Religion in the News Media

In Chap. 3 , I discuss the core of the four-layer rationale for the democratic approach or primarily the research on religion in the news. I begin by outlining the key arguments in the broader field of religion, media and culture, including their digital forms. The discussion of the prevalent approaches to religion and the media, including the news, identifies a need for a unified or shared general approach to religion and the news. I then consider the importance of news values and sociological factors in making general and religion news. The gap in the field of religion and the news that the detailed critical discussion of the literature identifies is that different types of research find common problematic issues or democratic bits, which, however, are dispersed across different studies and are not brought together in a systematic and unified approach. More importantly, all these different types of research and their findings are discussed in the broader context of democracy, democratic society and news media. Moreover, the suggested improvements are impossible without democracy and its decent functioning. The proposed four-dimension democratic approach—spiritual, world life, political, and conflict—and the posed empirical questions associated with it address precisely this gap in the field.