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Reporting on Religious Authority Complicit with Atrocity

Paul A. Soukup, S.J.

A popular accusation holds that churches or religious groups do bad things. Despite the logical fallacy – attributing to a religion the faults of individuals – the accusation still resonates in the popular imagination. From a journalist’s perspective, religious involvement in such evil – for example, in the horrors that have recently marked our world – provide either the best or the worst reporting challenge. On the one hand, it gives the opportunity to highlight hypocrisy, to shock the audience, to bring often exempt groups to accountability, to call into question the honored or even revered status of religion and religious leadership, and to debate the social role of religion itself. On the other hand, such situations and their reporting may well lead to antireligious violence, create conflicted feelings about religion, give offense to some audience members, and foster misunderstandings about religion, culture, and religious history. More likely than not, journalists would quickly accept the challenge and report. Most readers would agree that indeed they should report.

From an ethical perspective, religious involvement in evil raises a host of issues for journalists (not to mention for the religious organizations and individuals themselves, though that lies beyond the scope of this work). Reporting on that religious involvement adds still more ethical issues, a number of them not immediately obvious.

Sad to relate, the participation of religious leaders in bad things happens more than people would like to admit and occurs in almost every part of the world. A partial list of religious involvement in, or complicity with, atrocity in living memory includes:

One or another researcher or reporter would probably add to this list, but the general point remains: members of all religious groups – and often the leading members of those groups – have behaved badly. The ethical challenge to journalists lies in the reporting challenge mentioned earlier. How should journalists respond when their reports touch on the moral foundations of society? Should churches have some kind of exemption from the scrutiny of the news? Should churches merit some kind of additional scrutiny? The larger ethical challenge has to do with why and how journalists act as they do.

Generally, journalists let various professional codes of behavior or codes of ethics guide them in these and other murky areas. Given the sensitivity of these questions, those codes may not provide enough guidance. However, communication ethics does matter here, as White states more generally, “communication ethics at its best defines how the actors in a communication system think that communication should be carried out in order to respond to the problems of human and social existence in that context” (2008, p. 2).

In that spirit, this essay will briefly discuss why religious groups fall under news examination, review some common journalistic codes, highlighting potential limitations, and then propose some other guides drawn from communication ethics that journalists might employ with religious stories. At each stage, further ethical issues emerge; these perhaps will help us – all actors in a communication system – reflect on how we think communication should occur.

Religious Groups and the News

By their very nature, religious organizations and their leadership play a public role in society. Many people would neither question that role nor the ways in which people function within it, with rationales from two highly divergent perspectives. Historically, the major world religions have shaped the cultures and moral understandings of almost every region in the world, with many states and regions at some time making no distinction between religion and state sovereignty. On the one hand, then, journalists from societies where religious groups still occupy a central role in social and cultural life often do not report bad news about religious groups out of a fear generated by a kind of lese majesté. Religion and religious leaders simply fall into a category beyond the scrutiny of the news media. On the other hand, the development of the idea of the separation of church and state and its promulgation in the West (in theory, in practice, or in both) and a growing secularism in democratic states has led to an expectation in the minds of Western-influenced journalists that a religious body should appear simply as separate, of little interest to the more serious concerns of politics or statecraft. These journalists – particularly political journalists – have come to regard religion as of little interest to their audiences and beyond their own expertise (Silk, 1995, pp. 3–10).

In fact, few journalistic courses or training programs demand any special knowledge of religion, with reporters themselves acknowledging their lack of knowledge (Soukup, 2002). Religious commentators have vocally criticized religion reporters on this score, terming some “religiously ignorant journalists” (Smith, 2004, quoted in Dart, 2005, p. xiii). Apart from a few specialists, those who do report on religion depend on their own religious background or on a small number of sources from the religious communities they cover. Some reporters build on their own, often rudimentary, religious education; others rely on quick briefings. Editors, too, often miss religious stories (Briggs, 1990) because of a common – or, at least, American – willingness to separate church and state or to regard religion as of little consequence. Like Stalin, (“The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” May 13, 1935, quoted in Churchill, 1948, vol. 1, ch. 8), they dismiss religion. As they view the world through a lens of political or economic or technological power, they find they do not have categories that allow them to understand religious groups.

