BBC journalists are illiterate about religion, a former editor for the corporation has said.
Roger Bolton, who presented Radio 4’s “Feedback” programme for over two decades, was speaking to the Religion Media Centre, when he lamented the BBC’s “relative illiteracy about religion, both what it is and the way it’s practised”.
He added that there is “mismatch on the whole between the importance of religion to people throughout the country and the way it’s represented in the media, however well it’s done”.
The BBC, he argued, needs to make an effort to educate its staff on the reality and importance of religion.
Bolton is by no means the first person to publicly question the BBC’s ability to understand and report on religion.
Last month, also speaking to the Religion Media Centre, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said, “My concern is much more about the place of religion across the whole output of the BBC, rather than simply seeing it as religious broadcasting in that rather more narrow definition. So I note with sadness and some distress the sometimes appalling lack of religious literacy in so much of the BBC."
The decline in religious broadcasting has also been picked up by The Christian Institute, which said that between 2010 and 2022 the number of hours devoted to religion and ethics by public service broadcasters had nearly halved from 243 to 140.
Last year another former BBC man, Robin Aitken, said that many journalists at the corporation have a “woefully inadequate” understanding of religion. This stems in part from the liberal middle class background of much of the BBC and also leads to a “general feeling of disdain” for the Church of England and a “mild hostility to the idea of religion”.
The hostility to the historic religion of the country, Aitken argued, also leads to skewed editorial priorities. As an example he pointed to the acres of air time given to the persecution to the Rohingya Muslims, compared with the relative silence on the persecution of Christians.
