Gary Gilson: My name is Gary Gilson. I'm the Executive Director for the Minnesota News Council. I welcome you on behalf of the News Council. First I'm going to do a commercial for the News Council, because I think it is germane.

About 1-1/2 years ago, during the election campaign season, I got a phone call from a woman in St. Paul who said, "I'm upset with City Pages, the alternative weekly, because in the capsule profile of candidates running for the school board in the City of St. Paul, they list me and they say that I'm running for the school board to advance my Christian Right agenda." She said, "It's really funny because I don't have one."

I called the managing editor of City Pages, Monika Bauerlein, and she said, "I'll check it out." She called the freelance reporter who had written the story and then she called me back and said, "The reporter said he blew it. He doesn't know where that came from. I think what I'll do is invite her to write a letter to the editor that we can run next week. What do you think of that, Gary?" I said, "Well, I think that you have a much greater opportunity here than to ask her to write a letter in which the burden is on her and the letter will look self-serving. This is a great opportunity to seize - not accept - but to seize responsibility for the mistake you made. She didn't make it. It will really make an impression upon your readers about how open you are to complaint and inquiry." And that's what she did and the woman was satisfied and I am sure the readers of City Pages feel more confidence in that publication. I think that's interesting because it is something about the dynamics of news decision making that most people have no idea about.

We'll start tonight by introducing our guests. Here is Mike Tighe from the Catholic Bulletin, and his colleague, Bob Zyskowski, in the middle is Clark Morphew from the Pioneer Press, and next to him is Martha Allen of the Star Tribune, and Susan Hogan Albach of the Duluth News-Tribune. They all write about religion. Let's just get a sense of who they are. I am going to start with Martha. Tell us about a story that you think was fascinating, important and impactful.

Martha Allen: Let me preface it with this, one of the things I have discovered in nine years of covering religion is the tremendous power that it has in people's lives because it has had a tremendous effect on my own life.

The story I would pick that had the most power and impact was a trip that I took to Israel in 1987 with Harvey Eagan and Alla Bozarth. Harvey is a Catholic priest here in town whose job it is to make life impossible for the Archbishop. (I think he has done a pretty good job of it over his lifetime.) Harvey had never been to Israel. Alla had not either; she was an Episcopal priest who was ordained in protest. She was one of the 12 original women ordained in Philadelphia. (I just think she is a gift from God.)

The story was simply a spiritual journey of these two people, plus their connection, Mary [Lufgen], who is a marvelous woman and an Episcopal laywoman and travel advisor. The four of us went around Israel. I had never been there and it had an enormous impact on me personally. I remember standing on the Sea of Galilee on a Sunday morning and we had communion. Now, I'm a pretty ordinary mainline Protestant. In fact, I was raised in a secular humanist home and sent to Methodist Sunday school. I had never really understood the concept of eating somebody's body and blood. All of a sudden, I remember standing on the shores of Galilee and we were doing this and I got it. I said, "Oh!" It was an incredible trip for me and, in that story (deep in that story, I must say), I quoted Harvey as saying, "You know that old saying 'If Christ be not risen, then your faith be in vain'? well, sorry, I don't believe it. I don't care if they found his bones here today, he is still my savior whether he rose from the dead or not." Now, that was in 1987. The Archbishop hasn't forgiven me yet."

Clark Morphew: I would like to talk about one of my columns. Four or five years ago I wrote a column in which I said that there is no such thing as a satanic network as Pat Robertson and others had been saying on television and radio. I got a tremendous amount of mail. A woman from Augusta, Georgia (my column is syndicated) gathered together 100 of her friends and went to the publisher of the newspaper and asked him to get rid of me. He refused. I began to realize how much influence I had. When 100 people will gather and go to that much trouble to get rid of you, I guess you have some influence.

Mike Tighe: I will mention two stories, one from my current status in the religious press and another from when I was in the secular press at a daily newspaper. I am using them because they were an opportunity to give people who normally don't have a voice, a voice.

