Archbishop: we should welcome the challenge and scrutiny from journalists

By Ruth Peacock

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, says the church should welcome challenge and scrutiny from the media, as it is part of living in a democratic society.

In an address and interview at the fifth Religion Media Festival, he said it was vitally important to communicate well what the church was doing and what it cared about.

In an age of “misinformation, distraction, and the competition of noise with truth, it is ever more difficult for journalists to do their job”, he told the audience of journalists, media professionals and people interested in the role of religion in public life.

In particular he praised the recent ten part radio and podcast series by the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen “Frontlines of Journalism”, on how journalists find the truth in difficult stories around the world, the difference between comment and analysis, and the meaning  of impartiality.

He acknowledged that his approach to the media had developed over his time in office, saying: “I take more risks, deliberately rather than accidentally. I try to engage.”

In particular, the archbishop praised the value of local and regional radio: “I know how successful they are because they are deeply embedded in the community … and they do marvellous things, despite especially at the local level … being immensely stretched and having had an incredibly hard time in the past 10 years”.

There were two aspects to religious people being involved in the media. “First you are reported on, for example, after making a speech on the illegal migration bill”.

Secondly, he said religious people pro-actively engage on social media or by giving interviews, because they want to point to the truth and religion was “the prism through which we see everything else”.

He enjoyed interviews, although they made him feel nervous. He could choose to sit on the sidelines, and said he was often tempted to do so, as everything said in public by anyone would be analysed and “instrumentalised”.

So he admitted that one of the few things he looked forward to “in my eventual and long-distant retirement, is being able to read the paper without worrying about whether I’ll see my own name, in any context at all”.

He appealed to journalists to report good news alongside the controversial. He remembered speaking to the media at the recent Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in Canterbury, saying that he understood that reporters would want to write about deep disagreements over sexuality.

But he had urged them not to forget the millions of people represented at the conference, and the incredible stories of the bishops living in war torn countries, suffering from famine and drought, people fleeing from oppression and brutality and living in refugee camps.

Interviewed by ITN’s Julie Etchingham, he he reflected on the way religion was faring in fast paced social media with its speed of judgments. In particular what did he think of the way the SNP leadership contender had been treated?

He was adamant that she had been treated unfairly by the media: “I think it was an entire failure of many newspapers, reporters – radio and TV – to do its job of explaining how this happens, why this view is taken. It’s presented as an entirely eccentric view.

“People are perfectly free to choose not to agree. But surely it is part of a newspapers’ duty to try to explain how that happens”.

He believed it showed a particular issue around Christianity as her opponent, Humza Yousaf, was not challenged in the same way.

The archbishop was asked to reflect on how people get caught up in media storms. Kate Forbes was one example, another was Philip Schofield.

He said: “There is an absence of forgiveness, there is an absence of the possibility of redemption. People are treated as though they were the worst villain on earth”.

But compared to, for example, the Bucha massacre in Ukraine, or the war in South Sudan, he asked whether media pile-ons were proportional to the story.

So what did it feel like when he himself was at the centre of a media storm?

“It feels very uncontrolled. There’s nothing you can do about it except stick your head down and wait and see what happens. I haven’t had the worst of it.

“Obviously I’m asked to resign quite regularly, but by my friends more than anyone else”.

View the Archbishop of Canterbury’s address and itnerview at the Religion Media Festival here >>