Here’s a posting from somebody using the opportunity of posting here (see link).  I don’t have to know the person in order for them to be posted—anybody can post here, provided their content is integrally-informed enough.  But as it happens, I know Joe Perez; in fact, he’s a hero of mine.  I wrote the foreword to his first book (Soulfully Gay), and also happened to publish it in I-I’s imprint series, Integral Books/Shambhala.  The following is an example of his wonderful writing.  If you like it, please check out his book, which is just about to be released.  Joe, I love you, my friend.  Keep up the extraordinary work, grounded in your always already awakened Mind and Heart…..     Ken

What Good Religion Journalism Looks Like

Thursday's post by Scripps Howard columnist and religion professor Terry Mattingly "Is GetReligion a 'Christian' blog?" has inspired readers and fans of the GetReligion blog to ask pointed questions about the nature and quality of the media's coverage of religion and theology. My own brief comment (see item #10 at a comment) advised the blog's owners to look not only to the type of religious faith professed by the blog's authors, but also at their relative level of consciousness. In my view, the blog team's commitments to Christianity are also rivaled in importance by their common adherence to conservative theological impulses arising from the mythic-membership or essentialist worldspace.

In a follow-up comment on GetReligion today, religion professor and Scripps-Howard columnist Mattingly responds that I "should do more media criticism on [my]own blog. Honest." I will take his suggestion under advisement! Although unlike Mattingly I may not teach future journalists of journalism their craft, I nevertheless could and probably should comment more about the successes and failures of the media in covering religion than I do.

But before returning to my view of the media and religion, let's look at little closer at the fascinating GetReligion blog project. In February 1, 2004's "What we do, why we do it," the blogging team gets spooked out on ghosts.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don't. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don't get to see them. But that doesn't mean they aren't there.

Also so the GetReligion team scans as many newsworthy items in the mainstream media that they can find, picks out the best and worst religion coverage, and shares their opinions on what the journalist did well or poorly. The various blog team members come from around the US, but they share a common outlook: they are all relatively conservative religionists^S/S133 whose radcar screens are especially spooked by any effort by mainstream media to misrepresent evangelical or traditionalist Christianity. And so they use the tools and lingo of traditional journalism^S/S134 to question bias, demand balanced coverage, and advocate for greater representation of "doctrinally informed" religion reporters in the newsroom.

Want to know why it's unfair for the media to poke fun at conservative Mormon Mitt Romney's holy underwear? Want to learn why it's unfair for the media to examine gay couples raising children as "normal" parents instead of giving equal time to the view that they are freaks who are raising a generation of confused youth ? Want to learn why the media isn't getting the tone of coverage right on legal efforts to outlaw all abortion in Latin American countries? Look no further than GetReligion , where you are sure to find the "bias" always exists, it usually tilts to the left, and it very often shows up in insuitable places (especially the New York Times).

In Thursday's typical post "And [Pope] Benedict hates teddy bears, too" GetReligion blogger Mollie Hemingway calls a religion reporter an angry hack for snide remarks and superficial analysis of Pope Benedict's upcoming trip to Brazil. She concludes, "I hope it felt good for [Joseph] Contreras to spew this piece, because it sure doesn't serve any other purpose. I certainly don't think Pope Benedict is above reproach, but this piece is just infantile." She may or may not be right, but she's boldly willing to call other reporters on their shit (when she smells it stinking). I admire that.

From an AQAL-informed vantage point, I see most mainstream religion coverage in this country coming from somewhere between a mythic-membership and a postmodern pluralist vantage point (i.e., in Ken Wilber's terminology, amber to green). A few skilled writers also show the potential for existentially rich, multifaceted viewpoints and nuanced evolutionary models of journalism (i.e., teal to turquoise).

However, most of the more advanced teal and turquoise writers are not covering the religion newsbeat; they are writing as advocates, editorialists, and bloggers. (As a side note, Salon's Glenn Greenwald writes from a teal perspective and is a daily read for me. He's one of the most sensitive and intriguing blogger/commenters out there talking about the media's shortcomings as he does recently in " Do national journalists agree with Gary Kamiya?"). Is there room for taking a more AQAL-informed approach to the mainstream religion beat?

Of course! I feel the most urgent need for an integrally-informed religion journalism is for journalists to make use of multiple quadrant analysis in identifying the comprehensiveness of their reportage. A Four Quadrant look at religion news would insist that individual subjective and social, cultural, and individual objective are all included. If there's no room to include each of them, then the journalist should make explicit what is being left out.

From this perspective, most religion news today seems obsessed with the objective social angle^Q/LR (what mainstream denominations are doing what, and whether they will divide in order to accomodate for disagreements within their communions, etc.). Such coverage usually seeks fairness and balance by quoting individual experts to give their personal ^Q/UL or professional^Q/UR opinions regarding the cultural and social events happening in their midst. Reporters may interview, say, a religion professor who will offer that (a) Protestant US denominations are constantly multiplying and dividing and there is a historical precedent for mainstream denominations to schism when confronted with a controversial social issue ^Q/UR, but (b) she sure wishes everyone could just along^Q/UL.

