Note: Crossposted at StreetProphets.

Despite a drumbeat of public criticism by Faith in Public Life and others about biased exit polling on religion by the major media networks, the exit polls continue to ask more questions about religion to Republicans than Democrats.

I wrote yesterday in my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column in the debut issue of Religion Dispatches about how this bias distorts our understanding of religion among both parties.

Here's the current tally:

• 25 states have had both Republican and Democratic primaries
• 20 of these states had state-wide exit polls
• All of these states asked more questions about religious affiliation to Republicans than Democrats. (Only one of these, AZ, was a Super Tuesday state).

Upshot about the major media exit poll bias:

• They have asked Republicans about religion in every exit poll, but have NOT asked Democrats ANYTHING about religion in 3 states (IA, MI, NV).
• They have NOT asked Democrats ANYWHERE about whether they were "evangelical or born again."

It's time for the media to update their script and give us balanced coverage of the role of religion in both parties.

Labels: evangelicals, exit polls, media, primaries, religion

Note: This originally posted 2/5/08 on Religion Dispatches, a new daily online magazine dedicated to the analysis and understanding of religious forces in the world today, highlighting a diversity of progressive voices. I will be writing a regular column, "Dispatches from the Beltway," there in 2008.
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Old plotlines die hard, especially when they have the seductive clarity of binary divides: right vs. left, Republican vs. Democrat, us vs. them. Nowhere is this tendency truer than in stories about religion. We have witnessed a real sea-change in the relationship between religion and progressive politics since 2004, and some of these shifts have been noted in major news stories, such as the growing coverage of the complexity of the white evangelical community. But too often, the mainstream media is still trying to force the current complexities and realignments into an outdated script.

In my former life as a software designer, we lived by the mantra, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Media storylines about religion and national elections, and thereby public perceptions, are driven by two major factors: exit polls (controlled by the major media outlets) and the selection of sources for stories by reporters. There is mounting evidence that much of the mainstream media is operating with a perversion of this mantra, a kind of “garbage in, gospel out” approach that begins and ends with its own self-verifying, dated stereotypes about religion in American public life.

The heart of the old script was the mythology of the so-called “moral values voters”--voters who were highly religious, Republican, and supposedly cared about prohibiting same-sex marriage and abortion above all else. We now know that despite the hype, the single exit poll question upon which those conclusions were based in 2004 was deeply flawed.

In a New York Times Op-ed four days after the 2004 election, Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News and a dissenting member of the team that drafted the questionnaire, cautioned that the inclusion on the exit poll of “this hot-button catch phrase…created a deep distortion--one that threatens to misinform the political discourse for years to come.” A series of subsequent polls, such as the American Values Survey (AVS), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life in 2006, showed how distorting these assumptions were. AVS found that Americans in fact think mostly about “the honesty and integrity of the candidate” when voting their values. Even among white evangelicals, the group that was supposedly synonymous with “moral values voters,” only 1 in 5 (19 percent) thought primarily about the hot-button issues of abortion and same-sex marriage when voting their values.

Since 2004, much of the mainstream media has unfortunately continued to reinforce the assumptions that religion is only relevant to conservatives and Republicans. A recent study by Media Matters for America, "Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media," documented the continued bias in linking conservative politics and religion. The study found that while media coverage of religion has increased significantly since 2004, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories nearly three times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

Despite these well-known problems, in the exit polling in the 2008 primaries so far, the major media news outlets have once again pulled out their dog-eared script on religion and politics as they constructed the exit polls. In the Iowa and Michigan, Democrats weren’t asked about religion at all. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, more questions were asked of Republican voters on faith than Democratic voters. And nowhere have Democrats been asked if they were evangelical or born again, despite the fact that in 2006 white evangelicals made up 11.3 percent of the Democratic house vote nationwide, casting slightly more votes for Democratic candidates for example than black Protestants.

