The Church and the Media

From allmediascotland.com:

05/08/2008

Imagine if you were a Scottish political journalist covering a vital speech here by an influential world leader – EU President, Jose Manuel Barroso, for example.

You amble down to Holyrood, only to find no-one will let you in. The speech is in English, but you can’t get a word out of the Scottish Parliament press office, and the EU refuses to release the text.

You eventually discover his words reported in an obscure EU journal – in Spanish. Your news desk has to pay to have it translated. Then, and only then, do you discover it’s a great story.

Of course, in reality, this wouldn’t happen. Full media co-operation would be taken as a given. Politicians want to promote what they say and react to what they’re hearing.

And even in today’s badly-mangled British democracy, there’s still recognition among the political class that the media do have a right to report.

Sadly, the same can’t be said of the church. Reporters currently trying to cover the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion, which finished on Sunday, found themselves physically shut out of most of the proceedings.

Journalists were given accreditation and then ostracised and placed behind barbed wire fences. They were allegedly even divided into different camps depending on the level of their malleability.

This acrimonious relationship reached ludicrous proportions last week when Cardinal Walter Kaspar, one of the Vatican’s leading figures, warned Anglican bishops at a Lambeth session that the split between Rome and Canterbury was becoming irreconcilable because of the latter’s decision to ordain women bishops.

Kaspar is a stellar figure in the Roman Catholic hierarchy and his warning, delivered in English, of huge news value.

But reporters were kept out of the hall and the Vatican refused to release his text. Papers had to resort to waiting until it appeared in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s own paper, and then get it translated back into English from Italian.

On reading this, I was shocked but not surprised. As a writer regularly covering religious affairs, I know only too well and wearily how dreadful the mainstream churches can be when it comes to media relations.

I originally thought I would have loved to have been at Lambeth, but now I’m glad I wasn’t. I’m sure I’d have ended up punching someone.

Anyone wanting to know more about how grisly it turned out to be need only read the superb blog, here, by Ruth Gledhill, The Times’ long serving and hugely respected Religion Correspondent.

Things became so bad that the media team have dubbed Church of England press staff the 'excommunication officers'.

The conference organised a session for the attending bishops called Never Say No To The Media. It was suggested that the press apply to attend, so they did. They said no.

If this sounds insulting, then it is. Most religious affairs writers, like myself, love the cut and thrust of church politics and the constantly stimulating intellectual challenges that the great religions offer.

We’re journalists first and foremost, so if we get a tasty story involving a bust-up or some ludicrously wonky theology, then of course we’ll report it. That’s our job.

But – just as many political writers have a burning personal conviction about how society should be governed – we are often attracted to the work we do by a personal sense of faith.

We’re not out to wreck the churches. It’s not our task to protect them from their own foolishness, but many of us are committed congregants and have no desire to wilfully damage institutions we love and care for.

This is where the church hierarchies get it so, so wrong. They treat us as the enemy when in fact we have the potential to be their best friends.

John Paul II is said to have loathed journalists because they committed the sin of reporting him critically and not just presenting his ponderings as propaganda.

I don’t know what Benedict thinks, though the fact that the language of his daily press releases still reads like a tract from the Council of Nicaea suggests his media relations are a work in progress.

As for Rowan Williams – well, the poor old Archbishop of Canterbury is so wind blasted from the storms of his disintegrating Anglican Communion that I don’t think he knows which way is up anymore.

It’s not much better here in Scotland. Many of the mainstream churches confuse healthy debate with conflict and run a mile from hard discussion of the issues.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a column for a monthly church magazine (not, I have to say, the excellent Life and Work, which does still have the capacity to be stimulating).

They told me they wanted me to be controversial, gutsy and hard hitting. Pull no punches, I was told. So I didn’t.

Predictably, it didn’t take long before I was asked to soften it.

Not long after, it stopped altogether.

I constantly battle with clerics and senior lay people from all denominations who have great, positive stories to tell and yet refuse to tell them. The frustration is immense.

Contrary to popular belief, most of the big churches aren’t poor, and they could afford to invest in some good media training for senior staff. It would, believe me, be money well spent.

There are times, though, when the real viciousness – the nasty, venomous, evil stuff of which modern Christians are meant to be congenitally incapable – comes not from those within the formal structures of the church, but from ordinary professing churchgoers.

Last year, I interviewed Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire, for The Scotsman, who, ironically, is currently in Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival.

In every sense of the word, and as anyone who heard him preach at Glasgow’s Episcopal Cathedral on Sunday will recognise, he was and is a true Christian – tough and steely, but radiating gentleness, thoughtfulness, love and compassion.

But he is, of course, also a hate figure for the religious right. The power of the internet meant that within hours of the feature appearing, I was being derided globally by all manner of fundamentalist fruitcakes as a failed, useless, gay loving scribbler who deserved the fires of hell every bit as much as Robinson.

After 30 years of writing for Scottish papers I thought I was pretty impervious to insults, but even my formative years rounding up collect pictures in Glasgow housing schemes hadn’t prepared me for that.

Jesus told us to spread the Good News and, in this broken and cynical world, it would be nice to do a bit of that. But when fellow Christians deliberately make it as difficult as you can, you do wonder sometimes if it’s worth the effort.

You might call it a cross we have to bear. Oh God make speed to save us….oh Lord make haste to help us….

Andrew Collier