ABSTRACT
Roger Royle draws on over twenty years of broadcasting experience to offer reflections on the challenges of presenting religion in the news and other popular media. His chapter offers a range of stories that illustrate the complexities of ‘broad-casting’ news about religion, without distorting or patronising the audience. Recognising the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of both religion and the news story, Royle argues that treating ‘religion in a lighter way’ is essential if the values of religion are to be communicated to an audience ‘for whom “talking heads” would have been a turn off’. This approach robustly refutes ‘intellectual snobbery’. Along with a discussion of capturing and engaging audiences by embracing the media’s desire for the outlandish, Royle offers a series of insights into the difficulties raised by ‘compliance’, political correctness, and dealing with complaints from pressure groups even from within one’s own faith tradition. Referring to the ‘Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand debacle’, Royle reflects on the cautious media culture that has emerged from it. Offending people is of course unacceptable, but it must also be recognised that there are times when taking a broadcasting risk encourages people to ‘rethink their attitude to life and certainly to religion’.
Is there an inevitable clash of values – even vocabularies – between religious representatives and journalists? Royle discusses this too, pointing out the difficulty of conveying the ‘divine mystery in Sun-speak’, and also the disparity between the media’s love of celebrity and religion’s emphasis on the equality of humankind before God. These differences may exist, but Royle concludes by insisting that religious representatives must not shy away from the challenge: ‘religion has to be answerable for its beliefs and its actions in a way that is intelligible’.
