By RMC reporter
Newsroom editors do not always grasp the significance of religion when it comes to global affairs, Sir Mark Thompson, chief executive of CNN, told the Religion Media Centre Festival in London.
Sir Mark, a former director-general of the BBC and a practising Roman Catholic, said he found all religion “intriguing and fascinating” but that “isn’t true of everyone in our business”.
Religion correspondents, like CNN’s Vatican correspondent, Christopher Lamb, were “as expert as any journalists are in any category of coverage”, he said. Yet that expertise did not always extend to those setting the news agenda, Sir Mark told the annual event at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster on Monday.
In an interview with Mark Easton, home editor for BBC News, he said: “Do editors who make broad decisions about coverage, do they also have this expertise? Do they have sufficient knowledge or interest and commitment?
“I would say that although I’d hope that some of us do … generally in my industry often you end up with a broader editorial culture which is not particularly interested … and it’s not particularly curious or knowledgeable about religion as a field.”
The fallout after the publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie in 1988 was a “watershed moment” in highlighting the “sharp edge of religion”, he said. “We live in a world where the overwhelming majority of human beings have got some level of commitment to religion … [which] still motivates people to do many things, including conflicts and wars.”
When challenged by Mark Easton on why CNN did not have a dedicated section for religion stories, Sir Mark — who has also been chief executive of The New York Times and Channel 4 — said that of all the news organisations he has worked for, CNN was the “most focused on covering religion, with a particular focus on very big events”.
“Religion plays a much bigger part in American life than in British life for the population at large,” he said. “More often, it’s woven into political discussion,” he said in reference to public comments Donald Trump has made about God, religion and Christianity. “It’s very hard to imagine a British prime minister of any party speaking of religion in that way.”
Reporting the Vatican
Besides discussing how faith has an impact on politics, he also mentioned the year’s biggest religious story: the death of Pope Francis. Sir Mark said he was in the Vatican as Christopher Lamb was reporting live on air when the white smoke appeared. It was an “electrifying moment”, he said.
Earlier in the day Mr Lamb told the festival that covering the funeral live demanded a high level of religious literacy. During a panel debate about reporting religion, he said: “You must have expertise in what liturgy is, showing how the moments in a funeral mass might speak to a general audience, and you have to combine expertise with making it applicable and interesting to the viewers, many of whom may not have attended a mass.”
This was equally important when reporting on electing the new pope, said the writer Catherine Pepinster, a former editor of The Tablet.
“The new Pope was elected so soon after the movie Conclave had come out, which caused an enormous number of people to think they were experts,” she said. “And they patently weren’t. But the good thing about it was that people were genuinely interested in the whole process.”
The speed of Pope Leo’s election was also interesting, she said. “We’ve seen the whole conclave happen, and it’s over, done and dusted, and still we await the new Archbishop of Canterbury.”
Reporting sex abuse and the Church of England
Justin Welby, who was interviewed at the previous Religion Media Festival, resigned in November 2024 after an independent investigation found he failed to ensure that police were told about serial abuse carried out by John Smyth at Christian summer camps.
Channel 4 journalist Cathy Newman, who exposed the scandal and the Church of England’s failure to act, credited writer Andrew Graystone with helping her bring the story to light. He shared with her the secret dossier circulated to senior church leaders that documented Smyth’s “barbaric abuse” in “unsparing detail”.
When asked by interviewer Roger Bolton how receptive her editor was to the story, Ms Newman said she had been “fired up”. “I really marched straight into the editor’s office and said, ‘This is an incredible story’.”
“Senior figures within the church knew about this and covered it up. So that’s a pretty good headline,” she told the editor. “The editor was like, ‘Great, let’s do it. Let’s get on it.’ So I got a lot of support right from the start.”
Welby insisted in an interview with Newman last November that he would not resign from his post. Days later he did exactly that.
She believed part of what led to his downfall was that he had not been “across all of the details”. “He couldn’t remember what had happened when, or if you’re being less charitable, he conveniently forgot what he had been told when,” she said.
