should correspondents covering religion have specific expertise comparable to that of many economic or business correspondents and academic qualifications in religious studies or theology? Should religion correspondents be people of faith themselves or should they at least have a sympathetic understanding of faith? Or should journalists remain reticent about their own world-views and beliefs? The third issue relates to communication. Why is it that some journalists and religious leaders appear often to misunderstand or to misrepresent each other? And what does evolving journalistic coverage communicate about perceptions of faith, belief and skepticism? These issues resonate through the interpretations, criticisms and suggestions of the contributions that follow.

Chapter 1
Religion and the News: Stories, Contexts, Journalists and Audiences

Jolyon Mitchell

Introduction

Many journalists observed in October 2011 that for the first time since London’s Blitz during the Second World War, the doors of St Paul’s Cathedral were closed to the public. It was noted that, by contrast, the flaps of the tents of the anti-capitalist protestors, camping in front of the cathedral, were left open to visitors. Numerous reporters visited the ‘Occupy’ camp, listened to speeches, recorded interviews and photographed the placards. This evolving story was covered not only by religion correspondents, programmes and papers, but also attracted news coverage from all over the world. For example, The New York Times claimed that the ‘“Occupy” Protest at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London Divides Church’ (30 October 2011). On several days in late October and early November 2011 news about St Paul’s made the front pages of many papers, as well as being one of the lead items for broadcast and online news reports.

The St Paul’s protest is a useful example for reflecting on different approaches to religion and the news. In this chapter I consider four approaches. They can be characterised by a distinct primary focal point: the story, the context, the journalist or the audience. At the outset it is important to underline that behind every newsworthy event, or series of events, there are multiple stories, contexts, journalists and audiences. These are not frozen in time, but dynamic elements within the making of news. This will become clearer as we examine evolving stories, contested contexts, creative journalists, and expressive audiences. There are a multiplicity of representations, reporters and receptions, emerging out of a range of settings. In order to develop a nuanced analysis of the relation between religion and the news it is useful to draw upon questions and methods from each of these four approaches.¹

The vast majority of earlier studies on religion and the news have emerged in North America.² To varying degrees they draw upon each of these four approaches. By contrast, European books on news, by both academics and journalists, tend either to overlook religion altogether, or to deal with it only in a cursory fashion.³ This is slowly changing in the UK, Europe and other parts of the world,⁴ especially following the increased interest in the place of Islam in the news.⁵ Both this chapter and the entire book contribute to these emerging global discussions. The aim here is to shed critical light on the coverage of religion by journalists, on religious leaders’ engagement with the news media, and on several possible ways forward for reparative reflection and action.

Evolving stories

First, those who employ a narrative-centred approach tend to focus on the actual content of an individual news story or cluster of stories. Description of the evolving narrative combined with analysis of the language, the structure, and the images, as well as the use and choice of interviewees characterise this approach. In other words, how has a news story been covered? What makes up the story and what has been left out? How has it evolved, developed or fragmented? News stories are rarely static; they are constantly moving, adapting and evolving.

This can be seen in how the St Paul’s protest and related stories were covered. The event in London began on Facebook on the 10 October 2011, with an online encouragement to follow in the footsteps of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York.⁶ On 15 October demonstrators tried to occupy the privately owned property Paternoster Square outside the London Stock Exchange, but were prevented from doing so by the police, who were acting on a court order. The demonstration of around 2000 protestors relocated to outside St Paul’s cathedral, with over 70 tents being used for overnight accommodation. The cathedral’s Canon Chancellor, Giles Fraser, attracted both criticism (e.g. Daily Mail) and praise (e.g. the Guardian) for asking the police and not the protestors to move on, supporting their right to demonstrate. In the light of subsequent events, this was interpreted both as a warm welcome and tacit support for the protestors’ endeavour. A more permanent encampment was established to the west of the cathedral by 17 October 2011, which would soon increase to around 200 tents, including a larger ‘Tent City University’, a bookshop, a kitchen and the Occupied Times of London newspaper. The majority of these would remain for over four months.

There then followed a pivotal moment in this evolving story. St Paul’s, ‘the capital’s cathedral’, was closed indefinitely on Friday 21 October due to ‘health and safety’ concerns. These were not elaborated upon until after the weekend. In an age of 24-hour news, where there is an insatiable hunger for rapid response, immediate justification and swift judgement this explanation was interpreted by several commentators as prevarication. How did different news media cover the closing of the cathedral? The next day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Rob Marshall, an experienced broadcaster and cleric based in Hull, represented St Paul’s and tried to explain the decision to close its doors to the public. In the face of an unremitting ‘grilling’ by Today presenter John Humphries he was robust in defence of the Dean and Chapter’s controversial decision.

