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KAVU Anchor Chases Religion On Weekends

Wow. How refreshing and encouraging. I'm serious.

This guy really stands out in a business where recent and credible surveys show more than 85 percent of its practitioners profess to have no religious beliefs.

Most TV reporters were raised in homes where religion played no role in their lives. Consequently, they have little or no knowledge or understanding of religious teachings, which is why their coverage of religion issues is so superficial and painful to watch.

I watched a TV story on a Houston TV station several years ago, reporting on the Pope's appointment of the new Archbishop of Galveston-Houston. The reporter stated that "Christians in southeast Texas now have a new spiritual leader."

Being personally acquainted with that reporter, I ran into her a few days later and asked her about her story. I was astonished to learn that this person, educated in a respectable school of broadcast journalism, did not know the difference between Catholics and Protestants. In fact, she didn't even know what a Protestant is. She thought all Christians are alike, and that the Pope rules over all of them.

How is it possible that in a country where 75 percent of the people say religion is important in their lives, that someone could grow up, be educated in public schools, and graduate from a respectable college, and be so woefully ignorant of things religious?

This is why I cringe every time I see a story about churches and religion coming up on my local TV.

This young man in Victoria appears to have his priorities straight, but I hope he's happy where he is. There's no way a major market station would allow one of its anchors to be a minister on weekends.
 
I don't care about the religious beliefs of a journalist (or any public figure, for that matter). That is their personal, private business. However, I would have a big problem if they injected their convictions into their reporting. This guy is going to soon realize that he can't serve "two masters".

See also: Frank Turner (formerly of WXYZ-TV in Detroit).
 
Rollo-Smokes said:
I don't care about the religious beliefs of a journalist (or any public figure, for that matter). That is their personal, private business. However, I would have a big problem if they injected their convictions into their reporting. This guy is going to soon realize that he can't serve "two masters".

See also: Frank Turner (formerly of WXYZ-TV in Detroit).
Click to expand...

What is acceptable in Victoria may not be in Det-riot.
 
Rollo-Smokes said:
I don't care about the religious beliefs of a journalist (or any public figure, for that matter). That is their personal, private business. However, I would have a big problem if they injected their convictions into their reporting. This guy is going to soon realize that he can't serve "two masters".
Click to expand...

That's what FilioScotia was trying to point out: the Houston reporter cited was injecting her religious convictions into her reporting, i.e., that there is no difference between Protestant and Catholic. Ignorance of religion was her conviction. Injecting non-religious convictions should bother you too. And that's even more commonplace.

It makes no sense whatsoever for anyone to assume that a person's religious activities would interfere with his weekday job. I know many who hold down full-time jobs during the week and pastor churches on Sunday, and do so successfully. My grandfather did for nearly 30 years. My father did so for about 10 years.
 
The reporter wasn't trying to inject her religious convictions into anything. She had no convictions to inject.

She was showing her ignorance of organized religion, by stating that ""Christians in southeast Texas now have a new spiritual leader." She should have said "Catholics in southeast Texas...etc."

I found out later that she didn't know that not all Christians are Catholic, and she didn't even know what a Protestant is.

What's sad is that she's typical of most TV reporters. They know little or nothing about how religions, churches and denominations are organized, and even less about the beliefs of the various religions. And it shows in their inability to deliver intelligent insightful reporting when they cover stories about churches and religions. It would be like sending someone who knows nothing about oil or how oil wells are drilled to cover an oil leak. We see that every day on the networks.

Here's another good example of this kind of ignorance in another situation. I was covering a big story at the courthouse in Houston, where an a Pro-Life group had filed a lawsuit against a pro-abortion group. I heard one of the TV reporters ask one of the plaintiff's lawyers how much jail time the pro-abortion people would get if they lost the lawsuit.

She didn't know the difference between a civil lawsuit and a criminal case.

Is it too much to ask for TV reporters to do a little bit of homework before they cover a story about something they know next to nothing about?

The late great Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko never tried to hide his contempt for TV reporters. He stated flatly -- and I agree -- that local TV reporters, as a species, are the stupidest and most empty headed people on Earth.
 
FilioScotia said:
The reporter wasn't trying to inject her religious convictions into anything. She had no convictions to inject.

She was showing her ignorance of organized religion, by stating that ""Christians in southeast Texas now have a new spiritual leader." She should have said "Catholics in southeast Texas...etc."
Click to expand...

Whew!

Agreed...this has nothing to do with injecting your personal religious convictions.

This is simply an uninformed reporter making a very large error because they did not properly research their story. In the market where I worked, this particular goof up would have been a firing offense.
 
