Epistemological muddles: religion & the media

Commonweal held its second "War of the Worldviews?" forum on the "neuralgic" relationship between the media and religion at Georgetown University, Tuesday, September 13. The first skirmish was conducted in June at Loyola University in Chicago. Both conferences have been well attended, and the discussion has been unreasonably civil and nuanced in the best Commonweal tradition. Journalists on both panels have candidly acknowledged that bias exists in the newsroom and even criticized the sometimes unexamined views of their more smugly secular colleagues. Chicago keynote speaker Peter Steinfels's assessment that ignorance and lack of resources are probably bigger problems than outright antieligious or anti-Catholic prejudice was seconded by almost all.

As a former newspaper reporter, I also feel strongly that the complaints about religion coverage are virtually identical to the gripes of every other group. Everyone is convinced they get a raw deal from the press--and everyone, in a sense, is right about that. (An intuition I will pursue below.) Cokie Roberts of ABC News made this point vividly at the Washington forum. She suggested that religion was far from the most maligned victim of the press. "I could make a good case that the coverage of religion is considerably better than the coverage of Congress," she said.

True enough. Still, I think the deeper dissatisfaction with and even outright distrust of the media have yet to be fully fleshed out. Perhaps this will happen at the final forum in New York at Fordham University Law School October 25, although it can be an elusive subject. Certainly, the public is increasingly uneasy about the influence of the media in public life and politics. I suspect a portion of that unease has to do with the sense that the media seem incapable of either making sense of or communicating what it is that draws people to religion in the first place, what keeps many of the agnostic hovering around religious institutions, or what drives many others to create ersatz religions of their own. Yes, faith or a belief in God is not a strictly falsifiable claim. As such, it is not "information" the media handle well. The "just the facts, ma'am," assumptions--and those are big assumptions--of news stories tend to reduce religious and moral claims to private and often idiosyncratic hobbies somewhat akin to a belief in UFOs or astrology. Consequently, religious "knowledge" that many Americans know to be reliable has less and less resonance in public conversation conducted through the media.

What I'm trying to get at was touched on by Terry Eastland, the editor of Forbes Media Critic, in his remarks in Washington. Eastland noted that an "epistemological" problem or divide was evident in the conflict between religion and the media. Traditional religion, he said, remains a premodern phenomenon. The press, he argued, is a cousin of the modern social sciences, and proceeds from skeptical and positivist assumptions that are inhospitable to the "supernatural" precoccupations of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. More provocatively, Eastland suggested that the media both create and seek to satisfy an insatiable modern appetite for noelty that is fundamentally at odds with a traditional religious perspective. Our obsession with the news, he suggested, purposefully distracts us from the truth--and most pointedly from the truth of the Good News.

I put the argument starkly (and terms like premodern and supernatural can be very slippery), but I hope I haven't distorted Eastland's basic point. I think he's on the right track, but I would broaden the emphasis. The "news" distracts us not just from the truth but from a more satisfactory democratic politics as well. We are awash in information, overwhelmed by it, and frequently defeated by it. Our appetite for news is disorienting and enervating, and much of the blame lies with the media whose pursuit of so-called "objectivity" implicitly relegates argument and debate to the ghetto of mere "opinion." (CNN's "Crossfire" is a good example of what passes for "debate"!) As a result, the vaunted "information age" seems to be producing a public conversation that is incoherent, bland, and petty.

Without perspective, context, and argument, facts are useless. As the late Christopher Lasch writes in his forthcoming book (The Revolt of the Elites, Norton), advances in communications technology have not produced a better informed or more fully engaged public, but a more alienated and cynical one. "What democracy requires is vigorous debate, not information," Lasch writes. "We can know our own minds only by explaining them to others." Quoting James Carey (Communication as Culture, 1988), Lasch argues that historically the press's embrace of objectivity and the cult of information resulted in its "abandon[ing] its role as an agency for carrying on the conversation of our culture." Here Lasch makes an epistemological point similar to Eastland's. Lasch argues that only democratic dialogue--not just the contending agendas of "experts"--can provide the kind of knowledge that will enable us to make use of the vast store of information at our disposal. "Systematic inquiry," Lasch writes, quoting John Dewey, "[is] only the beginning of knowledge, not its final form. The knowledge needed by any community--whether it was a community of scientific inquirers or a political community--emerged only from 'dialogue' and 'direct give and take.'"

Of course objective reporting and a fair-minded regard for the facts are always needed. But a greater recognition of the limits of mere information and a renewed appreciation of the kind of knowledge that community life and broad democratic participation make available might be the way in which religious "knowledge" is brought back into the conversation of our culture as something more than a second-class epistemology. In any event, it seems increasingly clear that democracy's health, if not its survival, requires the kind of knowledge religion has historically provided. And that's a story the media should be covering.

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