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Tim Graham, Director of Media Analysis for the Media Research Center, in a 2004 report "Religion on TV News: More Content, Less Context," asserted that television news had failed to cover religion news accurately when it suddenly becomes "hot" as it did last year. At worst the reporters -- who are secular -- have an innate bias against religion. He wrote:

That disconnect between the media elite and the public is especially risky for journalists when religion news is "hot," as it is right now. Even when the amount of religion news increases, the media's tone remains cold, questioning, even hostile. The more traditional or orthodox the religious belief, and the more influential it threatens to become in the culture at large, the more the television networks seem to explain it away, as something "scholars" and "experts" dismiss.

Graham argued that the reporting about the consecration of Gene Robinson, a confirmed homosexual, as an Episcopal Bishop was highly skewed thanks to the journalists' own biases and lack of understanding -- or appreciation -- for the theologically conservative viewpoint. Graham stated that "the orthodox believer, the observer of Scripture, which clearly decries homosexuality" would understandably not have a favorable view toward Robinson becoming a bishop. They would even view him to be a "false prophet" based on their belief in the Scriptures.

However, CBS "Evening News" reporter Bob McNamara presented the view that traditionalists held toward the liberalizing Episcopal Church "becoming officially all-inclusive to gays is a scriptural gray area these U.S. conservatives vow not to accept." The reason they do not intend to accept it is based upon the Scriptural viewpoint that homosexuality is sinful conduct, not personal opinion. Furthermore, the reporting in this case presented the argument not as one of traditionalists versus liberalizers but conservatives versus "inclusives." Only rarely are "liberals" on theological matters identified whereas theological conservatives must wear the equivalent of a scarlet "C."

The major media outlets also should seek to stop the bias from seeping into their coverage. Graham noted that the networks in their selection of religion experts tilt lopsidedly toward liberal scholars and experts who lack an appreciation for religious orthodoxy. They are presented as true experts without identification as liberals or secularists. It's almost as if a sign is hung in the newsrooms of TV networks, national news magazines and leading newspapers: Orthodox and conservative experts on religion need not apply.

Readers and viewers must start demanding that the major news outlets stop shunting the topic of religion aside except when a scandal breaks. There is much good to report about religion that is simply ignored by the mainstream news media, which discounts religion as any kind of force in the lives of their audience. As Connie Marshner, my former colleague at the Free Congress Foundation, noted, if the mainstream news media had paid attention to the charges made by another Free Congress staff member, Father Enrique Rueda, twenty years ago about the influence of homosexuals within the Catholic Church, you would not have been surprised by the revelations twenty years later that shook the Archdiocese of Boston. Back then, the mainstream news media pretty much ignored what Rueda had reported in his book, The Homosexual Network, only to later seize upon the scandal.

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