Journalistic pretension

Books for the places where most reporters are blind | Marvin Olasky

I've been a fan of columnist Peggy Noonan, but her latest book, Patriotic Grace (HarperCollins, 2008), seems almost like a parody of her earlier, sprightly work. She gives ominous warnings, emits long sighs, and altogether seems self-consciously writing not for a particular week or year but for posterity. Her decline is too bad, because Noonan (once a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan) knows more about the importance of religion than many other journalists do.

That may not be saying much, though, as Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion (Oxford University Press, 2009, edited by Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert, and Roberta Green Ahmanson) shows. Chapters show that ignorance has consequences: Misreporting led Americans to see the Ayatollah Khomeini as a liberator rather than a tyrant, and leads many today to think of al-Qaeda as anti-American when it's more anti-Christian. Other chapters report how most reporters missed everything from the religious influence in Indira Gandhi's assassination to the nature of the current faith-based human-rights drive.