There's nothing wrong with focusing on the social and cultural angle of religion, of course, but it does have its shortcomings. GetReligion recognizes that unlike other types of news stories, religious stories are often influenced by doctrinal disputes--disputes with long and complex histories going back centuries. Would it kill journalists to occasionally treat religion news with the respect of acknowledging that religionists may be motivated by doctrine and faith ^{Q/LL, UL} as well as by politics and objectivity bias^{Q/LR, UR}? When GetReligion makes this case, as they so often do, they are becoming unwitting advocates of a more integrally informed journalism. Include the Lower-Right Quadrant, they might say (if they were fans of AQAL theory), but please also look at the Lower-Left Quadrant and take it just as seriously.

Unfortunately, GetReligion falls short of a truly AQAL-based look at journalism, primarily because it neglects the roles of two of the four quadrants, types, states, lines, and (especially) stages. In terms of the STEAM acronym, they don't look deeply or self-consciously at the Stages, Types, Experiences, or Modes (and their analysis of Angles falls short, too).

On types, for instance, GetReligion always speaks about "good journalism" and "bad journalism" and rarely seems to get that different personality types have a role to shine through the objectivity of the prose and thereby enhance journalism. There is no appreciation for the contribution of both feminist (communal) and masculinist (agentic) types to journalism, for instance. There is usually only the plea for "objectivity" and abandoning petty prejudices and agendas.

But GetReligion's most significant shortcoming is its failure to acknowledge the existence of multiple stages of consciousness. Many of the problems they attribute to differences between "mainstream" v. "alternative" journalists, or between "good journalists" v. "bad journalists", or "objectivity" versus "bias" are really a very good and usually healthy myth-membership journalist's reading of how folks at other levels of conscious are doing things. As such, it's fairly predictable and can often be used to identify the mythic-membership or mythico-essentialist point of view on any problem involving religion and the media. However, it's NOT truly being an advocate of objectivity. Real objectivity in journalism would more like taking an integral approach ^S/S138

Make no mistake, GetReligion is NOT truly an advocate of objectivity. Real objectivity among journalists would be aware of its particular location and contexts of expression (not to mention its own Kosmos Koordinates). With this awareness, such journalists would formulate principles and theories for effective integrally-informed communication. These theories would insist that the proper role of the newsroom is to offer stories that strive for fairness, inclusivity, comprehensiveness, sensitivity, accuracy, and trustworthyness ... NOT merely mythico-essentialist style objectivity.

Yes, journalists should generally present two or more sides to every issues. But they must not pick out what they hear as the two loudest voices in the dialogue, usually one conservative and the other liberal, allow those voices to speak at high volume, and then say that they've done their job. Instead, journalists should acknowledge their own situatedness in various contexts and personal commitments (just as the GetReligion bloggers do), but then strive to include as many quadrants and levels in the discussion as they can (with some attention to states, lines, and types insofar as it's possible).

Good religion journalism won't just stick to the big stories, and then offer the top two conflicting sides of the issue with equal time. As GetReligion rightfully insists, good journalism should penetrate the sociological conflicts of institution/politics ^Q/LR and politics to the cultural sources in theology/philosophy^Q/LL. However, why stop there?

Newsrooms should strive for diversity of gender, race, class, and point-of-view (including religionists of different stripes) so as to maximize the fertile fields of universal types that are allowed to be given expression. This is a techy way of making the point that whites and blacks, men and women, gays and straights, etc., will often reflect their own tastes and styles in different and valuable ways ... and embracing diversity in the newsroom should enrich the stew of universal types ( e.g., masculine v. feminine styles) of writing that are offered to their audience. The result is good for everyone, especially newspapers, in building stories that accurately present the types of thinking done by readers of various types of persuasion.

But let's not stop with increasing diversity to get more universal types flowing more freely. Let's also aspire to a journalism that is sensitive to the evolutionary dynamics at work in all human contexts. Objectivity must not be seen as the exclusive pioneers of the Mattingly-style traditional journalism, lest we become confused about the ability for any human beings to truly "leap over" their own range of opinions, cultures, preferences, and modes of being into some sort of otherworldly (and delusional) "objective" truth. The alternative is not to abandon Truth. Instead it is to forge an integrally-informed style of journalism which seeks to coordinate and arrnage the multifarious voices of the newsroom into an effective whole .

Of course, we must give the mythic-membership and rationalist/essentialist journalists a place at the table! Let men and women, black and whites, yellows and browns, children and adults, Jews and atheists, old age and New Age, shine their lights! Let journalists write in stody traditional prose, or light and lively personal reflection, with occasional forays into giving expression to alternative states of consciousness. In religion coverage, let the totalitarians, mythic believers, fundamentalists, liberals, conservatives, New Age, atheist naturalist, integralists, visionary , soulful, and mystical types speak. The resulting chorus need not be a cacophany; it could be a beautiful harmony attuned to a new and refreshingly familiar melody. At the very least, it will be more interesting than listening to the GetReligion echo chamber of "see the liberal, antireligious bias!" and "please cover traditionalist dogma more accurately!" passed off again and again, interminably, as the summit of media criticism.