In addition, journalists often lack the knowledge and familiarity with world cultures to help them understand, or at least to have a context for understanding, the role of religion across the world. Every religion, even the most global ones, exists deeply entwined with the particular cultures of its adherents, influencing those cultures and sometimes bearing the characteristics of those cultures – to the point that people find it hard to distinguish cultural and religious reality. Where journalists do not understand these situations, they most likely draw conclusions about religion from their own cultural or personal experience. While this may hold some value, it may also mislead them.

However, whatever their preparation, journalists must deal with religion. Religion and religious figures do play public roles and, as such, do influence society and do lead people to act, more often for good, but occasionally for ill. The danger for those who depend on the news media, of course, lies in how easily journalists and their editors may miss important stories, of good (like the American Civil Rights movement, begun in the churches of the South), of great international moment (like the Khomeini revolution in Iran), or of evil (like all those listed above). In each of the cases outlined above, where religious leaders failed, the news media failed along with them, missing the stories until they became simply too large to ignore and perhaps too large to fully comprehend.

In each of these cases, one could well argue that some kind of news coverage, some kind of public scrutiny would have helped both to foster public understanding and to keep the religious groups faithful to their own principles – and in the best world, to have prevented the atrocities. Where religious figures participate in atrocities, they betray (consciously or unconsciously, for whatever combination of reasons) their own goals and obligations. In retrospect, most would acknowledge their participation in such atrocities as evil. If one accepts the watchdog function of the communication sector, then journalists and others had a clear role to play and did not play it as well as they might have.

Such journalistic failure encompasses both the factual error – not reporting or not recognizing the story – and an ethical error – not doing what we have seen. White terms these the kinds of communication that they think “should be carried out in order to respond to the problems of human and social existence” (2008, p. 2). That journalistic failure has many causes. Among other things, the varying reasons for ignoring evils done under the name of religion point to two of the complicating factors of this ethical question: the role of cultural difference, particularly in terms of attitudes toward religion, religious authorities, and the social place of religion, and the level of knowledge that journalists bring to the task.

The perspective outlined here accepts the fact that people’s religious beliefs and behaviors do play a role in society. The public consequence of even private belief places religious actions into the social position that everyone in society should expect to know what religious groups do. Insofar as these acts affect others, then those others and their representatives – even those from other religious groups – can examine and criticize the religious behaviors of every creed. The more difficult question, to which we shall return, remains whether such criticism takes place from within or from outside the religious world view of the religious group.

Just this initial examination of the role of religion and the role of journalists has identified four ethical issues: (1) The relation of religious groups to the news, as subjects for the news; (2) The role of the news media vis-à-vis society, as watchdog, as information source about the full range of social actors; (3) The preparation and training of journalists in terms of religion and culture; and (4) The duty of journalists to the religious groups, providing the public scrutiny that leads to accountability. Given the public and central role of religion in society, each issue has a clear response: the public accountability of religious groups; the duty of reporting all sectors of society; the competent preparation of journalists; and an obligation to take religion seriously, even from the outside.

Whatever their situation, journalists then have the initial role of publicizing the actions of religious groups. However, the limitations mentioned make it difficult to do so. In practice, journalists rely on codes of ethics.

Journalistic Codes

Codes of ethics and professional codes of conduct function as a kind of shorthand. They exist to guide people who may not have the time or freedom to reflect on their actions. A code, preferably short and easily understood, condenses the wisdom of practitioners and theorists so that an individual can act responsibly by following the code. When faced with religious complicity in atrocity, a journalist may well rely on a professional code of ethics to guide the preparation of the story.

Cooper et al.’s work (1989) offers two appendices of codes of ethics relevant to journalism and communication. While incomplete and “uneven” in their translations (p. 291) and perhaps somewhat dated, the codes still provide some idea of the ideals to which journalists around the world adhere. The first assemblage includes codes from Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Turkey, the United States, and the then West Germany. The second, international codes, includes those of the International Federation of Journalists, UNESCO, the Federation of International Editors of Journals, and the common statement of working journalists.

