Issue date:
Dec. 4-6,1998

"My faith makes me a better reporter."

ABC's Peggy Wehmeyer seeks something higher than ratings for network news.

In this article:
Wehmeyer in college: Economics or reporting?
The gap in TV news: Religion
Religion coverage on the networks

By Skip Hollandsworth

hen the news broke in September that President Clinton had turned to two evangelical pastors to help monitor his recovery from his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, the national press corps went into full swing. The pastors found reporters and television crews camped out on the lawns of their churches or outside their offices, pleading with them to talk.

But only one reporter got the interview with the two men: ABC correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer, network TV's only full-time religion reporter. Why?

"She's someone you can trust," says Clinton's long-time pastor, Rex Horne of Immanuel Baptist in Little Rock, who also gave Wehmeyer an exclusive interview about the pressure he'd faced from Southern Baptist leaders who wanted him to kick Clinton out of his church. (He refused.) "Unlike other reporters, she understands the fundamentals of our faith and the basics of the philosophy of our life."

Though 8 in 10 Americans say prayer is a regular part of their life - and 48 percent claim to attend religious services - it's no secret that the mainstream media see religion as a backwater beat.

"What still amazes me is the level of ignorance in most newsrooms about the effect of religion on people's lives," says Wehmeyer, 43, who works out of a home office in Dallas, where she lives with her psychologist husband and their two children. " 'Religion' remains a dirty word among reporters. Many of them still believe all conservative Christians are far-right, anti-abortionist, unsophisticated wackos. And they are even more ignorant about other religions. Yet more than ever before, so many stories have a serious religious or moral angle to them, from the Clinton scandal to the murder of the gay student in Wyoming to the way we are trying to educate our children."

Wehmeyer, who attends a conservative non-denominational church, hesitates to discuss her own beliefs, in part because of colleagues' frequent questions about her motives for covering religion.

"It's infuriating," she says. "There are journalists who wonder if I have some secret agenda because I happen to be a person of faith. And I say, 'Do you think political reporters can't be objective covering politics because they vote?' Of course not. If anything, my faith, which demands that I be fair and honest, makes me a better reporter. What's the alternative - to have religion covered by an atheist who has no interest in God?"

How to cover religion is an issue for newspapers, too, as they struggle to address readers' needs. After a Freedom Forum poll found most Clevelanders were dissatisfied with local religion coverage, the

Plain Dealer newspaper started a four-page, stand-alone religion section that runs every Saturday. Religion "is one of those issues we know readers care about," says assistant managing editor Christine Jindra.

A 1996 poll of religion reporters by the Religion Newswriters Association found 64 percent said coverage of religious issues had increased at their papers over the previous five years. Three-fourths said quality was up.

"We get more coverage in print than in broadcast," says Herb Hollinger, press spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. Among the networks, Hollinger says, ABC stands out. For instance, he says, ABC represented the reasons for the group's boycott of Disney more accurately than did the other networks. (Ironically, Disney owns ABC.)

"Since the other networks don't have someone special assigned to the religion beat, their stories are written by people who don't always understand who we are," Hollinger says. Wehmeyer is "pretty knowledgeable."

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A coup for Wehmeyer, left, was scoring an at-home interview last spring with Bobbi and Ken McCaughey, the religious Iowa couple who opted for a risky delivery of septuplets rather than consider abortion. "Their main concern was whether someone would represent their faith accurately," Wehmeyer says.

hen Wehmeyer was a college student, she says, her parents wanted her to major in economics and find a husband. She did neither. At the University of Texas at Austin, she worked for the campus paper, where she broke a story on a controversial religious group. "I got death threats. That's when I realized how provocative religion could be."

It was also in college that Wehmeyer listened to a Christian speaker give a talk at her sorority house. "That night, I knew I had to understand what Christianity really was, and what place it should have in my life. There are many, many days I'm still trying to figure it out." She describes herself as a "struggling believer."