“I saw someone who was just overwhelmed by it all, and he’d arrived in this sort of deluge of abuse allegations. He didn’t have enough of a grip to keep across it all.”
Muslims in Britain
The festival delved into how other faith communities interacted with the media. Poonam Taneja, an investigative journalist with BBC News in London, chaired a panel discussion about Muslims in Britain.
Burhan Wazir, editor-in-chief of Hyphen Online, told the gathering: “One of the reasons why we were keen to launch a website in a very challenging media environment was that we felt that the role of Muslims in the UK and Europe was hugely underrepresented.”
He said the “vast majority” of stories about Muslims “tend to look at us from a security point of view or an Islamophobia point of view”. He added: “We think there’s a much more nuanced conversation to be had about access to healthcare, education, how Muslims live their lives.”
Echoing that was Rizwana Hamid, director of the Centre for Media Monitoring, which promotes fair and responsible reporting of Muslims and Islam.
“When we look at our stats, we find that when it comes to online coverage, almost 60 per cent of all articles are negative about Muslims and Islam,” she said. “When it comes to broadcast, that’s almost 50 per cent.”
While editors appeared keen to cover the “nuances” of life for British Muslims, the reality was, she said, that what made the news effectively reinforced “those age-old tropes of Islam being a threat to western civilisation”.
Such tropes were found in the “dark corners of the web” a decade or more ago, but were now “completely mainstream”, she said.
Akeela Ahmed, co-chair of the British Muslim Network, said another source of tension — the debate over how Muslim women dressed — was “exhausting”. “It’s tiresome and it’s actually a non-debate,” she said. “It’s a coded way to talk about British Muslims in a way which homogenises them, stereotypes them and dehumanises them.
“Often we see that Muslim women and how they dress, their beliefs and their practices are weaponised in this way, to demonise an entire community.”
This has contributed to the Muslim community’s mistrust of the media, the festival heard. Ms Hamid said the situation had worsened since the “entry of GB News onto the broadcast landscape”.
“GB News has an obsession with Muslims,” she said. “Over a two-year period they mentioned Islam or Muslims 17,000 times — twice as much as Sky News and BBC News put together — and the majority of that was negative.
“We’re in a really dangerous period where platforms like GB News and other kinds of right-wing and some establishment newspaper outlets and columnists are normalising Islamophobia and targeting Muslims.”
British Jews and the media
Richard Allen Greene, CNN’s former Jerusalem bureau chief, who is now training to be a rabbi, hosted a discussion about the relationship British Jews have with the media.
Journalist and commentator Jenni Frazer said: “It’s no secret … Jews are news. Most of our community would like very much to be below the radar. We’re not thrilled with the level of attention and coverage that has become the norm in recent years.”
That has obviously been impacted by the war in Gaza, triggered by the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October. The conflict has not only divided faith groups, but the Jewish community itself. In April, 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews sent a letter to the Financial Times condemning Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
The signatories are now being investigated by the board and some have been suspended. Mr Greene asked Phil Rosenberg, the board’s president, whether his organisation prioritised unity over diversity of opinion.
Mr Rosenberg said differing opinions were “completely accepted and supported, encouraged in some ways”. However, he said, the challenge was “where they’re perceived to be speaking on behalf of the organisation”.
Another panellist, Dr Jonathan Boyd, executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, said its research showed shows high community support for Israel but far less so for Binyamin Netanyahu’s government.
“There are very important distinctions to make denominationally, so those Jews who are sort of modern Orthodox to strictly Orthodox tend to be more right-leaning, more hawkish on Israel. People who are more secular, progressive tend to be more dovish, more left-leaning.”
Mr Rosenberg acknowledged that the 36 were more left-leaning, but said the same action would be taken if deputies came out in favour of “unilateral annexation of the West Bank” and far-right Israeli cabinet members Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Both men have been sanctioned by the UK government.
The question the panel was investigating, he said, was whether they breached the board’s code of conduct. “In all democracies, it’s a balance between diversity and order. If you have too much order, that’s autocracy, but too much diversity can be anarchy.
