Thankfully, the media has made great strides in fairness when covering faith-driven activists—at least compared to 15-20 years ago. But sometimes a story will reveal such astonishing ignorance or hostility toward politically-active evangelicals (e.g., some of the LA Times coverage of Prop 8 last Fall). In a recent GetReligion post Terry Mattingly does an excellent job explaining four biases that affect news coverage:
The bias of space, time and resources. Simply stated: You cannot print a story if you have little space in which to print it, time to write it, or the money to hire a professional to do so.
The bias of knowledge. Fact: You cannot write a story if you do not know that it exists.
This leads to the bias of worldview. Simply stated: It is hard to write a good story if you don’t care that it exists. The result is, at best, a blind spot on religious issues, and the people who care about them.
Finally, there is the bias of prejudice. It’s hard to produce balanced, fair coverage of people you dislike, distrust, or whom you feel are irrelevant.
And Mattingly adds:
I am convinced that the first three biases play greater roles in shaping religion coverage, with the “bias of worldview” being the most important.
Most people who study media-bias issues say that the most powerful force is bias No. 2 in this list — knowledge. However, I argue that this fails to explain why so many mainstream editors go out of their way to avoid hiring trained, experienced professionals to cover religion news, while seeking trained, experienced professionals to cover subjects such as politics, law, the arts, sports and other subjects. I argue that this points toward a larger bias. At the same time, I disagree with conservatives who blame everything on prejudice. Apathy affects religion news much more often than any kind of outright prejudice.
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