Accuracy in Reporting Religion

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

LAND: Accuracy in the press in terms of getting correct information to people about issues, including religion, is terribly important and I would suspect that as a professor of journalism that is one of the things that you try most to get your students to understand, and in your book, you point us to two pretty sobering historical examples where lack of information created a dangerous lethargy in the public at large. Talk to us about that.

OLASKY: Well, the classic example probably is right before the United States involvement in WWII. We thought, as much of Western Europe had thought, that Hitler was another political leader like other political leaders. You can bargain with him, maybe give him a little bit of what he wants, and he will compromise and so forth. The English and the French found out very quickly that wasn’t the case. John F. Kennedy in 1940 wrote a book with a provocative title, Why England Slept. He explained that the lack of understanding that Hitler was, in fact, different from their own statesman, that Hitler was motivated by a powerful ideology that over ruled the reasonableness that European diplomats tended to expect.

LAND: And it was basically because people didn’t accurately report. I mean, it wasn’t as if Hitler was a stealth leader. I must confess that I have always been fascinated by history and when I was like sixteen years old, I was reading about WWII, my dad has served in WWII, and I was reading Mein Kampf. And I kept coming out to my mother and saying, “Why was anybody surprised? Didn’t anybody read this book?” because it is all there.

OLASKY: Right, it is all there and had been available not only in German but in English translations all through the thirties and people did not take it seriously. Well, in the same way you say it is all there, the militarism that we’ve seen in Islam is all there in the Koran. Now, there are differing interpretations of certain parts of the Koran, but there is a lot more in the Koran about war than there is about peace. It is a very militant book in lots of ways—hard for people to get through but not all that long. It is only about as long as the New Testament. Very widely available, people can either pick up copies in bookstores or libraries or you can go right on the Internet and just read the whole thing. Islam, it is related to the word “Shalom,” which is peace, “salam” in Arabic, but it also is more tied to the word that means submission, and you can read the Koran and you can see the desire of orthodox Muslims for everyone to submit to Islam. It is right there. Other religions, thinking of Gandhi, we often view Hindus as pacifists but you can read, again, you can get it in bookstores or libraries, you can read on the Internet, the baggavigida, the translations of it. That’s the favorite scripture of Hinduism. It is an endorsement of war in many ways. Buddhism, we tend to think of, hey, it’s a religion of peace. We think of the Dalai Lama, and Buddhists generally having mantras and just being sweet and kind. There are a couple of books now out about the influence of Buddhism and particularly Zen Buddhism in Japan—that it was Zen Buddhist thought that really underlaid Japan’s buildup to an attack on Pearl Harbor and to attacking China. Not to go overboard on one gruesome story but you know, Richard, you’re an historian, you probably know about the rape of Nanging.

LAND: Terrible, the rape of hostages.

OLASKY: Yes, 1937 if I remember correctly and Japanese soldiers bayoneting Chinese women in Nanchang, China, and betting among themselves pregnant women, well, is it a boy or girl inside, and bayoneting the woman and opening her up, dead of course, to reveal what the unborn child looks like. So, you say, what can underlie such barbarity. Well, then Buddhism, nice as it sounds with nice collons, little mystical phrases, and things like that, there is also the sense that life is not really real, so, yes, you can engage in these types of activities and you are not killing real people. You are devoid of it in some way. Buddhism stresses non-attachment and that can include non-attachment to the consequences of brutal activities.

LAND: Marvin, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think one of the more salient points of your book, and I think that it is an excellent, excellent book, but one of the observations I think you make that is so true and has not been said quite as effectively as you say it in your book, is you say that there are two S-words that really characterize the normal U.S. coverage of the four religions, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam that exemplify what is wrong with the coverage. Talk to us about what is the first S-word.

OLASKY: The first of them is superficiality. There is a tendency among reporters to look only at externals. For example, in covering Judaism, there can be a story about the way that Torah scrolls, the five books of Moses, are carried around; but, there really will not be an examination of what is in those scrolls, the Torah itself. When it comes to Hinduism and Buddhism, the temple worship ceremonies are often very colorful, so there will be some nice stuff about, well, they are jingling their bells and here are their smells, and stuff like that, but they will not get into who these supposed gods are, what they represent, and what they are asking people to do. In Christianity, the superficiality is such that there is really very little understanding of how important it is that Christianity is a religion of grace. So, there will be a tendency to focus on certain works at times, there will be a tendency to focus on weird things, like if someone sees a face of Jesus in a pizza, that can be a story, but as far as getting into what Jesus actually taught, and the way that changes lives, that is a rarity.

LAND: And then syncretism.

OLASKY: Syncretism is the attempt to merge religions, to say, well, we all worship the same god, yet there are slightly different manifestations here and there, but basically all of these religions are the same. That is what it looks like from afar, in a sense. We could play off that old story about the blind man touching the elephant, well, you have to get up close to an elephant to actually see the different parts of an elephants body from a great distance away, maybe its just some gray mass, and say that’s an elephant to a reporter who doesn’t believe deeply in any religion and has a very superficial way of looking at them. It is very easy for that reporter to be syncretism and say, all of these religions are these same, because he just doesn’t understand the difference between a trunk and a leg, or a tail.

LAND: You also, I think, put the spot light on the role that journalists play in what you call certification. Talk to us about that.

OLASKY: Well, we tend to look very often, I mean Christians tend to look, to the press just to find out, well, who really are our Christian leaders. Who are the 25 most influential Evangelicals in the country. Oh, Time magazine says this, well, that in a sense gives additional credentials to one of those 25 people; it certifies them in certain ways as being a leader. I mean, we should not look to Time to do that in the same way that a lot of blacks have criticized the tendency to look to white-owned newspapers to find out who the black community leaders are. You can get some interesting and useful information that way; but, you know, our tendency is to buy what secular media are telling us and, as a result, a newspaper that gives a lot of attention to a particular group can help that group to gain increased influence. Certainly visibility, more people to come to its worship services and the problem is that the certification that the press tends to engage in tends to be very liberally slanted.