Week after week, I get emails from ticked-off readers who have seen run-of-the-mill mistakes in stories about religion. A few times a year I write posts about these cries for help.
The typical writer tries to imagine, to cite one example, a newspaper publishing a story containing a reference to the St. Louis Cardinals playing in the American League, as opposed to being one of the most famous franchises in the National League. Or how about a story that said the Illinois State Capitol was located in Chicago, instead of Springfield.
Now, let’s say that there was a story containing an inaccurate statement about a major religious group and it was published by the “daily paper of a town that's just *slightly* Roman Catholic — St. Louis, Missouri,” noted reader Michael Mohr.
That story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would have a headline stating: “Catholic Church of Illinois releases phased plan to reopen churches.” Then the overture, containing the same mistake, would look like this:
CHICAGO — The Catholic Church of Illinois … published a plan to begin reopening its churches later this month. The church reached an agreement with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, according to a letter from the Archdiocese of Chicago.
Catholic churches in Illinois have been closed since mid-March amid the coronavirus pandemic. …
The two-phased plan delegates many decisions for how to reopen to individual churches once they complete various training and certifications, and the Catholic Church will continue to work with the state government, according to the news release. After training during the week of May 18, all parishes across the state could open by May 23, but only to offer baptisms, weddings and funerals limited to 10 people.
What’s the problem?
Mohr (this guy sounds like a professional editor to me) put it this way:
There are six separate dioceses in Illinois. The smallest geographically, but the most populous and politically influential, is in Chicago — the only one mentioned in this article. There is no such entity as the “Catholic Church of Illinois.”
There are lots of accurate ways to state the information that this story needed to contain. How about, “The Catholic bishops of the six dioceses in Illinois” published this or that? It would have been even easier to click a mouse several times and link to the home page of the Catholic Conference of Illinois.
That site contained a simple statement of the facts — while also noting that the outspoken cardinal based in Chicago was not the only bishop who produced a letter on this topic. Note that the statements by bishops in central and southern Illinois may have been relevant to readers near St. Louis.
This is pretty easy to follow.
The bishops of Illinois’ six Catholic dioceses … released a uniform plan developed in conjunction with state and local civic and public health officials for reopening churches across the state. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker last week released a detailed “Restore Illinois” plan for reopening regions of the state as the COVID-19 pandemic runs it course.
Each bishop also released a personal letter to the faithful in his diocese, with some noting possible regional modifications to the overall plan.
Letter from Cardinal Cupich of Chicago
Letter from Bishop Braxton of Belleville
Letter from Bishop Pates, Apostolic Administrator of Joliet
Letter from Bishop Jenky, CSC, of Peoria
Letter from Bishop Malloy of Rockford
Letter from Bishop Paprocki of Springfield
Note, in particular, the reference to “possible regional modifications to the overall plan.” In other words, churches near St. Louis might use a slightly different approach than those in Chicago.
Chicago and downstate Illinois are very different places. Ask Cub fans and Cardinal fans.
Do mistakes of this kind really matter? That’s the question at the heart of that famous 2004 Books & Culture (RIP) essay by sociologist Christian Smith, the one with the headline, “Religiously Ignorant Journalists.”
Longtime readers will recall that Smith wasn’t happy, after receiving yet another call from a reporter asking questions about “Episcopals,” instead of “Episcopalians.” That reminded him of years of calls in which journalists referred to evangelical Protestants as “evangelists,” “evangelicalists,'“ “evangelics” or simply “them.” Smith noted:
These are the knowledge-class professionals who are supposedly informing millions of readers about religion in America. …
I find it hard to believe that political journalists call Washington think tanks and ask to talk with experts on background about the political strategies of the "Democrizer" or "Republication" parties, or about the most recent "Supremicist Court" ruling. Surely reporters covering business and markets do not call economists asking 45 minutes of elementary questions about how the business cycle works or what effect it has when the Fed drops interest rates. So why do so few journalists covering religion know religion?
So what needs to happen here? Smith offered this rather journalistic solution:
I propose, for starters, that from now on editors assign religion stories only to reporters who know religion just as well as their publication's political reporters know politics and their sports reporters know sports. If they don't have any on staff, too bad. Time to invest in competent religion reporters.
Part of the answer is likely the residual effect of the knowledge class presuming for most of the 20th century that religion was simply irrelevant to anything that mattered. Why gain a background depth of knowledge about things insignificant?
I realize that we live in hard economic times. Still, these words are relevant.
We need journalism solutions to journalism problems.