Here follow some of the key principles (note that my summary here does not reflect the full and detailed codes of ethics, but only some of the key ideas):

A few of the codes – particularly from countries wracked by communal violence – include either the positive encouragement of respect for ethnic, racial, linguistic, or religious groups or the negative prohibition of the vilification of any group based on its ethnic, racial, linguistic, or religious identity. A number of the codes also add specifications for personal ethics: a prohibition of journalists’ accepting favors or acting from self-interest, for example.

Individual countries or associations of journalists offer interpretations of each of these principles. As one might expect, the core values may well receive different emphases in different situations.

Given their nature, the international codes of ethics tend to take a more general approach as Merrill (1989) points out. While common ground exists, “a journalist’s ethics stems from his own background and value system and is tied to his nation’s political and social system. Such a recognition does not give much support to the idea of international codes of ethics” (p. 289). The international groups agree on the public’s right to information, the right to open expression, the promotion of peace and understanding, “the journalist’s dedication of objective reality,” “the journalist’s social responsibility,” a “respect for privacy and human dignity,” a “respect for public interest,” a “respect for universal values and diversity of cultures,” and “the elimination of war and other great evils confronting humanity” (Cooper et al., 1989, pp. 334–335). Similar to the items culled from the national codes above, these general principles also require local interpretation.

Just as the role of religion vis-à-vis journalism exists between the poles of taken-for-granted and non-interference, so too the role of journalistic ethics (as enshrined in these codes) exists between poles of universal and particular. In a discussion of communication ethics and universal values published some years after the work of Cooper and his colleagues, Christians and Traber (1997) note that communication ethics “has to respond to both rapid globalization of communications and the reassertion of local social-cultural identities” (p. viii). This compounds the difficulty of covering religion and religious involvement in atrocities: the particular may not immediately attend to the universal and the universal may not easily yield to an understanding rooted in the particular.

Here the codes of ethics fall distressingly silent. With the exception of those codes that caution journalists in terms of inciting communal violence, none of the codes provides any explicit guidance for covering religious groups. However, parts of existing codes could provide guidance on dealing with religious groups or individuals behaving badly. If we then choose key ethical principles from those lists for journalists faced with reporting the actions of religious authorities, we might have guidelines something like these:

These five principles of journalism, already accepted in the various codes of ethics, provide a theoretical foundation for journalists’ reporting on religion in general and, more particularly, on evil carried out in the name of religion or by religious leaders. The principles themselves, though, point to further underlying ethical issues: (1) The identification or definition of evil; (2) The role of context and culture in understanding evil, its causes, and the role of religious groups; (3) The role or justification of an outsider as critic of a religion or its leaders; and (4) The role of the journalist and the attitude of the journalist towards the issue. The first two of these go well beyond journalistic concerns and find only a partial answer in the general principle of human rights. Different cultures and religions define evil in different ways and different cultures expect varying religious responses to evil; for example, where Christianity may counsel forgiveness, another religion may seek justice through a kind of sanctioned vengeance, whether punishment by the state or the paying of reparations. Here the first two larger questions touch the third, the standing of one who would charge religious leaders, for example, of acting badly. Should such a charge take as its ground the tenets of the faith professed by the leaders? The more general requirements of human rights? What grants anyone the right of criticism? This, finally, brings the journalist into the picture. Any journalist revealing evil carried out by religious authority must at least bring a sense of self-knowledge to moderate an initial outrage. The journalist will also need to make clear the grounding of any charges as well as the context in which both the questioned behavior and the critique take place.

What appeared fairly straightforward at the beginning – should journalists report on atrocity committed in the name of religion or by religious leaders? (Yes, of course!) – now appears much more difficult, in terms of how to do that reporting.

What To Do?