I don't insist that a reporter "be" a Christian to cover a story about the church. However, I DO insist that a reporter at least know something about the Catholic and Protestant branches of the Christian church, and something about religious beliefs generally.

This comes down to what reporters bring to their job. Linda Ellerbee has given speeches all over the country on this subject, and everywhere she goes she urges people who want to go into broadcast news to go to college, get a broad well rounded Liberal Arts education, and stay away from degrees in Broadcast Journalism.

Ellerbee says, and I agree, that a degree in broadcast journalism is a worthless waste of time and paper. Any reasonably intelligent person can learn everything they need to know about how to put news on TV in about 30 minutes.

People who want to be good reporters -- electronic and print -- should spend their college time learning as much about the world as they can absorb; things that are important to the people they're going to be covering, no matter where they end up working. Politics, economics, social problems, the arts, the humanities, churches, religions and religious issues, whether they have any religious beliefs or not. Even if you're not a believer, at least make an effort to learn why many people are believers.

And, most important, never stop learning. They should always be reading something. Anything they can get their hands on. It will make them better reporters.
 
I might point out that Shaun Rabb at KDFW Fox 4 in Dallas has been a preacher for years. I went to a wedding once and was surprised to find him officiating. He was very good.

I think you can do both if neither calling detracts from the other.
 
Until a Muslim complains about having a Christian minister delivering the news, saying his or her reporting of anything involving Muslims is biased and not to be trusted.

Don't laugh. It'll happen.
 
I've personally held a regular job during the week and preached on Sundays. Hopefully, the preaching didn't change the numbers in my spreadsheets for my regular work. ;)

That being said, there is a FAR greater issue here. The reporter in question didn't do her homework -- PERIOD!! It wouldn't have mattered if she were talking about religion, medicine, or aviation. Her job is to gather the facts and do the research before putting together a story. We are getting equally ignorant reporting on health, aviation (in which I am well-versed), immigration, and so forth. It's surprising how bad television news really is.
 
You're right but that's not the point here.

The point is that while all Catholics are Christians, not all Christians are Catholics.

The reporter was completely ignorant of that fact.
 
You blame the reporter, but the copy could have been changed by the producer or management, or maybe it was a consultant thing. Someone in the chain might have tried to broaden the appeal of the story by making it more inclusive. In the newsroom, no man is an island.
 
Yes I blame the reporter because the reporter said it in a live report standing in front of the Cathedral in downtown Houston.

It's doubtful that the producer would have changed it had he or she known what she was going to say. They're as ignorant of these things as she, because producers were all reporters at one time.

It's an industry wide problem, from top to bottom, because most of the people in the news business today -- more than 75 percent of them who responded to a national survey -- said they were not religious, and religion played no role in their lives.

You're trying to excuse a reporter's complete ignorance of the story she was covering. Why?
 
It happens: some individuals just don't know much about religion. A reporter covering such a story should have known better.

I've also had an assignments editor tell me we should get video of an Easter service at a Catholic church because "...it's a Catholic holiday." When I pointed out that it's not limited to Catholics, he said "but it means more to us."
 
FilioScotia said:
You're trying to excuse a reporter's complete ignorance of the story she was covering. Why?
Click to expand...

Been there, done that, where I disagreed with an important point of the story but was voted down. You want someone in particular to blame. But you just don't have all the facts.
 
Folks, I think you're mixing different issues here.

The OP noted that news anchor Chase Gillmore is also a preacher on weekends. FilioScotia then opined that was a good thing, assuming that a preacher would at least be more knowledgeable about religion than the Houston TV reporter he brought up. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily follow. Becoming a preacher doesn't necessarily require someone to learn about religions other than his/her own.

The converse isn't true either. Many atheists are quite educated about all major religious traditions, if only to improve their debating skills.

I think we all expect reporters to be reasonably knowledgeable about the topics they report on, including religion. But we also want them not to have any hidden agendas. If they bring their own perspective to the news, the viewers should know what it is.

Those are two different things, and being a preacher doesn't guarantee either passing the first test or failing the second.

Whether Mr. Gillmore passes those tests is something for his viewers to decide. As for whether he's able to report stories involving Muslims without bias, well, there are already plenty of non-preaching reporters with problems in this area.

BTW, I'm quite skeptical that anywhere near 85 percent of reporters "profess to have no religious beliefs" in the US, where only about 15 percent of the overall population describe themselves as non-religious. This sounds like a misstatement of a 1982 (not "recent") survey by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute (which, depending on your views, you may not find "credible") which concluded that 85 percent of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism students (not journalists in general) identified themselves as liberal (not irreligious).

Here's the link to Cato's study, if anyone cares:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj20n3/cj20n3-7.pdf
 
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