The one that I wrote for the Catholic Bulletin a couple of years ago was a story on Yusef Mgeni, a prominent black man in the Twin Cities. When he was a young boy, an alter serve, on a religious track in school and the nuns were kind of grooming him to become a priest, he went away to a Catholic camp. He was kidding around the pool and I guess he had gotten into an altercation with another kid, and somebody grabbed him by the neck and said, "You nappy-headed nigger. You're not going to be able to act like that." And he sent Yusef back up to the camp and he wasn't allowed to go near the pool the rest of the week. He didn't ask him what the situation was or anything. He fell away from the church after that happened, got farther and farther away. Then, in adulthood, was able to tell the story of how he got back to the church.

The other story I would like to mention was when I worked for a daily newspaper in Iowa back in the mid-'70s. They passed a state law that teachers could negotiate in public so I started covering the negotiations where the teachers were asking for a quarter of a million dollars and the School Board was saying, "No, we are going to give you $5,000." The school teachers started calling me after I wrote the stories and they said, "You know, the rumor around the teacher mill now is that you are going to be fired for printing this stuff. Aren't you concerned about your job?" I said, "As long as I print what is true, I am not concerned about my job." I think that is generally true.

Sometimes reporters will do whatever they can, including lie, to get a story, but I have also run into religious figures who have lied to prevent a story from being in the paper. So, the truth doesn't always set you free, and there have been instances where it has set people free of their jobs (but that is for a later discussion).

Susan Hogan Albach: I would change the question a bit to reflect the approach that we have for religion coverage in Duluth. Our community is not as diverse so our approach is different. Until last year I was called the religion reporter, now my beat is called Values. There are three components to that, one is ethics, one is organized religion, and the third is spirituality.

When it comes to organized religion, we have a whole lot of Catholics and Lutherans and not much of anything else. You can literally count the Muslims, there are now 15. You can literally count the Bahai's, there are less than 30. And there are only about 500 Jews. When people talk about the ecumenical movement, often they are talking about the Norwegian and Swedish Lutherans getting together for a Lutefisk supper. So there are a whole bunch of readers who we aren't reaching by just focusing on religion.

The spirituality component focuses on that inward experience or seeking of the sacred. There are many people who talk about their spirituality who aren't involved in organized religion. We have six reservations within our readership area and we heard from the Native American community that they would prefer that we use the word spirituality. There are also a lot of people who are self-described shamans or practitioners of alternative religions, which typically are called the New Age movement. They gather around Lake Superior and it is considered a place of healing. So I do stories that focus on each of those groups and then stories that cross over. For instance, a year ago I did a story on drumming from three different perspectives: that of a white male shaman, of a Native American drummer and pipe carrier, and that of a Roman Catholic nun who is integrating drumming into her practice of Catholicism.

Another story I did earlier this year was on the dances of universal peace, which many of you probably know about because it is huge here in the Twin Cities and it is growing across the country and it has been active in the Duluth area for about one year. They dance simple circle dances and, while they do that, they also chant phrases from various world religions. I saw a lumberjack from Ely in his flannel shirt chanting to Krishna and Allah and Jesus in the same night. It is really fascinating and it brings together a wide range of people and that is of great interest to our readers.

Bob Zyskowski: A few years back I got a phone call to inform me that [Heime] Cardinal [Sin] of Manilla, in the Philippines, was coming through the Twin Cities and wouldn't it be wonderful if the Catholic Bulletin interviewed the Cardinal. This happened to be not too long after the Marco's overthrow so there was a little more interest in covering that story. But it would be too easy, I thought, for us to rehash the Marco's overthrow story with the religious connotations that story had, with the lady saying her rosary in front of the tanks. I got the idea to ask the Cardinal, "How do you pray?" He just jumped at the chance to answer the question. He talked about getting up early in the morning and getting on his knees first thing and praying, then going about a full day of parish visits and meetings and then praying again just before bed and forcing himself, before he goes to sleep, to get on the telephone and, as a result of his prayer, phoning the folks that he felt he had somehow hurt that day and apologizing to them.

I think that getting such a good answer from him about that question sort of influenced how I am able to bring up the subject of prayer and spirituality when I talk to other people. I think it influenced other people at our newspaper, too, because they then had a reporter do a whole series asking people how they pray. Some of the answers were incredible. The pastor of the rectory of the Cathedral prays best while vacuuming. I think that kind of story is one that we don't do often enough. We don't get into that personal faith level.

