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It has to be said that the book promises considerably more than it delivers. First, it chiefly concerns reporters or journalists rather than editors or corporate owners, thus favoring a kind of auteur theory of journalism. Nor is as much said as should be about the role of "experts" and commentators, and the means by which certain individuals emerge as the ubiquitously cited authorities on given topics, regardless of the plausibility of their views, or the number of times their analyses and predictions turn out to be dead wrong. It used to be said that a reporter was as good as the contents of his or her Rolodex, the range of contacts and experts on tap, and allowing for changes in electronic technology, that comment is still true. In practice, though, reliance on a few predictable commentators and interest groups mean that stories on a theme tend to develop a stereotypical structure as unchanging as the laws of the Medes and Persians.
In contrast, stories that do not attract such "expert" attention remain under-reported or unconstructed. Compare the reporting of the clergy abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, and the familiar patterns of interpretation applied to those events, with the lack of construction applied to secular counterparts. A story of an erring priest becomes the foundation for a particular analysis of church structures and problems: we already have the story to hand, and need only plug in the name of the latest perp. A parallel tale of a pedophile public school teacher, meanwhile, is reported as the isolated story of a single bad individual, without wider context or relevance. No experts or claim-makers, no wider story.
Also, the book defines "media" in strictly traditional terms, of print and broadcast outlets, with little systematic attention paid to the Internet or the blogosphere (though Paul Soukup offers some thoughts on the Internet in his essay on the Vatican's attitudes to modern forms of communication, as does Rebecca Moore on fundamentalism). However odd this might have sounded to the medium's pioneers, religion and religious activists very rapidly adapted themselves to the Internet, with long-term consequences we are only now imagining. Religion has taken to the Internet like a duck to orange sauce.
At first sight, the book seems to present eleven paired case-studies, with treatments from, respectively, an academic and a journalist, and some of the linkages work very well indeed. For example, Rebecca Moore's discussion of "understanding fundamentalism" is followed by journalist Corey Flintoff's account of modernity and fundamentalism in Mongolian society. Again, Jame Schaefer's study of "Reporting Complexity: Science and Religion" neatly segues into an article by New York Newsday journalist Joe Williams on "Fairness and Pressure Advocacy in Controversial Science." In such instances, academe and media speak to each other, and the encounters are enlightening and stimulating. On other occasions, though, the pairs are oddly matched indeed. Paul Boyer's study of "Biblical Prophecy and Foreign Policy" finds its counterpart "View from the Newsdesk" in Aslam Abdallah's "Post 9/11 Media and Muslim Identity in American Media." Both essays are perfectly solid and readable in their own right, but their juxtaposition is puzzling, and an editor could have mixed and matched the same essays with any number of other pieces in the collection. Despite the apparently careful twinning of professorial and journalistic views, then, it seems better to think of the collection as 22 fairly miscellaneous essays on the theme of religion and the media, some of which are really intriguing. The collection thus comes off as a provocative assemblage of studies, lacking the unity the editor hoped to achieve.
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