BOOKS
Journalists, Meet Your Maker
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From Yahweh to Yahoo! The Religious Roots of the Secular Press By Doug Underwood |
From Yahweh to Yahoo! is the product of one journalist’s spiritual quest. As a political reporter for The Seattle Times in the 1980s, Doug Underwood grew frustrated at how the practice of journalism was succumbing to the influence of marketers. Fed up, he left the news business and joined the communications department at the University of Washington. While there, he channeled his bitterness into a book, When MBAs Rule the Newsroom (which began as a cover story in cjr). He remained restless, however, and in 1994 he decided to enroll in a Quaker seminary in Indiana. During his year there, Underwood explored his own roots as a Quaker, and he was struck by the rich connections between his religious heritage and the profession he had once practiced. Understanding those connections helped reaffirm for him his belief that journalism is not simply a profession like law or accounting but a “calling.”
By the end of the year, Underwood had felt transformed by his experience, and From Yahweh to Yahoo! is his effort to share what he learned. “My main purpose,” he writes, “is to unearth the way that religious values, hidden though they may be, guide journalists in their thinking and their daily tasks and how those values have been shaped by the historical developments of Western religion.” By doing this, he hopes to improve the way journalists go about their business. Reporters and editors, he believes, “are missing good and important stories by not being better attuned to the religious dimensions of American culture.” The public would be much better served, he writes, “if the coverage of religion were deeper, more perceptive, and more nuanced in its grasp of the spiritual impulse in people.”
It’s an audacious task. There seem few more irreverent places in the world than the modern newsroom. The skepticism, empiricism, and detachment so esteemed by journalists seem worlds away from the awe, mysticism, and credulousness demanded by faith. The Bible, meanwhile, seems of less relevance to journalists than Strunk & White. What does the story of the Exodus or the Acts of the Apostles have to do with the world of investigations, exposés, and scoops? A great deal, Underwood maintains in this intriguing, idiosyncratic, and ultimately maddening book. In place of the usual procession of journalistic forerunners — the mocking Voltaire, the slashing Tom Paine — Underwood offers an alternative roster of “preachers and proselytizers” whose writings, and sense of mission, helped pave the way for modern-day journalism.
Among his heroes is George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, who, in a series of polemical tracts in the seventeenth century, advocated political reform and free expression. While it may be a stretch to regard Fox’s writings as journalism, Underwood writes, they in fact represented a “raw and inspired” form of expression that Underwood calls "prophetic journalism” — a journalism of “passion, polemic, and moral opinion” that hearkens back to the preachings of such biblical figures as Isaiah and Jeremiah and that continues to characterize modern-day advocacy and adversarial journalism.
Underwood also extols Samuel Johnson. Unlike Voltaire, who loathed conventional religion, Johnson blended a sense of Enlightenment practicality with an appreciation for religious tradition. In Underwood’s view, Johnson showed that it was possible to remain open to the role that faith can play in human life while holding firm to such values as skepticism and rationality.
Ranking highest in Underwood’s pantheon is William James. Though a committed pragmatist, James fully appreciated the role that faith plays in human affairs. His work The Varieties of Religious Experience, Underwood writes, provides journalists “with a clear road map for articulating the way religious insight can illuminate life experience in the practical realm of human existence.” Journalists, he maintains, would perform their job “in a deeper, richer fashion” if, like James, they were “attuned to the way faith is lived out even in secular settings.”
This is an appealing idea. By showing more respect for the varieties of religious experience around them, Underwood is arguing, journalists could bring a new level of insight and understanding to their coverage of the world at large. Since September 11, in particular, most journalists need little convincing of the importance of faith in the world. But how exactly to apply this lesson?
