The Press, Religion and Politics
A few interesting items showed up yesterday –
Joel Campbell looks at news and blog comments, free speech, and hate speech. Do you think the fact that editing comments can be considered a free speech violation will show up on the Huckabee excuse list soon? Frankly I am surprised it has not already. Just remember one thing – a campaign web site is not journalism – it has a definitive political poit of view and is allowed to defend it.
Then there were a couple of pieces from Dan Gilgoff on the Sarah Palin movement. This one points out that her support seems to be almost purely religious, and this one discusses the fact that her faith-based support is screaming foul. In the later he then discusses how the press is supposed to cover religion since religious people seem to want it both ways.
Just a few quick comments:
1) The current Sarah Palin movement is indeed largely religiously based and it is a huge mistake on the part of the people that are doing it. I make no judgement currently on Palin’s suitability for the job – but the movement that is shaping up around her is essentially Huckabee with more class. It’s the same players with the same motives. It’s the whole “one of us” thing all over again. She has far more class than the Huckster and I doubt she would ever treat the nation to the same plausibly deniable gartbage that spewed from Huck, but it’s still identity politics. Call me old-school-stick-in-the-mud-behind-the-times, but idenitity politics are a recipe for problems. After all, it gave us the current administration, it’s already enormous batch of missteps – and this bunch is just getting warmed up.
2) Religiously based identity politics are a huge problem for religion. It reduces religion to mere idenitity – kind of like Calvin Klein or Prada. My religion is far deeper and more meaningful to me than just a label and I do not want it reduced to such.
3) Which brings me to the press coverage. The balance Gilgoff seeks lies in coming to understand religion sufficiently to not merely treat it as just another political demographic. Tell us who candidates are, which is indeed shaped in part by their faith, but they are so much more than that. So we don’t need a treatise on the religion – just the candidate.
Posted in News Media Bias, Reading List | 1 Comment » | 
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CarlH on 04 Feb 2009 at 9:39 am #
While I substantially agree with John’s comments about the dangers inherent in a Sarah Palin movement based on religious identity, I’m not sure that Gilgoff’s selective parsing of the supporters of the “Team Sarah” website is fair–and goes directly to the problem he seems to fret about in the second post about criticism of the media. Yes, he is factually correct that three of the top four groups (in terms of their own membership numbers) might be categorized as “faith-based” (but I don’t know enough about Pro-Women, Pro-Life to know if it is exclusively religious, even if organizaed around a big issue for a lot of conservative faith-based voters), but the fourth–and second largest–is “Rush Limbaugh Fans for Palin.” Moreover, there are six other groups large enough to appear on the home page (and more, I assume, but you have to register to find out who they are), none of which seem to be explicitly religious.
More fundamentally, however, I find Gilgoff’s comments about the appropriate level of focus on a candidate’s religion to be more than a little disingenuous. He mouths the correct principle:
If only the media’s focus on a candidate’s religious beliefs were limited to those ways in which they relate to positions on public policy! Unfortunately, the treatment of Romney’s Mormonism, and even Sarah Palin’s Pentacostalism, in the last election cycle amply demonstrated that most journalists simply don’t have a clue where that line is–and hectoring them about the problem only seems to embolden them in trying to silence, rather than listen to, their critics.