Abstract
Religion and the News
Jolyon Mitchell and Owen Gower (eds), Religion and the News (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. £19.99. pp. xiv + 250. ISBN: 978-0-4094-2019-4).
The relationship between religion and news media is complex and evolving. In the not so recent past religious correspondents were often clergy of the established Church employed to reflect its life and report on its public face. This rather gentle arrangement ended with the rise of more strident secular attitudes in broadcasting and the press, reflecting the assumption that religion would simply wither away over time. 9/11 changed all that, with the result that there is more coverage of religious themes in the press now than there was two decades ago.
This collection of essays is part analytical and part anecdotal. The editors have an interest in fair play between religion and news media. They would like the relationship to be a constructive one, and this aspiration is reflected in a number of the essays. One incident which several correspondents reflect on was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ill-fated comments on sharia law which led to something of a storm and damaged the Archbishop’s reputation. The way the story was taken up in the popular press receives censure from a number of writers; but the Archbishop’s response also comes in for criticism. Lambeth Palace simply went silent for several days which allowed the storm to intensify. The lesson seems to be that religious bodies have to learn to play the journalistic game. But what a depressing game that sometimes is. The anecdotal essays by religious correspondents (Ruth Gledhill, Catharine Pepinster, Andrew Brown and the broadcaster Roger Royle) tend to be unreflective and rather self-indulgent, though Catharine Pepinster makes a good attempt at making sense of the journalistic ambiguities involved in being editor of a Catholic weekly; The Tablet.
The most useful parts of the book are the drier and more analytical sections. Jolyon Mitchell’s careful analysis of the Occupy movement around St Paul’s is well-balanced and genuinely illuminating and the two following essays simply analysing the content and context of religious stories in news media reveals the continued uneasy status of religion in the public sphere. I was sorry there was no sustained reflection on religious stories in local and regional and media – it would have been useful to see whether or not there was a contrast of attitudes with those that prevail nationally.
Religion and the News confirms what might have been suspected, that those who come off worst in the news media are British Muslims. There is a savage carelessness in the popular press about the linking of Islam to violence which is deeply disturbing. Compared with this the occasional pokes at Christians are no more than minor irritants. The verdict on the book is that it is good in parts, a mirror of the subject. But I am not sure who would take the trouble to read it all the way through.
ANGELA TILBY
Christ Church, University of Oxford