Gilson: That's why people are here. I want to turn on this overhead for just a moment and ask why Roger Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles wrote a letter to "60 minutes" in which he said, "That story you did this Easter about the Catholic Church was really good. I liked it. But the media cover religion the way they cover politics. The media miss the faith dimension and the faith experience, which don't readily translate into controversy."

This is the complaint that caused us to gather this meeting. You all, with the exception of the satanic story, went immediately to stories that have to do with the faith dimension and the faith experience. Is Cardinal Mahoney right?

Allen: Editors want the stories but they don't know what to do with them. They get very nervous because the stories are too deeply personal. Readers respond to them extraordinarily.

Morphew: I think that is one of the reasons the Pioneer Press put me in the Features department in the beginning, they just didn't know how to handle those kinds of stories. Now I'm in the newsroom and they want conflict stories. Conflict stories aren't all bad. When you have a conflict, that signals a trend is happening and if you play that right you can explain a lot to people. But I agree with Martha, they just don't know how to handle those kinds of stories.

Allen: I tend to save faith stories for holidays. The 1987 trip to Israel was the Easter piece that year. I asked Harry Piper one year if a rich man can get into heaven. It was an extraordinary interview, but I did it for Easter.

I remember asking a woman named Signey Anderson who had been a lifelong loyal Lutheran and lived in the same house on the same block in Minneapolis for all of her 87 years I asked her what was her faith journey like through all those years. She believed in the rapture and it fascinated me and I kept asking her about that. But I was doing it for Christmas. It is much easier to do those stories for particular holidays, otherwise editors don't know what to do with them.

??: Is it okay to complain amongst ourselves? I think that we live our lives of faith 52 weeks a year, seven days a week and to relegate news or religion to Christmas, Easter, Ash Wednesday, Rash Hashanah, is the wrong approach.

Tighe: I think the Cardinal hit on part of the problem when he says the media cover religion the way they cover politics. However, with all due respect to the Cardinal, it has been my experience that religious figures, particularly in the Catholic Church, but also in other faiths, do religion - do faith - the way politicians do politics. When you call and ask a simple question, they will defer or they want to know why.

I'm not sure many Cardinals would answer the question "How do you pray?" without saying, "Well, I'm going to have to get back to you when I think of it."

I'm not trying to say that the media are saints. As I mentioned before, I've seen reporters lie to get a story, I've seen religious figures lie to prevent a story. But a lot of times when the media look at the faith dimension they run into a stone wall. It's almost like Churchgate.

Hogan Albach: Being from a smaller paper, my problem is just the opposite. Before I came to Duluth six years ago they never had a full-time religion writer. They had someone write occasional stories, usually about people making quilts and sending them to missionaries overseas. They had stories about the faith dimension or something of that sort, something lighter ( as we tend to call them in journalism). I have no problem getting those stories and, in fact, am given a quote of one a month.

What has been harder, initially at least, was getting the harder news and getting my editors to see that we can do stories about how religious communities are responding to problems, such as sexual abuse and domestic violence, that that is news, and getting the religious community to respond to that. I remember a Methodist minister calling and saying, "You can't write that about me. It is your job to make us look good." Somehow my job was perceived to be one of promoting the faith and not looking at the hard issues.

Gilson: So we have editors guilty of not getting it and religious leaders practicing religion the way politicians practice politics. These are some of the things in the air. What's on your mind?

Audience: The idea of focusing on the holidays, as some of the panelists have mentioned, that approach sometimes lends itself to really weird -------. I'm thinking of last year when there was an article about the Ramadan month-long fast and in the same section there was a whole section of pork recipes. I would very much be in favor of taking a more holistic look at the holidays.

Audience: I think the news weeklies, and indeed some of the monthly magazines, do a better job of really plumbing ideas of faith and God and redemption and so on. If it is not irregular in news magazines, why do daily newspapers seem to pull back and have skittishness about it?

Allen: That is a complex issue to answer. Part of it is the personalities of the people who run the paper. I have said for years that I am lucky because Tim McGuire is the editor now. He is a very active Catholic and always very interested in religion. That also means that when I do stories that are things he doesn't want to know about his own church, the threshold gets extremely high.

But most editors, and I have seen this happen over and over, are simply uncomfortable with the topic. It is partly the atmosphere in the newsroom - we are all cynics and questioners, that is why we are there - and partly we really are reflective of the secular nature of society.

