Multiculturalism

by Gene Shelburne

Whenever I’m in Dallas, I always enjoy reading the Morning News. One Saturday morning early last year I picked up a copy. Being a religion columnist, I turned first to their Religion section just to see what they were doing. Instantly I concluded that my column definitely would have improved their offering that morning.

Aside from that rather egotistical evaluation, however, my other immediate reaction was disappointment. Because of the almost total lack of Christian features or news in the entire six-page section.

If E.T. had read the Dallas Morning News religion section that day, he never would have suspected that at least 80 percent of the paper’s readers and subscribers are Christians.

Two-thirds of the section’s front page displayed a story about Saudi Muslims in nine Dallas mosques. Bannered across the bottom of the same page were two extensive articles on local atheists, billed as “defenders of nonbelief.” The article about the North Texas “Church” of Freethought was carried to an inside page, taking up several columns. I wondered how many Christian pastors had news items rejected that week because “there was no space.”

The name of Christ appeared nowhere on that front page. The word Christian showed up only once, in a two-inch blurb about some misguided liberals who were trying to bribe local tots to turn in their toy guns.

All but a thumbnail of the remaining inches on that same front page were filled with articles about Judaism and the Baha’i religion.

On Page 1 I spotted a teaser about an article buried inside—an article about some poor fellow who had part of his brain missing. For a fleeting moment I wondered if it might be whoever selected the copy for Dallas religious folks to read in that Saturday paper.

Why the imbalance in religion coverage? Weren’t the million-plus Christians in the DFW metroplex doing anything newsworthy that week? All but about 10 inches of the religious ads were paid for by Christians. What journalistic philosophy judged them worthy of less than 5 percent of the news copy?

I think it’s called Multiculturalism. Which is usually a polite way to say Anything-but-Christian.