Underwood offers some interesting examples. One concerns Richard Nixon. By failing to understand the true nature of Richard Nixon’s Quakerism, he contends, the press overlooked an important aspect of his political formation. In the end, Nixon’s unscrupulous actions sprang from his own warped personality, but his attitudes were also shaped by the “splits, the schisms, and the struggle for a modern identity” among America’s Quakers. Thus, Nixon’s lifelong resentment of the eastern establishment in part reflected his roots in the evangelical southern California wing of Quakerism, which was far more conservative and anticommunist than the social-activist wing centered on the East Coast and on college campuses. The press’s “blindness” to such nuances of religious life, Underwood writes, “deprived its audience of the fullest possible understanding of the religious wellsprings of Nixon’s inner nature and the way these translated into his political actions.” And so it goes with American political leaders generally. Journalists, Underwood asserts, often have a “limited and superficial understanding of presidents’ religious beliefs and the role that denominational differences play in their theological and political outlook.”
Underwood sees similar superficiality in the press’s coverage of the sightings of the Virgin Mary that have multiplied in recent years. Surveying seventy-five stories on the subject that appeared in major newspapers from April 1997 to May 2000, Underwood found that most were “one-sided, presenting only the religious claimants’ point of view.” Respectful “to the point of pandering,” he writes, these stories were “bereft of context, analysis, or perspective about what might have led to such a widespread phenomenon.” The reports omitted the views not only of skeptics but also of people of faith who might have had interesting things to say about why these sightings had increased and why so many people were flocking to them. “Most frustrating,” Underwood writes, “nothing in any of the stories discussed why Mary is such a figure of reverence.” The story of Marian visions, he explains, has “fascinating roots” that are bound up with Latin American politics, Vatican infighting, the growth of Catholic fundamentalism in Europe, and a heightened interest among Catholics in miracles and spiritual signs. That so many news outlets covered these sightings in so cursory a fashion, Underwood observes, “is a reflection of how jaded and routinized much media coverage of religion is.”
As such passages show, From Yahweh to Yahoo! is a far cry from the many research studies that have appeared in recent years chastising the press for not paying enough attention to religion. Underwood does not want sugary features about devout do-gooders. Rather, he wants stories that show “faith in action” and that “add important context and perspective to what might otherwise seem to be no more than ordinary news accounts.” Pulling this off, however, seems no easy task, and I wish Underwood had spent more time instructing us in it. Alas, From Yahweh to Yahoo! is very digressive and disorganized. It contains long, meandering discussions of such disparate topics as the press’s worship of science, the “gospel” of public journalism, and Bill Gates’s spiritual life.
Underwood also offers up a dreary, statistics-laden analysis of a survey he and a colleague conducted of journalists’ religious and professional attitudes. Questionnaires went out to 1,413 daily newspaper journalists in the United States and Canada. Based on the 432 that came back, Underwood concludes that journalists “are more motivated by religious values than they may realize.” Large majorities, for instance, reported that they attended church or were members of congregations. Even those who didn’t express such overt religiosity responded positively “to calls to put traditional Judeo-Christian values into practice in their profession.”
Yet Underwood defines such values so broadly as to render his findings virtually meaningless. Thus, he reports that many of his respondents reacted favorably to Paul’s admonition to the Galatians that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This ethic has become so deeply engrained in Western culture, however, that no doubt large majorities of all professions endorse it. Underwood’s findings seem even more questionable given that he got back responses from only 31 percent of his target population. It stands to reason that those who took the time to fill out the questionnaire and return it would be more religiously inclined than those who didn’t. Yet Underwood makes no attempt to take this effect into account.
Underwood’s drive to discern religious echoes in modern journalistic practice leads him to make some silly claims. For instance, he asserts that the romantic image of “the outsider hero” found in the story of Moses and of Joseph’s rescue and rise to power retains “a deep hold on the journalistic imagination.” As examples, he cites “Gunga Dan” Rather’s “dropping in to cover the Afghan-Russian war” and CNN’s Peter Arnett “staying on in Baghdad during the U.S. bombing in the gulf war.” Dan Rather has been called many things over the course of his career, but no doubt this is the first time he’s been compared to Moses or Joseph.
In general, Underwood finds religion in too many places. From Yahweh to Yahoo! — reflecting its own roots in a spiritual crisis — has a proselytizing tone that will put off many journalists. That’s too bad, for its underlying message could be redeeming.
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