I remember having a big staff meeting because I was trying to get a story in the paper that offended some conservative Christians on the news desk and they simply killed the story. This huge fight erupted. I just let it swirl around me for about a week and then we finally had a meeting. There were about 75 people in this room just yattering at each other and I heard myself say "You know, I am a Christian." It was as if time had stopped. My good friends and colleagues turned to me and looked at me like, "What?!" (Partly because the Christian Coalition has stolen the word.)

I've seen liberal editors get extremely uncomfortable with the subject. They dance around and dance around. Finally you begin to learn what the parameters are.

Morphew: Here is an example. Two Easters ago I did a story on the whole Jesus movement and Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borden and all these people. People are just hungry to find out who this Jesus is. It is not an evil thing. The executive editor spiked the story. It inadvertently had been sent over the wire and it appeared in the Duluth newspaper. So we were scooped by Duluth on our own story.

So this year I went in to him and I said, "I want to do another story about this whole historical Jesus stuff. Are you going to spike it like you did last year?" He said, "I won't run it the week before, the week of, or the week after." And I said, "You know Walker (his name is Walker Lundy), I just didn't realize that we were in the business of protecting religion."

Gilson: There is something very unusual going on here. I remember reading a story within the last six months that when people were asked what kind of news they crave more than anything else, religion news ranked, if not at the very top, near the top. So then are we to allow the skittishness of some editors to get in the way of what the people want? After all, these news organizations, both television and print, spend thousands of dollars on focus groups to find out what you want. What is going on?

Tighe: The difference might be between answering a poll and contacting a newspaper. You always hear the quote that more people go to church on Sunday than go to athletic events all week long. Unfortunately I suspect many of them are going to church because they have to, their faith requires them to, out of guilt, a spouse is forcing them to. So while the number may be more, you would not get by dropping a sports section even for one day without hearing from readers?

I think readers have to tell editors that they want the religion stories. Denominations have to make faith important enough to people every day that they demand it as part of their daily newspaper, too.

Morphew: When I first started at the Pioneer Press 13 years ago we had two pages and very often my story started on the front of the Express section and jumped to the religion page. Now we have half a page and all they can get on that is my column. That is because we have secular leadership that just doesn't see the value of religious news. We can't fight it all by ourselves. And yet the Dallas Morning News has started publishing a six-page religion section every single week. They've got three reporters and a researcher working on that thing.

Gilson: What kind of response are they getting?

Morphew: I don't know. I will tell you something else, the Religious News Service was just purchased by Newhouse News and the former editor of the Pioneer Press, Deborah Hall, is the head of that bureau in Washington. She talked Newhouse into buying RNS from the Methodists and boy are they turning out some good stuff.

Audience: I would like to return to something Mr. Morphew said - is the press in the business of protecting the church. No, I don't think so. I've been a pastor for 11 years and a part-time freelance writer for about as long and I think the media and churches have different agendas, and that's okay. The more clearly we articulate that expectation on our respective parts, the better we will all be.

My issue comes from my experience when the media simply hasn't dug deep enough to get the right story. I almost had a riot on my hands when my pastor-husband and I were doing a retreat on human sexuality for our confirmation kids the exact same week that the papers were all reporting that the Lutheran's statement on sexuality supported homosexual marriages. That was not the truth of the matter. It was a working document: it was not an endorsement, it did not represent the official position of the Lutheran Church, but at least in the Ohio papers, where I was living at that time, that never made it into the paper. It was presented as a completely finished fact, this is the way it is, this is what Lutherans across the country think.

A few years ago when the Jesus Seminar met at my seminary, it was reported that the Lutheran Church supported the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar when, in fact, it might have been a more interesting story to report that the Jesus Seminar had applied for meeting space and funding under basically fraudulent grounds. What they said they were going to do and what they actually were about were deliberately deceptive and that would have been a better story.

I don't think we expect the media to protect us. We are called to live lives that are open books. If we are screwing up, the public needs to know that. We have no reason to expect to hide behind anyone. But we do have the right to expect fairness and balance, and getting the facts straight.

