Religious News Shows Struggle to Be Heard Over TV’s Multitudes

Over the last 18 months, three 30-minute weekly religion news shows strode boldly onto television, famously called the “wasteland” several decades ago. The three shows are serious efforts to report on the moral and ethical dimensions of society. That’s good. But the question is: Does anyone know they are there?

Certainly the networks do not.

“Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” premiered Sept. 6 and is now available--when it is not preempted--on 190 public television stations. “News Odyssey” got underway a year ago and can be found somewhere in the cable welter. Fox News Channel, the 24-hour cable operation of Fox Television, started “Fox on Religion” in October 1996.

Although a solid majority of people living in the United States say that religion is important, it is hard to find many places where serious religion reporting takes place. It’s certainly not at the television networks.

And then, most of what is reported is what is called “sweet and sour”--either a fluffy piece about a church social or synagogue event, as with much of the coverage of last year’s Promise Keepers gathering in Washington, or reporting of scandal, as in Jim Bakker’s problems, or conflict, such as the denominational disputes over sexual mores.

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Too rarely do we hear about religion at the core of the way we live and move and have our being, such as the striking mushroom workers in Quincy, Fla., who cite the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Roman Catholic social teachings on the right to organize in their dispute with Quincy Farms. Or how, for the past decade, in a comparative religion class taught at a major university, the students are increasingly American Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims wrestling with their own beliefs rather than Christians and Jews studying about other faiths.

On television, however, entertainment is paramount.

Television’s “god is brevity,” said Bill Moyers, known for the multiple dimensions of his TV work. “Even when television captures the emotional religious experience of its subjects, it can’t explain it historically, psychologically or analytically in ways that honor [religion’s] complexity and diversity.”

But polls suggest that Americans want television--where a majority get their primary news coverage--to pay more attention to religion. According to a poll in TV Guide, 56% of adult Americans believe that prime-time television does not pay sufficient attention to religion.

They might be right. Ninety-nine percent of network news coverage from 1993-96 ignored religion, according to the Media Research Center.

Into that gap have come the new programs.

“News Odyssey” is produced and largely financed initially--$1.4 million of the $1.7 million needed for the first year--by United Methodist Communications in Nashville. It began a little more than a year ago and continues to be available each weekend on the 9-year-old Odyssey Network, sponsored by an interfaith coalition of about 35 religious groups, on hundreds of cable channels.

In the Los Angeles area, the program airs at 6 p.m. Sunday on cable systems that carry the Odyssey Network full time, including Century Cable, Comcast, Cox Cable, Jones Intercable, TCI and Time Warner.

“Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” began in September 1997 on 20 public broadcasting stations and now appears on 190. It has been funded for 39 shows by a $5-million grant from the Lilly Endowment to WNET, Channel 13 in New York, and expects to continue for at least another year. The program is put together in the Reuters studios in Washington. WNET sends it out on Friday afternoons.

“Fox on Religion” appears Fridays at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time on the Fox News cable channel and originates in the Fox studios in Manhattan. It is hosted by Carol Iovanna, a longtime TV anchor. When Fox started Fox News Channel two years ago, it sought to provide in-depth coverage of subjects such as psychology, law, education, health and, yes, religion.

The program--18 minutes of news, 12 of commercials--usually devotes its time to single topics such as televangelism or the pope in Cuba.

“Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and “News Odyssey” begin with crisp current religion news items. Then they present three or four longer pieces. The span ranges from the 100th birthday celebration of Dorothy Day, whose Catholic Worker movement concentrated on the poor, to the impact of Christian rock on worship.

“News Odyssey” has an interesting editorial comment. “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” often has a panel of ethicists or religion experts who discuss a timely issue, such as the current presidential crisis that was featured on a show released at the end of January.

A central theme of both has been the growing diversity of American religious expression.

“Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” which airs at 10 a.m. Sundays on KCET, has a staff of 15. Executive producer Gerry Solomon has worked as an executive producer for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CNN.

He joined the show, he said, because “here my values are in play.” A practicing Conservative Jew, Solomon left behind a program on finance that “asked no ethical or moral questions.”

Longtime NBC News reporter Bob Abernethy created the show and now hosts and directs it. Abernethy, an active member of a United Church of Christ congregation, emphasizes that “this is news reporting, no apologetics for one point of view.

“But it’s another thing to cover ethics and religion. We’ve learned a lot. We have a lot to learn. We need to improve, quickly.”

None of the three programs is perfect. But they are a step in the right direction and already challenge the networks to take religion seriously. Check them out . . . if you can find them.