“What we’re trying to do is hold together a series of views, express a consensus, and make sure that that consensus is understood to be what it is — while other views are allowed, of course and indeed, encouraged and listened to.”
Reporting communities
Lord Rook, an Anglican priest and adviser to faith minister Lord Khan, participated in a panel on community relations and the media’s role in creating cohesion.
“If we’re serious about national renewal, there’s no way of doing that without faith,” he told the festival. He said that while it was vital that society acted to “combat bad behaviours”, such as Islamophobia and antisemitism, government must also play its role in “making good stuff happen”.
“There is a huge amount we need to be doing over the next few years to unlock the power of faith in local communities, precisely to have these conversations locally and decide what we do to foster something more positive, not just to stop bad things from happening,” he said.
The interfaith movement had brought a huge amount to the United Kingdom, but the challenge in an age of populism and social media was much bigger than any strategies of the past.
“Given the size of the challenge we face, the idea that one organisation could actually support all that this country needs to have effective relationships between faith communities and ethnic communities is crazy, Lord Rook said. “We don’t need just one organisation. We need an ecosystem that can support this kind of activity.”
The panel included representatives from cities where the Religion Media Centre had staged Creating Connections events for local media and faith groups, and they outlined their own concerns and strategy for good relations.
Manjit Kaur, co-chair of Coventry and Warwickshire Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education, said the area had come up with a motto: “We will do what benefits our children, so the conversation isn’t about politics or political leads or whatever. It’s what our children need.” Rabbi Warren Elf, from Manchester, suggested that local businesses or sports clubs could invest in local interfaith work.
From Manchester, Yakub Qureshi, democracy editor at Reach plc, said journalism was fundamental to community cohesion, reporting what had happened but also asking questions and challenging fake information on social media. For this, trust was essential to build.
This was the nub of it for Professor Adeela Shafi in Bristol, who wanted to know of the practical initiatives being planned by media organisations to rebuild trust and ensure all sides of the story were told. Feelings towards the media were not particularly positive at present, she said.
From the Midlands, Gary Newby, news editor at ITV News Central, said its diversity and inclusion panels helped its team to find and understand stories in communities, so for example, after riots in Tamworth and Staffordshire, stories emerged of people coming together to rebuild and support shattered neighbourhoods.
And on a positive note, he said, there were more reporters now from diverse communities, who brought new stories, fresh insight and more recognition of stories about religious communities.
Faith and football connected
Dal Darroch, head of diversity and inclusion at the Football Association, outlined some examples of positive measures being taken to ensure that the beautiful game remained just that — free from divisions and discrimination.
“Football is a significant component of one’s identity … whether it’s organised religion, whether it’s spirituality or your personal beliefs,” he said.
“It does shape the way we all perceive ourselves and their place in the world, and a massive connection to sport and football. So it was really important for us that we connect with our party participants that we engage, we open doors and we get out into as much of the wider communities across the country that we can and they are completely connected. Faith and football are completely connected, inextricably linked.”
Millennials and faith
Lord Rook presented the community reporting award for young journalists, which was split between Francis Martin of the Church Times and Lamorna Ash, an author.
Ms Ash joined the final panel of the day which discussed how younger people were grappling with faith in different fields of the media.
Dismissing the idea that young people were no longer interested in faith, she said: “We’re beings of longing … looking for better worlds and beauty and more connectivity.”
This was a sentiment echoed by her fellow panellists, who were all bringing faith to their audiences in new and interesting ways — from Christian BBC radio presenter Swarzy Shire, to Sikh podcasters Indy and Dr Jaz, and Islah Abdur-Rahman, Muslim founder of The Corner Shop Network, who creates viral clips.
Also on the panel was Daisy Scalchi, BBC commissioning editor, specialist factual, who was heartened by what she heard. “I’m really excited and interested to learn a bit more about the different means that we can communicate stories about faith and belief to different demographics, different age groups and just bring different people to the conversation,” she said.