On the same day the Daily Mail ran the headline: ‘Surrender of St Paul’s: Protest rabble force the cathedral to close, a feat that Hitler could barely manage’ (22 October 2011). Their story was illustrated by the famous photograph by Herbert Mason from 29 December 1940 of St Paul’s emerging out of the smoke during the Blitz.⁷ Readers were reminded that the picture was taken from the roof

Figure 2 Occupy protest and camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, London, including one of many banners. 5 January, 2012. Courtesy of Alison Henley / Shutterstock.com

of the Daily Mail’s former offices, in Fleet Street. They were also told why St Paul’s last closed: a time-delayed bomb ‘hit’ the cathedral on the 12 September 1940, which only reopened when the bomb, which could have done catastrophic damage, was removed and detonated safely. ‘For the rest of the war, however, even as Luftwaffe bombs reduced much of the surrounding area to rubble, St Paul’s remained open.’⁸ The condemnation of the cathedral Dean and Chapter’s decision on what were assumed to be ‘spurious health and safety grounds’ was widespread and unforgiving. Several television news reports used black and white footage from Reuters or Pathé of another bomb’s damage in December 1940 to the interior and high altar. Few reports distinguished between the different attacks that the cathedral had survived during the Blitz. Some simply ignored the comparison between the closing of the cathedral doors in 1940 and in 2011.

Several television news reports included interviews with disappointed or frustrated tourists who were unable to visit or even worship at St Paul’s. The Times highlighted how William Hill, the bookmakers, was offering odds of 100–101 that the cathedral would still be closed at Christmas. In response to The Times’ story William Oddie, the former editor of the Catholic Herald, quipped in his old paper: ‘will it matter?’ (25 October 2011). For the Telegraph it was a ‘squalid occupation’ that had resulted in ‘A Sullied Cathedral’ (24 October). This description resonated with several comments by a number of lords and MPs in Parliament. Libby Purves in The Times memorably described the protest as a ‘tented tantrum. A nylon-roofed, media-savvy, Twitterati, festival-inspired, Glasto-generation sulk’, though she was ‘very glad that St Paul’s was gracious towards it at first’. The Daily Express, in a series of negative headlines articulating rage at the protest, claimed that: ‘Mob threat to sabotage Poppy Day at St Paul’s’ (25 October).

The second significant series of twists in the story was the resignation of both Giles Fraser, the Canon Chancellor, on 27 October, and the Dean, Graeme Knowles, four days later. Another chaplain also resigned. After these resignations and the re-opening of the cathedral (on 28 October), the Independent used the headline: ‘Carry on at the Cathedral’; while Riazat Butt’s article in the Guardian was given the title: ‘St Paul’s brought to its knees by confusion and indecision’ and the Telegraph reported that: ‘St Paul’s branded “laughing stock” as Dean Graeme resigns’ (31 October). Time magazine offered an ironic score line: ‘London Protestors 1 God 0: Anti-Capitalism camp scores PR Victory Against St Paul’s’. On the same day the London Evening Standard ran a satirical comedy sketch by Nick Curtis, one of the creators of Rev, the BBC’s comedy drama series. It was entitled: ‘A loose Canon, his Bishop, the Dean and unholy war at St Paul’s’ (28 October). It is noticeable how some of these accounts employed irony and comedy while others resorted to framing this story in terms of conflict.

Figure 3 Photographers and a cameraman document entrance doors opening at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, following a week-long closure. The cathedral reopened at midday on Friday 28 October 2011, with a special Eucharist service, including prayers for the demonstrators. Courtesy of Press Association Images/Matt Dunham.

The third significant development came on 1 November after the resignation of the Dean, when under the temporary leadership of the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, the cathedral chapter reversed their original decision and suspended their legal action against the protestors. Melanie Phillips, in the Daily Mail, was less than playful and wrote of ‘the debacle at St Paul’s’ which ‘threatens to inflict a terrible blow on the authority of the Church of England itself’ (2 November). While on the same day Matthew d’Ancona wrote in the London Evening Standard under the headline: ‘The Church looks like a heritage society on the hop’. On 1 November The Times declared that ‘the C of E’ was in ‘disaster recovery mode’. Ruth Gledhill, The Times’ religion correspondent, ascribed global significance to the events: ‘The resignations show the huge divisions at the leadership of the cathedral. The cathedral in particular has been brought to its knees by it but I think it’s been extremely damaging for the Church as a whole in Britain if not Christianity in the West’ (1 November). The precise nature of the ‘damage’ or ‘terrible blow’ is not spelt out.

As can be seen from these brief descriptions the story evolved and attracted a broad range of coverage. Read back over the last few paragraphs and it is noticeable how this evolving story is invested with considerable dramatic significance. This is achieved by heightened language, which on one level is ‘entertaining’ to read, while on another is in danger of sliding into hyperbole. The descriptive language employed varies in its tone, though amongst some commentators and headline writers it often slides into melodrama, exaggeration or even plain vitriolic attack. There is no single simple narrative but a range of stories and perspectives emerging out of a series of events. News stories need a new angle to remain fresh and attractive to editors and to audiences. The story about St Paul’s evolved...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SECTION 1: UNDERSTANDING RELIGION AND THE NEWS
• SECTION 2: COVERING RELIGION
• SECTION 3: REPRESENTING RELIGION AND THE NEWS
• SECTION 4: CONTESTING RELIGION AND THE NEWS
• Select Annotated Bibliography
• Index