On my local news stations, on stories involving someone missing, someone found, someone who survives a tragedy, or someone who doesn’t survive a tragedy, they will almost always air a clip of someone leading a prayer for God’s help, or someone saying that their relative is now in Heaven, or saying that God protected them For Some Special Reason. Here is the latest one (not my local station’s site, but same story.)
So do all parts of the US put so much emphasis on airing clips of crime victims and their relatives asserting their religious faith, or is that more of a regional pathology?
Where is your local news station? That type of thing is common in the South where I am originally from. It isn’t very common in the Boston area where I live now but it isn’t unheard of either. There are a whole lot of hard-core Catholics around.
I am not especially religious myself but I never took offense at that type of thing. It is really people trying to show unity and that they care. It is more of a cultural norm that doesn’t have much to do with a specific religion.
I’m in South Carolina. Unfortunately, it looks like not many of the aired stories have printed transcripts on the station sites (or else I’d be getting many more hits for searches for Jesus and God) but here is one fairly typical recent example. Not that not only does the piece have quotes in two places about God and miracles, but the reporter even says that the girl has a story that is “meant to help others”, showing that even the reporter is officially claiming that the girl’s survival had a supernatural purpose.
Can’t find the quote I think is from H.L. Mencken. Something like “You can’t throw your hat out of a train in middle America without hitting a fundamentalist”
I avoid the radio *; but in Britain there’s a couple of classical music stations, a mumsy national station to pump out BBC values and a 100,000 inane chirpy stations to bring the latest pop.
On none of them is God or religion mentioned, outside maybe, a deliberate religious programme lasting 5 minutes on the BBC, if longer it devolves into a pompous debate on ethics and comparative religion — just like Religious Education ( RE ) at British schools ( ‘Be nice to everyone; all faiths are valid; what do we really know ?’ ) — any DJ mentioning Jesus would be out within the hour.
However we are not noticeably more ethical than Yanks; so if they like that sort of thing no doubt it does little active harm.
I wouldn’t mind a schlager station — I believe one may exist in High Germany — but I’d get bored after a few hours.
One more thing to realize about this: most professional news systems have more or less “canned”, or pre-programmed formats to report any and all news that they present. Those formats are not arrived at by constant monitoring of what their customers want from them, they are usually arrived at the same way most corporate social conventions are formulated: they borrow them from elsewhere and elsewhen, and then repeat them until there’s a serious public fuss against them.
As one of our least revered political handlers said to interviewers on behalf of his Don, or directly to that Capo di Tutti Capi himself, in Britain, “We don’t do God.”
If the people of the area say things like that, why are you concerned that the news people put them on the air? It seems you upset with people who invoke religion in times of trouble, not really with the TV station. Maybe you ought to not be less concerned with the religious practices of other people.
I can only recall it done in a reporting style, saying that the people involved claim it was God, usually placed at the end. Something like “The doctors say they do not know how this happened, but as for Mary-Jo and their family, they believe it was a miracle,” followed by a brief snippet of them saying . I also hear the “thoughts and prayers” stuff if a local tragedy is reported.
Nothing with the actual reporters making their own claims one way or the other. Not because their listeners are not Christian, but because they are not priests or anything, and thus in no position to report on God’s plan.
That said, I haven’t watched any local TV news in a long time. I may occasionally catch a clip, but it’s likely to be from anywhere in our country.
The last thing I remember is some local football star who died being eulogized as an inspiration for us all.
It’s probably part of the old adage: “if it bleeds, it leads.” The reporters want to get coverage of the emotional effects of the event on family and friends. If family and friends manage their emotions with religion, you get footage of them managing their emotions with religion.
I worked in local news for a long time. The introduction of God Stuff in a story can be a bit annoying. But, in the example you linked to I think the man’s mention of praying and God adds to the story. It happened. Reporters often ask for people’s response to the news event. This was this man’s reaction. It’s real. It’s part of the story.
Other times, however, media goes out of it’s way to introduce religion where it’s not part of the story. that’s just pandering and trying to sell ad time at higher rates (because of higher ratings from Jesus-Folk).
ETA: It’s worthwhile to remember that part of the original mandate of broadcasters (before massive corporate lobbying totally deregulated it) was to serve a community’s particular needs. When you somewhat tilt toward religion in a religious community you are generally upholding that mandate.
Yes, but the stations have a choice of which 10 seconds of the interviewee’s comments to broadcast. And they always choose to broadcast the section where they are praising the Christian God. You can rest assured if one of the area’s tiny number of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or other religious groups praised their god, gods, or assorted supernatural forces, those 10 seconds would never see the light of a TV screen. It is absolutely endorsement, not objective reporting.
Paul in Qatar, it’s one thing when my neighbors or the clerk at Walmart say some thing about god or they’ll pray for me or have a blessed day. It’s quite different to have the news reporter saying those same things.
That is not my experience. I won’t say it’s part of every such news story, but not at all uncommon. Here is a page from the web site for Sierra Lamar-- one of the most famous, recent missing teen cases in the South Bay. Not a new story, but the sentiment is still there.
The reporters are trying to catch the families in their emotional turmoil, and many Americans turn to religion in such times. It’s going to be more common in certain areas, but I doubt there is any region in the US where it’s absent.
Yep. I doubt reporters are commonly encouraging religious statements, while challenging or editing them out would cause complaints from another quarter.
Sometimes news media (especially local) will credulously back up someone’s claim that woo (religious or otherwise) had a miraculous effect on health or other matters, but it’s not typical in my experience (including time spent as a Satanic parasite among the godly in several states).