The Mainstream Media and Religion

On Saturday I posted comments by David Meadows at Cronaca regarding the ways in which the New York Times botched its coverage of John Paul II's funeral, revealing the paper's total lack of understanding of things religious. [here] Here is another commentary -- this time from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette -- that broadens that critique to include the entire mainstream media. Excerpts follow:

Whenever Old Media get within 40 cubits of anything to do with religion, they just don’t get it.

My point exactly...,

The other day, we tuned in to CBS and saw Harry Smith & Co. on the morning show. Harry was LIVE in Vatican City, and he was—you guessed it—amazed at the outpouring of emotion and the crowds that just keep coming....

As Orrin Judd pointed out the MSM is continually being surprised that common people care about things that just aren't on their radar. The cognitive dissonance encounters with popular religion evoke must be uncomforting.

Things will be so much simpler once this whole Pope story is over and all those strange people go home to their prayer books and Ten Commandment refrigerator magnets. Then the TV cameras can go back to covering Important Issues like sex, politics, sex, race, sex, and the celebrity of the hour. Or quarter-hour. Like, say, Michael Jackson and his trial. Now that, the Old Media get.

Actually, this better describes the cable tabloid channels [other than FOX] than the broadcast news channels, although there is some truth there, especially as regards their endless obsession with politics.

Maybe there’s something in the air over Washington and New York that paralyzes the brain cells that have anything to do with belief, faith, awe, wonder, reverence, inner transformation, religious imagination or whatever term you prefer. Instead, all of that is reduced to a cloud of gaseous condescension, which barely disguises the mod commentator’s irritation at having to discuss such matters at all.

The basic problem is that the old guys who produce and present the news on the major media outlets were trained and grew up in a rigorously secular elitist environment that was contemptuous of popular religion and other manifestations of the emotional side of life. They just don't have a template into which they can plug people like Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, or George W. Bush. The key here is that people who are supposed to give informed opinion, are themselves spectacularly uninformed and are flailing around trying to fit this new information into their old templates. That's what gives rise to this kind of incoherence:

The Old Media are having some trouble figuring out what to do with John Paul II’s legacy. Lionize him as John Paul the Great? Patronize him as a simple, grandfatherly type? Give him the Reagan Treatment, that is, steer clear of too-direct criticism in deference to his long, slow decline? Skewer him as an anti-woman, anti-choice, ultraconservative, close-minded old so-and-so ? Or claim him as one of their own who opposed war and favored the minimum wage?

Failing to find a suitable template they often revert to simple dismissal or denigation.

Without any decent answers even from their Vatican Analysts, the Old Media are reduced to stirring old resentments. They "analyze" a pope the way a skeptic would analyze a magician’s tricks. Here is a tidbit from Hanna Rosin’s "news analysis" in the Washington Post, the burden of which was that John Paul II was, well, overrated:

"To the Catholics who felt betrayed by how little [John Paul II] changed the church, his popularity was a kind of trick, the thing that most reminded them of the gap between what he appeared to be and what he was."

Here we see one of the most basic forms of incomprehension. It simply never occurs to these people that the Roman Catholic Church is a global institution and as its head the Pope is not so narrowly obsessed with American upper middle class opinion as are they.

Well, you get the idea.... Read the whole thing here.