While journalists should report on religiously motivated atrocities, the greater ethical challenge lies in how they do so. Even following the principles sketched above, they still run the risk of misrepresenting religion through cultural or religious ignorance or bias. To guide those faced with such difficult tasks, here are some proposals.

First we must begin well before the reporting of evil. Better to create an environment where people avoid the temptation to act badly than to have to report evil after the fact. Religious leaders and groups need public help to see themselves in the light of their own values and teachings. Religiously interested journalists (perhaps those sharing the same religious values) and even people from outside the particular religion can provide a kind of mirror to help the religious leaders come to know themselves as others know them. What may seem an innocuous religious statement interpreted from within their own system may well lead to misinterpretation and misunderstanding and then trigger harm. What may seem like mere cultural or political accommodation may lead to an inability on the part of the religious leaders to take on (in the Judeo-Christian tradition) a prophetic role in condemning government-sponsored evils. Religious leaders need help to understand how they communicate and what they communicate. Religious leaders also need help in a globalized communication system to realize that they simultaneously address their own followers and millions of others who do not share their knowledge, understanding, values, or beliefs. For example, when Pope Benedict XVI spoke of Islam at Regensburg in 2006, his comments may have raised little surprise in the restricted circle of academic debate among scholars, but they led to widespread outrage outside that group. Here is where journalists can help both the religious groups and the wider public, giving one a sense of how they are perceived and the other a context for understanding. In taking on the role of public mirror, however, journalists and commentators cannot place themselves above religion. Their comment should find its foundation in universal values and the common good, particularly as espoused by the religious groups themselves. Those reporting on religion can also draw on the normative values, legislation, public policy, and moral philosophies in each culture. While these may go beyond a particular religion, they still reflect the cultural surroundings of the religious group, surroundings that the group itself may have helped to shape.

Second, journalists and commentators should remain true to their own role. They should report. Cautious of the danger of antireligious or anticlerical ideas, they should aim for clarity, avoid distortion, and strive for neutrality. Here the choice of stories matters as much as the framing of any given story. The journalists in a secular society must help others live as good citizens in that society and so should ask what religious information best helps their audience participate as informed citizens. Those in religious societies must similarly ask what religious information helps their audience as religious citizens. Tensions can exist between religion and public policy, between religion and government, between one religious group and another; and so the journalist should provide information to help people to understand the larger issues and even the religious values. On the other hand, a journalist should not take on the role of a propagandist nor that of a secular critic of religion. Religious groups do not need journalists and commentators to develop their theology, but society does need them to report on all the segments of that society, including the religious. For example, journalists have played a positive role in teaching a predominantly Christian United States about the beliefs and customs of Islam.

Third, journalists and commentators should develop both religious knowledge and self-knowledge. As already mentioned, journalists – particularly those faced with reporting evil done in the name of religion – must develop a religious literacy, finding expert sources who can provide information and interviewing members of the religious groups. What exactly has occurred? How does it conform to or violate the tenets of the religious group? What is the larger context of belief and action? For example, in reporting on the religious involvement in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, journalists needed to place both Orthodox Christianity and the Islamic groups into the larger nationalistic and ethnic history of the Balkans. Clearly many of the religious leaders acted badly, but to what extent did they act from religious motives and to what extent from secular ones? All too often, in this and in other stories, the narrative structure of the reports pushed the journalists to favor one side or the other.

Journalists reporting on atrocities linked to religion should also keep in mind their own interests and attitudes to religion. They face a very strong temptation to carry out a critique of religion under the guise of uncovering the evils. Such strong feelings may also blind the journalists to their lack of preparation to report the story. For example, the journalists reporting on the sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church often showed little knowledge or understanding of the past efforts of some of the Catholic bishops to address the issue; others relied on a small number of commentators who themselves had an interest in the story; and many let their (understandable) outrage color their attitudes towards Church practices like clerical celibacy.