Morphew: David Briggs wrote that sexuality story. He is an AP religion writer. He had a very pedestrian kind of lead on that story, turned it in and the editor said, "Punch this up. We want to get homosexuality in there, masturbation, and condoms." What are you going to do? I mean, you can't fight for every story.

Audience: In the world of religion, misquotes, misattributions, those kinds of things are absolutely damning and there is very little redress.

Allen: There is the same redress there is in politics. The thing that fascinates me about (religious) institutions is that they don't talk to us. They don't call us the way politicians call us. I can't get to the Methodist bishop of this state and I'm not alone. One of the reasons that I like Jack Roach so well is that he will talk to me. He may not tell me what I want to hear, he'll tell me, "I won't talk about that." But he will call you back, or he will have Joan Burnett call you back. He is very straight about it.

There are two things going on in American journalism. One is that most journalists are ignorant when it comes to religion. Clark and I have sat in on many a press conference (and Clark has much more training, well, Clark has training, I don't, in religion), where the TV stations sent somebody down and he and I have just rolled our eyes at the questions that they ask. They are ignorant.

There is also something else going on in journalism that a lot of journalists are talking about and trying to do something about - we are all so mean. The model of being mean started for journalists during Watergate and it has taken off and it is the model that we use now. I think Mahoney was kind when he said we cover religion like politics. We do go for the controversy. We are mean.

Audience: I was wondering what the panel might think about the possibility that this skittishness on the part of editors or, perhaps the failure to ask the right questions by reporters, might lead your readers to think that secularism is the religion of our nation and that religion itself is minor in our life.

Tighe: [Secularism] is a big part of our lives. We are losing people from the mainline churches and the Catholic church right and left because of secularism. It has had a great impact on my family.

??: I'm not sure it's the media that is causing secular humanism to rise. I think the media reflects what is going on in society. But also, I think there is a mythology that says people don't care about religion, that if you care about religion you are behind the times.

Morphew: I remember I went to the printer to pull off a story that I had just completed about a Catholic priest who was retiring and he was a big guy in downtown St. Paul. One of the hockey writers was standing at the printer also. He picked this thing up and looked at it and looked at me and said, "Good God, are we still writing about those people?" That is some of what you have in a newsroom. You have that kind of cynicism about religion.

??: Are you still writing about hockey players?

Audience: I would like to hear you talk about how you make news judgments. What sort of criteria do you use in deciding what's newsworthy and, the companion question, how does that differ from what churches and religious organizations and, for that matter, publicly religious people think is newsworthy?

Allen: I always ask myself, "Is the reader going to be able to relate to this in any way? Am I interested in this?" I figure if I'm interested in it, then at least one person is interested and I bet nickel some other people are too. I often use the look on my assignment editor's face. If I walk up and say, "I want to do a story on..." and if his eyes glaze over, I don't even bother to sell it any more. If he looks kind of interested, I will keep burrowing in until I have sold him on it.

Gilson: Prerequisites of traditional news judgment: Is it near here? Are there important or famous people involved? How timely is it? Is it bizarre? (That doesn't mean this is a good prerequisite. That has forced people who are desperate for news coverage to get bizarre real fast, which is a corruption of everything.) I would suggest that the most important one is if it's interesting innately and if it is going to have an impact on people generally.

Audience: I have a comment and a question. I am hearing that one problem is editors. Doesn't that just mean that you all have an important role in bringing articles to the editors? I think there is a power within those stories that will carry them. It is not something that you, as writers, have to sell but if the article captures enough of what is really going on within that faith experience it might move even an editor who is extremely cynical about religion. But it puts more of a burden on you to present stories that have that kind of power.

I also, as one of the religious community, have always viewed it as part of my responsibility to pray about the editors and the whole thing to getting it published. I think that there is a spiritual responsibility and power that we, as a community can help you in presenting those articles.

The question I have is this, one of the other problems with covering religion, is that often if it is a breaking news item, reporters from different parts of the newspaper end up covering it. We might have spent a good amount of time with you in explaining who we are, what our faith community is about, then all of a sudden there is another writer from another beat covering the story. Is there any way that within the paper you can network so that when religious issues are involved, you could have a voice in that?

