Democracy, News Media, and Religion

This chapter sets the ground and provides broader legitimacy for the proposed democratic approach to newspaper religion reporting and the questions this research seeks to answer. To this end, it explores three of the four-layer rationale for it. In the first layer, the attitude of democracy to the news media, civil society, and religion, I discuss leading twentieth-century models or ideal types of democracy and a few contemporary models or hybrid types of democracy, beginning with the model that assigns the most limited role to the news media and civil society, part of which is religion, and finishing with the most sophisticated model—monitory democracy for which I make a case. In each model’s review, I pay closer attention to its central tenets, the roles assigned to the news media, civil society, and religion. In the second layer, I examine the news media’s attitude to and roles in democracy. I complete the discussion of the wider framework for this research by considering the third layer or the attitude of religion and religious citizens to democracy.