After graduation, Wehmeyer went to work as director of public information for Dallas Theological Seminary. She then got a job on the assignments desk for Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA, where she eventually persuaded the news director to let her go on camera. The green-eyed blond certainly looked the part of a TV correspondent. But what made her different - seriously different - was her desire to focus on religious stories.

Soon, word of her work reached Peter Jennings, anchor and senior editor of ABC's World News Tonight. Jennings - who says traditional reporters "have much more difficulty understanding the effect faith and spirituality have on a broad range of behavior in the world" - hired Wehmeyer in 1994, and he says her work has paid off in a myriad of ways.

"I was inundated with news tips from people who didn't think they had any other place to go to get their story told," Wehmeyer says. Her reputation also helped her beat some of the biggest names in network news to get an interview with Bobbi and Ken McCaughey, the deeply religious Iowa couple who refused to consider abortion and gave birth to septuplets in a highly dangerous delivery.

"I think some people thought I showed up at the McCaughey house and did some secret candlelight ceremony with them," she says with a laugh. "Actually, their main concern was whether someone would represent their faith accurately. Their faith came above everything else, and they knew I could deal with that."

When Green Bay Packers lineman Reggie White, an ordained Baptist minister, wanted to explain his public denunciation of homosexuality, he had his agent call Wehmeyer. She did a piece about residents in a small Montana town responding to an outbreak of anti-Semitism, and a two-part series on President Clinton's religious beliefs. (In a revealing statement, Clinton told her, long before the Lewinsky scandal broke, that he depended on God's forgiveness because "it frees you of all the guilt that you would otherwise carry around from all the mistakes you make. ... The God I believe in is the God of second chances.")

Wehmeyer's faith certainly hasn't kept her from asking hard questions. When she did a critical exposé on an evangelical Christian child-rearing method that promoted spanking, some friends from her Dallas church quit speaking to her. When a sanctimonious TV evangelist told her, "God just spoke to me and said I should not talk to you," she came right back at him. "That's funny," she said. "God spoke to me and said we should talk."

Because part of her goal is to shatter stereotypes, she produced a positive story on Islam, debunking the idea that its principles lead to violent behavior among Muslims. Jennings, who calls Wehmeyer an "influential intellectual force" at ABC, says her work "has elicited a greater response from both audience and colleagues than anything else we have done."

Yet no other network has followed ABC's lead, which disturbs Wehmeyer. "There remains this feeling among many of the top news organizations that religion doesn't really matter, that it's more like a hobby for certain people. Listen, I will never do anything but report on religion.

"There's nothing more interesting than reporting on people who struggle to understand the world in a different way, who believe there is a greater meaning to life than their own day-to-day existence.

"One day, I had just come back from a long road trip, and I was stressed out from all the work and I was at the grocery store, and a woman came around the corner with her cart. She said, 'Peggy, you're the only person in the media who understands the kind of things I think about.' I thought, 'That's why I do this.' There's a vast group of people who need to be spoken to."

The gap in TV news: Religion

SOURCE: THE TYNDALL REPORT

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Religion coverage

Neither CBS nor NBC has a reporter assigned to the religion beat. "If there's a story, we'll cover it, regardless of subject matter," says CBS spokeswoman Kim Akhtar. At NBC, says spokeswoman Barbara Levin, "we cover religious events as [warranted]."

ABC's religion coverage has increased since Wehmeyer was hired, says spokeswoman Eileen Murphy. "Part of the reason she came on board was that religion is such a big part of many Americans' lives."

Cable channels: Spokesman Steve Haworth says CNN has boosted its coverage of religious issues, using "a host of domestic and international correspondents." Fox News Channel reporter Carol Iovanna has covered religion full time since fall 1996. Says Fox vice president John Moody: "Religion is a very undercovered topic in most media." At MSNBC, spokeswoman Cameron Blanchard says coverage "revolves around whatever's making news." Because the cable channel uses NBC's reporters, it does not have a specific religion reporter. - Michele Hatty

Skip Hollandsworth is a staff writer for Texas Monthly magazine.
Cover and cover story photograph by Danny Turner for USA WEEKEND