Allen: Reporters are constantly asking us for sources, for names, "I'm doing the story on this, what does it mean?" Sometimes it doesn't happen enough. Usually it is with wire stories. I see something in the paper the next day and I say, "Why didn't you ask? I would have told you that this piece of it is simply wrong." But, don't forget, we come out 365 days a year, we have to keep feeding the beast. The phrase at the Strib is, "That was a real great in today's paper, what have you got for tomorrow?" It's all one sentence. "Thank you, what have you got for tomorrow?" People simply run out of time.

We have all blamed our editors, or the atmospheres within our newsrooms for a lot of this. We do bear the greatest responsibility, but we also learn over time where the boundaries are, and we just don't bother to bump up against them anymore because we have to feed the beast.

Gilson: What can they do? You need their help?

Allen: Call. Has anybody noticed that the Star Tribune hasn't covered religion for five months? Has anybody called? No. In fact, I have been kind of miffed. Where have my people been? But I can't call Chuck Lutz and say, "Chuck, call and complain because there is no coverage in the paper." That's unethical.

Gilson: Is there anything else they can do?

Allen: Call with ideas. Write letters to the editor. Take a chance. You are going to run into ignorant reporters with bad questions. You are going to be misquoted. It's going to happen. Take the chance anyway.

Audience: Tom Brokaw said he sees a tremendous resurgence in spirituality because baby boomers, who grew up without any formal religious training, are looking for some kind of spiritual dimension to their life. He said he expected it to be bigger than any trend that is now part of our lives, like health, for instance. Do you see that, and if so, do you expect that religion coverage will be any different?

Allen??: Yes and yes. I think it already is. If you go back 20 years ago and look at the clips of the kinds of stories that were done then, they were almost all institutional coverage.

??: Go to a Catholic church in Apple Valley on an evening during Lent when it's -5° and the place is 3/4 filled with young adults. The place is just jammed with people in that baby boomer age group who are looking for something. I think it is interesting.

??: But if you went to a Catholic church in Apple Valley and it wasn't Lent, it might not be quite as filled. If there were more people interested in religion we wouldn't have the circulation problem we have now. I think part of the problem is people are interested in spirituality, and I think the institutional churches are going to run into trouble if they don't realize that. People look to spirituality, not to institutionality. People don't feel they can get spiritually fed at the institution. In the Catholic Church they have adopted secular terms, Archdiocese are no longer heads of the local church, they are the "central corporation." That just drives me nuts. Jesus Christ didn't say, "Thou art Peter and upon this 'central corporation' I am going to build my church."

??: That goes back to the criteria question about what kinds of stories are the baby boomer generation looking for. I think that it is the human interest stories that we are really missing: the human drama stories, the compassion stories, the personal sacrifice stories of all kinds of people who do all kinds of ministry, lay or clergy, professional or volunteer. I would bet that if we asked everybody in this crowd to raise their hand if they ever called a newspaper or religion editor with a story idea about a person that they know who is doing a great job at whatever, that there would be very few hands raised.

Gilson: Let's do it. How many of you have ever called a news organization to suggest a story that was important to you, that you felt shed light on an important experience about religion? It's about 10 people out of about 70.

Hogan Albach: We have been talking about spirituality in its positive sense but I have also witnessed a big downside to it and that is that a lot of people are going to church these days expecting not to be spiritually fed but to get an experiential buzz, which is what they call spirituality. I am hearing more pastors talk about wanting to entertain their congregations and there is a church in Duluth where the pastor will routinely show videos during worship from movies like "Return of the Jedi," or "The Wizard of Oz" to drive home different sermon messages. The word spirituality is being tossed about in a lot of different ways and it isn't always positive.

Audience: A lot of space in the Star Tribune was devoted to what looks like PR things from individual churches. Have you considered that instead of doing that every week, maybe an indepth article on St. Joan of Arc or Reverend Battle might be a better use of that space?

Allen: That space is the so-called Church Page. Frankly, I was told not to write specifically for that page. There are a lot of people around the country who think that religion ought to be mainstreamed, like court coverage, cops, politics, it ought to just fall into the mix of daily news because it is part of people's daily lives.

Part of the reason that that page has turned into what it is now is that I'm not covering religion. I've been told that the calendar has become as long as it has because the woman who puts it together thinks "Well, we've got to have something,"

Morphew: I sure would like to get rid of the religion calendar. I spend too much time taking phone calls and opening mail and that sort of thing. Do you look through that to see what's happening at St. John's on the corner?

