The Wardman Wire

I’m not a journalistic pessimist. Overall, I think the massive expansion of the media is a good thing. I also believe that truthfulness has a way of continuing to assert itself, if we are serious in attending to it. But that takes some hard work, and in the meantime there can be little doubt that modern reporting and commentary is frequently tempted to put passion well ahead of precision. A couple of recent items concerning religion might serve as an example.

Last week, a row broke out after The Times ‘reported’ the latest ‘findings’ of a well-established agency called Christian Research, which issues regular data on Religious Trends. The headlines were dramatic enough. The Times itself had Churchgoing on its knees as Christianity falls out of favour, followed by correspondent Ruth Gledhill’s God-shaped hole will lead to loss of national sense of identity. The Telegraph weighed in with Practising Muslims ‘will outnumber Christians by 2035’, while the Daily Mail’s similar take was ‘More practising Muslims than Christians in Britain by 2035’.

Then the interest groups got involved. The Church of England pronounced that Latest Religious Trends publication ‘flawed and dangerously misleading’. The National Secular Society said that the C of E was attempting to “shoot the messenger” and labelled the Telegraph’s religion correspondent as “not caring about the overwhelming evidence” that the church is “dying”. Meanwhile, Benita Hewitt defended the data (published by the Bible Society) by drawing attention both to the inadequacy of its original reporting and to the conclusion jumping of much subsequent comment.

Reality is messily inconvenient

The problem of truthfulness in all this (the quest to portray accurately what is being measured or claimed about something) is that statistics are subject to a host of variables that don’t immediately assist headline writers and summarisers. Hewitt commented, rightly, that Religious Trends is a book of data with no direct interpretation and no commentary on the numbers. So the press decided to put two sets of figures together – one for weekly church attendance and another for “active membership” among other religions.

But patterns of attendance and membership are not the same thing (either internally or externally), with the former varying between weekly and monthly (say), and the latter depending upon conflicting types of measurement. To prove the point, the March 2008 Christian Research Quadrant publication carried different statistics which bore little relation to Gledhill’s summary – one based mainly on two tables from Religious Trends 7.

At one level, it is difficult not to sympathise with journalists faced with tight deadlines, complex data and an editorial thirst for ‘conclusions’. This is why academics and researchers are usually suspicious of the media, and vice versa. Moreover, as a wise poster on Ruth’s blog points out, “most people have no idea about statistical analysis / interpretation” and “coverage of reports like this tends to be less than comprehensive.” There is also “a tendency to assume that figures tell us more than they tell us. This year’s number is lower than last years number may well indicate a decline. Or it may indicate more stringent accounting. Or any number of other things.” At which point, eyes glaze over, and fingers flick to another page or website.

Reality is incorrigibly messy and difficult to quantify. In this case, I think that Christian Research’s Quadrant tried to give a fair summary, without pandering either to those who have a vested interest in things looking good as far as organised religion is concerned, or those with a vested interest in faith withering rapidly away. It pointed out that overall, measured in a variety of ways, the churches are still facing significant decline. But in a number of instances decline is slowing, there a growth points, and it may be necessary to revise projections upwards for church membership in the immediate future.

No apocalypse tomorrow then, but certainly no grounds for complacency. Indeed, as I have suggested elsewhere, the cumulative relocation of religion in society may be far more important to look at than the minutiae of the latest data. But that is a matter of argument rather than straightforward fact.

Looking beyond the sensation

Another example of the way dubious interpretation is reported as fact came in relation to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ comments about abortion and embryology, made in an article published in the Daily Mail. Williams is what one hack tellingly described to me as “a notoriously nuanced thinker”, and this article, agree with it or not, followed suit. But the headline writer no doubt needed a ‘payload’ and dutifully came up with, “We condemn torture, rape - anything that uses another’s body for our own purpose - Shouldn’t we show embryos similar respect?”

Now if you actually read the piece (a novel idea for some!), it becomes clear that the Archbishop is precisely not drawing this kind of simplistic parallel, but is averting to a problem further down the bioethical line, the danger of a “drift towards a new attitude to human life, an attitude that is more and more fuzzy about the absolute right of an individual not to be used for the purposes of another.”

Is what is being proposed in the current Human Embryology and Fertilization Bill “in the same category as using someone’s body as an instrument for your purposes?” he asks. “Put like this, the answer is clearly no. The compassionate and responsible scientists we are discussing here are far removed from the nightmares of experimentation on living and unwilling subjects that haunt our imaginations,” he responds. In these terms, “[t]he difference is clear and no one should be trying to make debating points along these lines.”

All of this is rather dramatically sidestepped when the Telegraph then misleadingly ‘reports’ that “Dr Rowan Williams compares Embryo Bill to rape and blackmail” and the National Secular Society decides, on the basis of this exceptionally partial account, that “Archbishop resorts to ridiculous exaggeration in desperate opposition to embryo bill”.

Whether, and in what way, religious leaders should or should not intervene in such matters is not the point here. The point is that cavalier or partisan lack of attention to what people are actually saying erodes public discourse, discredits journalism and does little to credit whatever cause it is supposed to serve.

Wrapping up

In spite of the difficulties involved, it is in all our interests that a certain sacredness is attributed to fair representation and accurate conveyance. None of us are innocent in this (I have been pulled up in the past, and I’m sure I will be again), but before we use words as weapons, money magnets or convenient simplifiers we might stop and think about their potential to illuminate problems and enhance mutual understanding – irrespective, or perhaps because of, our other differences.