Even noting the source of objections to this practice is a testimony to the new religious landscape. Leah Daughtry, Chief of Staff of the Democratic National Committee (and herself an ordained Pentecostal minister) recently lamented in a Washington Post Op-ed that the biased exit polls drove media stories that

“often fail to acknowledge that people of faith are and can be Democrats.”

Similarly, a group of prominent evangelical leaders also objected to this prejudicial polling, declaring that these surveys

“pigeonholed evangelicals, reinforcing the false stereotype that we are beholden to one political party.”

As these leaders attest, this skewed coverage is damaging both to politics and to religion and diminishes our understanding of American public life. Hopefully the media will update their script with more equitable exit polling and balanced sources heading into Super Tuesday and through the home stretch of the election cycle.

Labels: dispatches from the beltway, evangelicals, exit polls, media

This post originally written for Third Way Culture Project and can be seen here.

When I hear complaints about the “liberal media”, the additional adjective “secular” is usually a part of the phrase or not far behind. For example, last summer at the so-called “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, DC, speaker after speaker referred to how the “secular liberal media” has neglected religion and distorted coverage of religion and conservative values. A new study by Media Matters, however, documents two key findings that debunk this tired mantra: 1) since 2004, coverage of religion by the media has increased significantly; and 2) this coverage has actually been biased in favor of conservative religious leaders by a factor of nearly 3 to 1.

The new Media Matters for America report – Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media – demonstrates that the clear conservative bias in coverage of religion since 2004:

• Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

• On television news – the three major television networks, the three major cable news channels, and PBS – conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 3.8 times as often as progressive leaders.

• In major newspapers, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed 2.7 times as often as progressive leaders.

(You can check out the highlights of the Media Matters press conference here.)

What are progressives to make of this? One response would be to concede the religious ground to the conservatives and simply lament the increased coverage of religion, which seems to bring in its wake increased coverage of conservative viewpoints. But one of the most exciting things happening in progressive politics today is that political progressives are remembering (even if the media are still coming around) that “religious” and “conservative”, “Christian” and “Republican” are not synonyms. Progressives are awakening from their short-term amnesia to remember that the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the abolitionist movement—in fact virtually all major progressive political movements in American history—have had influential progressive religious voices helping to lead the charge.

Progressives are also realizing that the American religious landscape is much more diverse than the skewed media coverage leads the public to believe. Just a glimpse of some findings from the American Values Survey conducted in 2006 by the Center for American Values in Public Life illuminates our real religious diversity:

• The vast majority (9 in 10) Americans consider themselves religious, and most (50%) Americans are Religious Centrists.

• Religious Traditionalists—the voices overrepresented by the media—only represent 18% of Americans.

• Progressive Religious Modernists weigh in at 15% of the population, nearly matching the size of Traditionalists that too many assume are the whole of religion.

• Even among conservative religious groups such as white Evangelicals, only 44% said that conservative religious leaders like Pat Robertson and James Dobson represented their views.

• Despite the insistence by conservative religious leaders that religious Americans cared mostly about hot-button cultural issues, AVS found that more than 8 in 10 Americans agree that too many religious leaders use religion to talk about abortion and gay rights and don’t talk enough about more important things like loving your neighbor and caring for the poor.

So, progressives need not lament the increased coverage of religion—an important and influential part of American life—but the Media Matters study demonstrates that we need to demand better, balanced coverage that fairly portrays the voices that are both religious and progressive. Fortunately, there progressive religious leaders have been organizing and working to educate the media through efforts like Red Letter Christians, Faith and Public Life’s Voicing Faith Media Bureau, and Catholic Alliance for the Common Good’s Voices for the Common Good Speaker’s Bureau.

Progressives should encourage a more informed media that will not only paint a more accurate portrait of religion in America but it will also give the American public a more accurate understanding of what religious Americans care about—a broader religious agenda that goes beyond conservative values and hot-button issues to include progressive values and other moral issues like the budget, poverty, the war, and health care.

Labels: media, religion