??: It relegates religion of the back of the bus.

Gilson: People should understand how you make news judgments about New Age religions or other things that aren't mainstream? Do you actually judge the quality of the faith in deciding whether to devote space to them?

Allen: I try not to. I try to suspend my own prejudices because if I don't I'm on really slippery group. If I'm writing about a marginal kind of religion, I try to find some expert who studied it, who is not in it, to tell me about it.

??: I have three or four people who I think are really knowledgeable about New Age stuff and I call them and ask, "Is this bogus? Is this a legitimate thing?" They give me their opinion and I have to make a judgment.

Hogan Albach: I have a large segment of people who are New Age practitioners. We have, for instance, a large [----] community and, I guess three years ago at Halloween time I profiled a member of that community and that was very well received. We only had one letter complaining about that story. There was a lot of balance in the story, giving opinions of people who don't embrace this as well. We do have a lot more stories than you would find elsewhere, just because of our population.

Paul Rucker: I think I am probably the only Neo-pagan in this room, to judge from appearances, and we have received very little public coverage. Some of that has to do with the fact that there is a lot of prejudice against Neo-paganism. I have a vested personal interest in getting more representation here because I have been involved with the Pagan ----projects for the legitimization of coming out of the broom closet, as the expression is used.

I came because I wanted to know, if you are a member of a minority spiritual culture, especially if you have something going on that is newsworthy, what is the best way to get attention from the media?

Morphew: First you send us a press release telling us what is going on and then you follow it up with a phone call. You're probably not going to get into the Catholic Bulletin or the Metro Lutheran. I am certainly open to doing stories about Wicca and Neo-paganism. I've done them before.

Rucker: How far ahead of time from the event to be covered do you like to receive it?

Morphew: I would like two weeks lead time.

Audience: I wanted to make a comment about what Mike said. If I weren't Catholic or if I wasn't aware of the teachings of my Catholic tradition, I wouldn't want to be Catholic. In the media all I hear about, or all I see, is so much abuse. Every day there is (something about) priests who are abusing alter boys. The media is so powerful. Most people's idea of the Catholic Church becomes the abuse and Mother Angelica on TV and that's it.

Morphew: We do other stories. I think at this point a priest abusing a child would probably play inside. I remember the first story, it was front page, 1A. Then it slowly moved back to the Metro front and now it's inside and usually brief, that a suit was filed against the Catholic Church. One of the problems is that, as Martha was pointing out, we have to fight for space and many editors favor that kind of story.

Allen: I do think there is a lot of Catholic bashing in the media, not just the news media but the entertainment media as well. You know the latest move out about priests: there's a drunk priest, the molesting priest, the guy who wants to get married, and that's it. I haven't seen the movie but it is my understanding there is no happy priest who is satisfied in his vocational choice. Well, that's not true of the Church.

We have done surveys that show that they are very happy, but part of the problem for the Catholic Church is because it's very hierarchical it's much easier to sue than a lot of Protestant denominations. For some reason I don't understand, also, the Protestant denominations have been better at taking care of the abuse cases before they get to court so you don't hear about them as much. We have had polls that have shown that there is far and away more Protestant clergy abuse than Catholic clergy (abuse).

Audience: Sue, you mentioned the breakdown of your job into values, spirituality and ethics. It is interesting, 20 years ago I don't think anybody would have separated those. There is a feeling, maybe since the '60s, that you don't find value or ethics or spirituality within an institution. I would be interested in hearing your reflections on what you think led to that breakdown and how they are different.

Hogan Albach: I think your perception is very insightful but years ago we didn't do anything except institutional religion and barely covered that. So what it's doing is adding what we didn't have before. The News-Tribune has taken a number of surveys and, more often than not, people will say right at the top that they want more stories about values and how values are formed, how children are taught values.

Mnsgr Richard Pates: My name is Dick Pates and I'm a happy priest. I came here tonight to offer a little insight into my experience with the press is two-fold. I worked for six years in Washington, DC., in the office of the Apostolic Delegate and we had a lot of contact with the press. I felt that it was important for us to be very straight, direct, and as informed as possible with them. I think the when the press approach you, it is very important to take the opportunity. They are going to come one way or the other. Be as open, gracious and accommodating as you can and give them the information they need.

