{"id":79,"date":"2010-09-28T06:36:03","date_gmt":"2010-09-28T06:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/chaput-takes-on-the-media.html"},"modified":"2010-09-28T06:36:03","modified_gmt":"2010-09-28T06:36:03","slug":"chaput-takes-on-the-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/chaput-takes-on-the-media.html","title":{"rendered":"Chaput takes on the media"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the Religion Newswriters Association meeting in Denver last weekend,
\nthe local Catholic ordinary, Archbishop Charles Chaput, delivered
\nhimself of a classic culture-war critique<\/a>
\nof the news media’s coverage of religion: Journalism is composed of
\nknowledge-class professionals who make secularist assumptions about
\nAmerican society that shows they are out of touch with real Americans.
\nCoverage of Christianity in particular is negative, focused on stories
\nabout fundamentalism and decline and infighting and repression. This
\nkind of thing was a lot more common back in the 1990s than it is
\ntoday–but then, Chaput has never been known for being up to date.<\/p>\n

I could get on my hobby horse about how the media tend to view religion
\nnot through secularist glasses but in categories derived from Western
\nreligion. Take, for instance, the Eddie Long story that has been so much
\nin the news in recent days. Like other allegations of clerical sexual
\nabuse, it turns on the issue of hypocrisy. Over at GetReligion (whose
\npicking apart of religion coverage Chaput singled out for praise), Brad
\nGreenberg opines<\/a>,
\n“More importantly, though, such acts become no more heinous just
\nbecause they are seen as hypocritical.” Well, maybe not in a court of
\nlaw–but in the court of Christian public opinion they’ve been so ever
\nsince Jesus denounced<\/a>
\nthe “scribes and Pharisees” as “whited sepulchres, which indeed appear
\nbeautiful outward, but are within full of dead [men’s] bones, and of all
\nuncleanness.” Hypocrisy is a religious trope.<\/p>\n


\nBut be this as it may, what really caught my eye in Chaput’s address was this:<\/p>\n

One of the worst habits many Catholics had at the start of the clergy
\nsex abuse crisis, including many bishops, was to minimize a very grave
\nproblem. But news media show many of the same patterns of denial,
\nvanity, obstinacy, and institutional defensiveness in dealing with
\ncriticism of their own failures.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, it’s pretty white of Chaput to include “many bishops” on his side
\nof the comparison–would that other members of the hierarchy did the
\nsame. I’m not sure, though, about the Catholic non-bishops, who
\nremarkably were neither defensive nor vain nor in denial about the
\nabuse. And as for the comparison itself, well, in my observation the
\nnews media have, since the mid-nineties, been notably eager to do better
\nby the religion beat. But perhaps the archbishop was referring to more
\ngeneral patterns of vanity and institutional defensiveness on the part
\nof the press. If so, I’ve got a modest proposal.<\/p>\n

Just as some leading American newspapers have hired ombudsmen to monitor
\nand critique their coverage in their own pages, I suggest that American
\nbishops do the same. Hire independent observers to monitor and critique
\nyour actions, and publish the results in your diocesan newspaper and on
\nyour website. How salutary would that be?<\/p>\n

Apology: <\/b>I’ve caught some criticism for characterizing Chaput as
\n“mighty white” above. I confess that while I was aware that he is a
\nNative American, I wasn’t thinking about that when I used the phrase--but rather was referring to the “whited sepulchre” quotation from
\nMatthew. The idea was in fact to acknowledge with the off-color (as it were)
\nreference–as I did directly by referring to other bishops–that Chaput had
\nsaid something honorable: no mere whited sepulchre he. But I apologize for what
\nclearly can be taken as a racist slur. Mea culpa. <\/span> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the Religion Newswriters Association meeting in Denver last weekend, the local Catholic ordinary, Archbishop Charles Chaput, delivered himself of a classic culture-war critique of the news media’s coverage of religion: Journalism is composed of knowledge-class professionals who make secularist assumptions about American society that shows they are out of touch with real Americans. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}