News and Media: Week 9

This week I did my presentation on news and the media. I thought that the article I reviewed "I Will Show You My Faith by What I do: A Survey of Religious Beliefs of Journalists and Journalists' Faiths Put into Action," by Doug Underwood was extremely interesting and informative. Doug and his colleague set out to disprove the theory that journalists are "Englightenment-bred rationalists, pragmatic skeptics and empiricism-loving modernists" that are secular and unreligious. Using a complex questionnaire, Doug set out to determine how journalists view region in the 20th century. 


His results disproved the the long thought idea that journalists are secular and at times irreligious. His findings showed that "journalists of all religious orientations responded similarly to calls to put their belief into action, as long as these calls are framed in a way that makes them seem to be a part of the journalistic, rather that the religious, tradition." I thought this result fairly predictable since it is rational to think that people would want to put their beliefs into action in a professional, and in this case, journalistic way. 


His results also found that, " journalists who were more secular in orientation said they wanted to keep religion separate from news coverage and professional ethics; those who were more religiously inclined were more comfortable intertwining them. Those journalists who were more “Christian” in their beliefs tended to define themselves as more politically and philosophically conservative and to see religion as more important in their lives." Doug argues that these results were also predictable and made sense when religion was looked at in the context of peoples lives.  


I thought it was particularly interesting that all the journalists interviewed mostly viewed themselves as morally correct, and willing to their beliefs into action in a professional way. I had always thought journalists simply reported or wrote about what they were told, so it was refreshing to see a study that proved me wrong. 


Doug ends with a warning that "we must be careful to not mistake this sympathy (towards religion) for an overt embrace of religion in their work or explicit support for the expression of religious viewpoints in their professional activities." And also that "clearly, religious currents- both visible and less visible- run through the moral value system of journalists." 

•Underwood D. 2002. I will show you my faith by what I do. a survey of the religious beliefs of journalists and journalists' faith put into action. In From Yahweh to Yahoo! the religious roots of the secular press, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, chapter 9, pp. 130-147, via the library's reading list.