Fourth, journalists and commentators should pay attention to the things that can inflame a story about bad behavior by religious leaders or groups. This caution refers less to conscious things than to the unconscious things, those taken for granted. Ethno- or religiocentrism falls into this category. In reporting on less familiar groups, one often takes refuge in what one knows. That habit makes it easier to stir up the passions of those disposed to agree with the journalist’s perspective. For example, news reports of the Taliban destruction of the Bamiyan statues of the Buddha in 2001 (Hirst, n.d.) led to widespread condemnation of the group for a kind of cultural barbarism, without much attempt to understand the religious motivations at work in Afghanistan. Similar prejudicial elements can enter with varieties of anticlericalism where any action taken by a religious leader can carry an antidemocratic charge. Linguistic choices matter here. Many times news reports in the United States describe foreign governments as “theocratic” or, with some skepticism, point out the influence of clergy in government. The linguistic aspect runs more deeply, too, since conflicting linguistic terms may manifest a prejudice against a religious practice. Here journalists would do well to choose neutral terminology. Finally, journalists reporting the evils carried out by religious leaders or in the name or religion should keep in mind the fallacy of attributing to a religion the faults of individuals. Even when a reporter knows this, the very story of an atrocity can easily become linked to a religious group, as when Islam receives the blame for the actions of militant nationalists in Iraq.

Conclusion

Yes, religious individuals do occasionally do bad things, abuse their power, exercise undue influence over their followers, and stir up passions. Occasionally religious leaders have no one within their own group to call them to accountability for such evil. Journalists have an obligation to report on such things and on religion, perhaps even more so when religious groups violate some commonly accepted norms of human rights or of their own creed or commandments. Journalists must however, also avoid personal prejudice and cultural blindness, based on their lack of knowledge of culture or religion. In such reporting, journalists must exercise caution in holding a religious group to values alien to it. The journalist should point out what the religious group believes and how its adherents have acted.

The journalist or commentator’s task is not an easy one in these situations. As we have seen, the situations themselves raise important ethical questions that go beyond the reporting task. These include the relation of religious groups to the news; the role of the news media vis-à-vis society; the preparation and training of journalists; the duty of journalists to the religious groups; the identification or definition of evil and the role of context and culture in understanding evil; and the role or justification of an outsider as critic of a religion or its leaders. Alongside of these concerns, the journalist must also remain self-conscious of personal attitudes and motives towards the story and towards religion.

Every religious group acknowledges that it, and its leadership, serves a higher power or authority and that its members and leadership are accountable. Even if they assert that God alone can judge, they still participate in human society and must in public ways. Here the journalist’s role intersects with the role of religion – not as judge but as witness.

References

Briggs, K.A. (1990) Why editors miss important religion stories, in Reporting Religion: Facts & Faith, (ed. B. J. Hubbard), Polebridge Press, Sonoma, CA, pp. 47–58.

Christians, C., and Traber, M. (eds) (1997) Communication Ethics and Universal Values, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Churchill, W. (1948) The Second World War (Vols. 1–6), Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA.

Cooper, T.W., Christians, C.G., Plude, F.F. et al. (eds) (1989) Communication Ethics and Global Change, Longman, White Plains, NY.

Dart, J. (2005) Foreword, in Quoting God: How Media Shape Ideas about Religion and Culture, (ed. C.H. Badaracco), Baylor University Press, Waco, TX, pp. xiii–xv.

Hirst, K K. (n.d.) Destruction of the Bamiyan statues: Taliban vs. the Buddha, http://archaeology.about.com/od/heritagemanagement/a/buddha.htm (accessed August 17, 2010).

Merrill, J.C. (1989) Global commonalities for journalistic ethics: Idle dream or realistic goal?, in Communication Ethics and Global Change, (eds T.W. Cooper, C.G. Christians, F.F. Plude et al.), Longman, White Plains, NY, pp. 284–290.

Silk, M. (1995) Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America, University of Illinois Press, Urbana.

Smith, C. (2004) Religiously ignorant journalists. Books & Culture, January, 6–7.

Soukup, P.A. (2002) Media and religion, Communication Research Trends, 21 (2), 3–37.

White, R.A. (2008) Teaching communication ethics in the African context: A response to globalization. Unpublished paper.