Around 30 media professionals from 20 countries participated in the European Journalist’s Conference, in Kiev on September 27-29, 2012.  The event was organized by The Media Project. Dr. Paul Marshall – the Board’s member, and he was a speaker diring the event in Kiev. Also he serves  as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom.  Marshall is the author and editor of over twenty books on religion and politics, especially religious freedom.  We asked him several questions during the coffee break. 

Paul, who do you believe you are? A journalist? A scientist? A public activist?  

All of those. Mainly I’m a public activist. I work on International religious freedom.  And all of my work is devoted to trying to improve the situation in countries throughout the World with prisoners to work with them. But in order to do this work, we always need to have the information, so we do a lot of research and documentation. My background is an academic as a professor, and what I’m trying to do, is convince people that not cover very much, why religious freedom is important. Many people don’t think it’s important.  So I wrote quite a few books about religious freedom.  And of course I’m writing in the newspapers, magazines about trends in the World about different countries, about different people, so I’m also doing journalism. And all of those are related. 

Is that truth that the Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the World?  

Yes, it is. My view is, also just this week the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, released the latest survey on religious freedom, saying that Christians are the most widely persecuted group in the World, in this case it’s 131 different countries. 

Why this information is not spread in secular media? Almost nobody knows about that fact? Secular Media do not talk on that.  

Mainly because we don’t know about it. I mean the certain reporting that I mention on Pew Forum is quite recent. But not much reporting on that. 

There is a lot of reporting about persecution of national minorities for example, but almost nothing about Christianity?  I’ve been working for many years on secular TV channel and every day we got videos from news agencies, such as Reuters, APTN, ect… but almost nothing about persecution of Christians. 

Yes. Part of it is, at least in Western World people still think of Christians as Westerns. Christians are white people who live in the West. By the West, I’m including Ukraine, Russia, European white population, Americans, whatever. So this is the mind set, and often we don’t notice other things. And two thirds of the World nominal Christians who live outside of the West, of the World active Christians, about four out the five live outside of the West. So people don’t know that, they simply not aware of it. By saying not aware it also means that association of Christian as Europeans, pluralism. The mindset is that the Christians must be the people on top.  So a lot of it is ignorant, that may be a prejudges against Christians, because secular people often are struggling against Christians in a whole country, but a lot of it is just simply ignorant, people who just are not aware of religious trends generally. One reason, I got involved in editing this book called “Blind Spot”, showing how journalists miss a lot of stories because they don’t know religion. I realized that many journalists don’t know about religious persecution, because they don’t know about religion. 

By the way, what is the connection of religious freedom activity and the book “Blind spot”? You are one of the authors… 

There is the connection, because if I want to do more about religious freedom issues, then every journalist needs to get to know more about religion. If I don’t know that then unlikely take religious freedom issues seriously.  So, partly the book “Blind spot” is to educate journalists who say: Religion is important even in the secular news, so if you don’t know about religion you going to be a bad reporter even if you write about international relations, or economic development or globalization. If you are trying to have those subjects without religion, you are missing so much. 

Can you give an example what is the connection between religion knowledge and covering political or economical subjects? 

If you want to understand what’s going on in Iran, what is the competition that the president Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader Khamenei on the forum policy. You have to have religion vision and it’s complicated. If you take Nigeria, you have this terrorist group exploding churches, its major topic, probably Christians but they also Muslims who just agreed on this attacks. Muslim politicians said well, they just Westerner they not like us. The president of Iran Ahmadinejad just made the speech before United Nations. And major part of it was devoted to returning of the Hidden Imam. Which he believes will be soon.  In all the speeches he stressed this theme that he is the Christian apocalyptic message of the World will end soon and the hidden Imam will appear. If you look through western coverage in here they missed this. Let’s go to the real news and look for some nuclear programs or economy, all of it is important, but what he leads is and obviously is important. But if you don’t understand you don’t know what drawing him, because obviously for him it’s a central theme, it’s in his mind and heart all the time. 

How can we solve this problem, because we have the same situation in Ukraine: a lot of secular journalists know nothing about religious subject or aspect? Should we ask every journalist to educate themselves in religious subjects or we should have special religious-educated editor in every news room. What practical steps can we take? 

All of these. There are two reasons people don’t know. One of them might be opposed that they don’t like religion. And it’s harder; you have to make friends with them, etc. Then you have other people the like religion but they just don’t write about it. And that is easier to tag them. We are trying to give them examples of stories such as Ahmadinejad. And tell them that they missing what’s going on here. There are many American journalists in a war in Iraq who didn’t know different types of religion divisions, so they don’t know what’s happening. So to educate people, to give those cases of showing, this is important in other areas too. If they journalist don’t know much about the topic they should ask what should I read? Also it would be great idea for all the media to have a reporter whose specialty is religion. In America religious stories are the ones the most read. Most of the journalists are not interested in them, but in terms of readership, they get the large audience.  I remember some magazines if they had religious theme on the cover, they sold more issues compare to the usual one. So writing about religion is important. It’s a slow process of education and doesn’t change quickly. 

What kind of group of journalists is bigger? The anti-religious group or the group that doesn’t have any knowledge about religion?  

I’m not sure. It’s probably different in different countries. But I think the ones who are basically ignorant. They often think that religion is a private matter. Because of that we miss things what happening in front of the faces. 

What argument you will give for the secular journalist who will tell you that religious is a private issue? 

It’s not possible to understand American presidential election or any other election without religion. Until a few years ago, the less predictable voting in Canada was religious background. Even the people were secular. Keep pointing these instances. I do a lot of research on terrorism. You can’t understand the terrorism ideologies without religion. For example Al-Qaida is trying to shape their ideology around Islam. And I’ve been reading a lot of books on that topic, because it’s my field and some of the writers have no idea what they are writing about. I see mistakes after mistakes coming out of coverage. We need to point it out as gently as possible. My goal is to persuade people. If you told someone or attack them, you don’t persuade them. This would mean someone attacks me and I argue even strongly. But if somebody is friendly and trying to help me, maybe I’ll listen. 

Why do you think in Christian countries the journalists will rather cover the celebration of Ramadan then the Christian Holiday? Are they trying to support minorities? 

News of all kinds focuses on the unusual. If the people celebrating Christmas, we all know that. They view Ramadan as something they don’t know and want to find out. News focused on the unusual. The “NEW” is the word news. News doesn’t reflect reality. Be careful to think the news reflects reality of the world but often strange things. It doesn’t reflect a lot of normal things because they are not new. 

Can you explain the name of the “Blind Spot” book? What do you mean by “blind spot”? 

Medically proved that you can see things from the side and sometimes you can’t see. Or in North America, driving a car, you got mirrors but there the areas you can’t see. In some areas you might see the things and in some areas you can’t see. In this book, religious media is a blind spot. 

Ruslan Kukharchuk, Yuliya Maruk, The Novomedia Association.