More recently, I'm the pastor of a merged parish called Our Lady of Peace in South Minneapolis. In one article of three paragraphs in the St. Paul paper there were eight inaccuracies about the merger of the two parishes. Among other things, it had the Metropolitan Transportation Company buying property rather than the Metropolitan Airports Commission, etc. It was a real boon for me because every time the press called I would say "I'm very concerned about the facts," and then would send them a copy of this article. And they would really be very receptive to listen to you after that.

WCCO did a piece in "Dimension," several articles ran in the Star Tribune, some pieces in the Catholic Bulletin, and in each case I tried to spend as much time as possible with the reporters and take them through the whole story, show them the physical plan and people and make sure that they talked to others, other than just those who were opposing the merger. That was successful in the sense that the articles that eventually appeared and the things that were on the screen were balanced.

I think sometimes we get a little fearful of the press. We tend to think that they are automatically going to do a job. If you are really wanting to know the slant, just ask them. "Are you just going to point up the opposition?"

What is important to clergy is our continuing relationships with the press on a very informal level. When I was in Washington, often times we met different people from the Washington Post at social functions and took the opportunity to talk to them. That establishes a very good relationship and enables you to provide information. They will call you about background.

I don't have a lot of criticism but I think we of the clergy should be factual, assertive and deal positively with the press because they are very important in our community.

Gilson: One of the many requests we get at the News Council and that I receive when I go and talk to groups is how to get news in the paper or on television. The one thing that I tell people is more effective than anything else is not to send a press release, but to cultivate a relationship with an intelligent, sensitive journalist and talk to him or her even when you don't have a story to sell. It is just exactly what the Monsignor was talking about.

Tighe: Sometimes at the Catholic Bulletin we have trouble getting parishes to call us and tell us something is going on. I don't think we have ever made eight mistakes in three paragraphs but I know we've made five in 10.

Archbishop [Weakland] wrote a comment a couple of weeks ago in which he said we must maintain the separation of Church and State but we cannot do it at the expense of the Church. I think the Church gets removed from the media and it gets removed from society. Churches have to draw the line and become that moral voice again.

Gilson: A story that came out several years ago by David Shaw, who writes about media ethics for the Los Angeles Times. He often condemns the L.A. Times. The story I'm talking about is one in which he interviewed reporters and editors all over the U.S. to ask them about the stories that appeared in their papers on abortion. He found that most reporters and editors were pro-choice. He also found that they did not skew their stories pro-choice because they were determined to have slanted stories. They came out slanted because they were so convinced that the other side - the pro-life side - lacked any intellectual rigor. He then went back to the same reporters and editors that he interviewed and said, "Look at this result. Do you recognize yourself in this?" And they said, "Oh, my God, yes." They realized how they cut off the other side of the argument at the pass. That is a form of intellectual arrogance, obviously, but it is so unconscious that you might not be able to accuse them of being arrogant.

There are only two newspapers in the U.S. - the L.A. Times and the Washington Post - that I know of, that have media ethics beat reporters. Most news organizations are so uncomfortable with a public discussion of their own ethics that they ignore it entirely. This is something you can ask for.

What I have heard tonight, and what I draw from this, is that everybody in this room has some responsibilities. The reporters have acknowledged their responsibility to do a better job of persuading their editors that certain stories are important enough to get in the paper.

Your responsibility is to call news organizations and congratulate them when they do something good and call them to hold them accountable when they do something wrong, like eight errors in three paragraphs.

You also need to say "Why are you not paying attention to this major thing in our lives?"

You have a responsibility to cultivate relationships (with reporters) and not pitch stories every time you have a conversation, but persuade them there is something they ought to be interested in so that they can pitch their desk. Somebody said earlier, "Why don't you write an article and go in and show it to them and persuade them?" They can't just go off and write articles. That's an allocation of resources. The desk has to let them do that. They are accountable for how they spend their time.

Another question would be for you to ask editors, "What qualifications do you require in a reporter who covers religion?" There are people in this city who work for major corporations who call the business section and say "How come this reporter is covering business who doesn't know how to read a balance sheet?" These are serious questions because journalists tend to be generalists and that can hurt. You have a challenge to help them and I think they would welcome your help.