Some in the denomination have been angered by stories the news service has written. One frequently cited is a story about the speech that Dirk Ficca, a Presbyterian minister who works for the Council for a Parliament of the World Religions, made at the Presbyterian Peacemaking Conference two years ago. The story incited a fierce debate over whether Ficca’s comments went outside the bounds of what’s considered theologically acceptable in the PC(USA).
And some divisions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have recently created public relations positions to help get their own messages out, or are considering doing so. The Office of the General Assembly recently hired a person to work in communications, for example, and the Worldwide Ministries Division has advertised such a position. So questions are being raised about where the news service fits in — whether it should in any sense be viewed as a promotional arm of the church, or whether it should have complete journalistic freedom — and about how much the denomination can afford to spend, at a time of financial pressure on news and public relations.
Among church-sponsored publications, the Presbyterian News Service is well-respected. Jerry Van Marter, the news service coordinator, points out that the Associated Church Press has named it the best religious news service in North America for three of the last five years, including 2000 and 2001.
But the news service resides in a hazardous crossroads. Its writers — two of whom, Van Marter and Alexa Smith, are ordained ministers — are employees of the church, so they are a part of the denomination. Van Marter, for example, sometimes represents the views of the denomination to reporters from secular publications. But they also function as journalists, making an effort to report fairly and freely about the organization for which they work.
Sometimes, the news service reporters benefit from their insider access. They can be handed the first crack at a story that denominational leaders want to get out. But sometimes, because they’re so close — and have been known to ask uncomfortable questions — they’re also standing in a good place to get hit.
“The news service, by virtue of being part of the institution, is not identical to The Outlook or to the (Louisville) Courier-Journal or the New York Times or anyone who is outside the church,” said Gary Luhr, who leads the PC(USA)’s Office of Communications and wrote the first draft of the document the General Assembly Council will consider. Luhr said he hopes the new document will allow the news service to operate with freedom and integrity but “at the same time be faithful to the church of which it is a part.”
The Presbyterian News Service is somewhat unusual. Some denominations expect their equivalent offices to have much more of a promotional role.
“The Presbyterian News Service, a denominational news service that is granted editorial freedom, is a strange bird,” Van Marter said. “I do not use the word independence — we are not independent.” But in trying to be fair and balanced, “I feel we are doing absolutely the best job we can,” he said. “There are some who do not believe there should be an independent news service with editorial freedom, that it should be more at the service of the institution. My argument is that the best interest of the institution is to tell the truth” about an organization that is both deeply committed to ministry and mission and, like all people and institutions, has its flaws.
‘The Role of the Presbyterian News Service’
The document the General Assembly Council’s executive committee will consider is called “The Role of the Presbyterian News Service” — and it states that because the news service is a part of the denominational structure and because its primary audience is Presbyterian ministers and elders who need to make informed decisions, the news service “has the responsibility of reporting for the denomination in addition to reporting about it. The news service should strive to include the institutional voice of the PC(USA) consistently in its reporting,” although not to the exclusion of other voices and opinions.
“The news service will often present the denomination in a positive light by reporting on events, activities, resources and traditions that give witness to Christ and the gospel,” the report continues. “However, this will not be the case with every news story. Some stories will reflect the fact that, at times, the church suffers the same frailties and failings as other institutions. Reporting these stories fulfills the church’s responsibility to connect the body of Christ by being accountable to its members and by sharing full, fair and accurate information.”
The report states that the news service should “consistently” express the denomination’s official voice through its reporting. And it says “the news service best serves the denomination through dispassionate reporting that is designed to shed light, rather than heat. Therefore, the news service should exercise special care in presenting information and, where appropriate, analysis in ways that foster understanding but do not exacerbate conflict or tensions within the denomination.”
That’s where the complexity comes in — how the denomination’s own news service can write fairly and honestly about controversial, divisive or uncomfortable subjects (and, from involuntary layoffs at the Presbyterian headquarters to the wrenching battles over ordaining gays and lesbians to a declaration by Parker Williamson of the Layman that last year’s General Assembly was “apostate,” the PC(USA) has no shortage of those).
Before going to the General Assembly Council, the report was reviewed by the denomination’s Advisory Committee on the News, which has recommended its approval. Bill Lancaster, a minister who’s on the staff of Foothills Presbytery and who sometimes writes for the news service, is chair of that committee. He says the advisory committee wants the news service to educate people about the policies and positions of the church, but also to be autonomous enough to keep its credibility.
“It’s primarily important for us in whatever we do to preserve the credibility of the news service,” Lancaster said. “We’re also going to report bad news with the good.”
While the news service may at times need to be “more intentional” about representing the church’s official positions in the stories it writes, “we’d rather avoid having a story spun by leadership,” Lancaster said. “The news service has some anxiety about this. They do not want to do anything to start us down the slippery slope of having leaders make the denomination look good when it otherwise might not . . . . We want to be clear: we’re not about spinning stories. We’re about fair, accurate reporting.”
Both Luhr and Lancaster said there have been occasional instances, although not huge numbers of them, where some in the church have questioned whether the news service was fair and accurate in its reporting — for example, when it reported Ficca’s asking the rhetorical question in his speech, “What’s the big deal about Jesus?”
Luhr said he recently read through a year’s worth of stories produced by the news service, and found that fewer than 10 percent involved any sort of controversy. Few would argue that the news service should just ignore sensitive or controversial issues, but some would say they should “do as much as is humanly possible to report those stories without increasing the damage” — to avoid “provocative language” and to follow what one denominational leader describes as the “do no harm” approach, Luhr said.
Some on the denominational staff “want public relations, they want good news, they don’t want controversy,” said Karen Kiser, who edits a newsletter for the Southern California and Hawaii Synod and is a member of the Advisory Committee on the News. “I think they should be neutral. I think they should present both points of view in a neutral way. They don’t need to emphasize things that are negative” and the news service reporters shouldn’t approach a story thinking, “What can I find in there that’s controversial and inflammatory,” but should “try to lift up what’s good” in the situation.
Marj Carpenter, a General Assembly Council member who formerly directed the news service and later served as the denomination’s moderator, said she thinks the document being presented on the news service’s role is “all right, but it’s scary,” because it approaches what she describes as a “very fine line” between giving the news service editorial freedom and having more denominational control over its work.
Carpenter said her standard line has been that in secular news reporting, “you try to report the truth. In church reporting, you try to report the truth with love.” From the news service “they need straight news,” she said, “not just propaganda.”
Van Marter, in a prepared statement, said “in the heat of passionate criticism, the role of the Presbyterian News Service can get lost. We have long-established editorial guidelines for how we do our work, but amid the pressures of budget cuts and divisive issues, some Presbyterians rightfully question what we do and why we do it. So the Advisory Committee on the News wrote this paper to try and clarify the role of the Presbyterian News Service within the PC(USA).”
Van Marter wrote that it’s his understanding that the Advisory Committee on the News intended the statement it approved “be read as an educational attempt to explain how the editorial guidelines are lived out in practice. If it is read as a castigation of the Presbyterian News Service for our faults and failures, then it will have been misread and will not produce the clarity we all desire.”
