Media and Minorities

72
Christel Gärtner
due partly to reflection on the part of journalists and partly to the increased
presence of Muslim Germans in the media. These changes have produced a
significant expansion in the range of themes covered.
3. Elite journalists’ patterns of interpretation
regarding religion
In this section, I will characterize some of the patterns of interpretation with
regard to religion that we found among interviewees, which I arrange as a series
of propositions.16 The analysis first addresses selection criteria for media
coverage, the relevance of religion for coverage, and interviewees’ views of
religion (3.1) and, then, the ways in which their religious self-understanding
influences their actions in the coverage of religion and in their professional
ethics (3.2).
3.1 Religion as an object of professional journalistic practice17
First proposition: The selection of religious themes for media coverage complies
with criteria typical of the media system as a whole.
This proposition states that the perceived newsworthiness of religion is
subject to the same selection criteria as other topics: meaningfulness, mass
appeal, unexpectedness, the status of speakers, their orientation on conflict
and scandal, and a certain preoccupation with quantitative data, for example,
a rise or drop in the number of people leaving a church. Only in exceptional
cases, and depending on their personal habitus-formation, do journalists
decide to devote space to religious topics as such, perhaps because they
observe society’s loss of tradition and do not want to support it.18 Overall,
however, the data suggest that, for the most part, journalists subscribe to a
systems-theoretical mirror-model of the public sphere.19 We observed no
ambition on the part of interviewees that their work contribute actively to
changes in the society’s understanding of religion.
16 These propositions are presented in Gärtner, Gabriel, and Reuter, Religion bei Meinungsmachern,
chapter 2 (written by Karl Gabriel and Hans-Richard Reuter).
17 For further detail, see ibid., 33–67.
18 See ibid., 167.
19 See Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2000). Systems theory holds that the mass media offer society and its actors a
reality-constructing mirror to observe both events and the observers of events.
© 2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
ISBN Print: 9783525300886 — ISBN E-Book: 9783666300882