Originally posted on April 13, 2007.

Thursday, April 12’s post by Scripps Howard columnist and religion professor Terry Mattingly “Is GetReligion a ‘Christian’ blog?” has inspired readers and fans of the GetReligion blog to ask pointed questions about the nature and quality of the media’s coverage of religion and theology. My own brief comment (see item #10) advised the bloggers (Mattingly, LeBlanc, Hemingway, etc.) to look not only to the type of religious faith professed by the blog’s authors, but also at their relative level of consciousness.

In my view, the blog team’s commitments to Christianity are also rivaled in importance by their common adherence to conservative theological impulses arising from the mythic-membership or essentialist worldspace. [For readers confused by my colorizing of this blog post, see "What do the colors mean?"] In other words, the GetReligion team could easily add, say, an orthodox Jew or moderate American Muslim to the mix of blogging heads, but the result would not really be a significant expansion of their own vantage point. On the other hand, my own integral Christian perspective really probably wouldn’t gel too well with Mattingly’s or Hemingway’s styles.

In a follow-up comment on GetReligion on April 13, Terry Mattingly responds that I “should do more media criticism on [my] own blog. Honest.” I will take his suggestion under advisement! (However, my own blog is a rather idiosynchratic and experimental blend of usually personal posts. It’s probably not the best place for serious media criticism, I’m afraid.) Although unlike Mattingly I may not teach future practitioners of journalism their craft, I nevertheless could and probably should comment more about the successes and failures of the media in covering religion than I do.

Looking for Ghosts in the Story

But before returning to my view of the media and religion, let’s look a little closer at the fascinating GetReligion blog project. In February 1, 2004’s “What we do, why we do it,” the blogging team gets spooked out on ghosts.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don’t get to see them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

And so the GetReligion team scans as many newsworthy items in the mainstream media as they can find, picks out the best and worst religion coverage, and shares their opinions on what the journalist did well or poorly. The various blog team members come from around the US or Canada, but they share a common outlook: they are all relatively conservative religionists whose radar screens are especially spooked by any effort by the so-called mainstream media to misrepresent evangelical or traditionalist Christianity. And so they use the tools and lingo of traditional, objectivity-seeking journalism to question bias, demand balanced coverage for Christians, and advocate for greater representation of “doctrinally informed” religion reporters in the newsroom.

Want to know why it’s unfair for the media to poke fun at conservative Mormon Mitt Romney’s holy underwear? Want to learn why it’s unfair for the media to portray gay couples raising children as “normal” parents instead of giving equal time to the view that they are narcissistic freaks who are raising a generation of confused youth? Want to learn why the media isn’t getting the tone of coverage right on totalitarian legal efforts to outlaw all abortion in Latin American countries? Look no further than GetReligion, where you are sure to find given expression the beliefs that “bias” always exists, it usually tilts to the left, and it very often shows up in unseemly places (especially the New York Times).

In Thursday April 12’s typical post “And [Pope] Benedict hates teddy bears, too” GetReligion blogger Mollie Hemingway calls a religion reporter an angry hack for snide remarks and superficial analysis of Pope Benedict’s upcoming trip to Brazil. She concludes, “I hope it felt good for [Joseph] Contreras to spew this piece, because it sure doesn’t serve any other purpose. I certainly don’t think Pope Benedict is above reproach, but this piece is just infantile.” She may or may not be right, but she’s boldly willing to call other reporters on their shit when she smells it stinking. I admire that. And I hope it felt good for her to spew that opinion on her blog.

From an AQAL-informed vantage point, I see most mainstream religion coverage in this country coming from somewhere between a mythic-membership and a postmodern pluralist vantage point (i.e., in the Integral Institute’s terminology of altitude [see "What is Altitude?"], amber to green). A few skilled writers also show the potential for existentially rich, multifaceted and holistic viewpoints and nuanced, evolutionary constructions of the various models of journalism (i.e., teal to turquoise).

However, most of the more advanced teal and turquoise writers are not covering religion news as beat reporters; they are writing as advocates, editorialists, and bloggers. As an aside, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes Unclaimed Territory from a yellow-to-teal perspective and is a daily read for me. He’s one of the most sensitive and intriguing blogger/commenters out there talking about the media’s shortcomings as he does recently in “Do national journalists agree with Gary Kamiya?”.

Some Ghosts Have Ghosts

Is there room for taking a more AQAL-informed approach to the mainstream religion beat? Of course! I feel the most urgent need for an integrally-informed religion journalism is for journalists to use (at least implicitly) multiple quadrants in forming their analysis and in identifying the comprehensiveness of their reportage. (See Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything or (free) “Introduction to Integral Theory and Practice” for a quick overview of the quadrants.) A Four Quadrant look at religion news would insist that individual subjective and social, cultural, and individual objective perspectives are all included. If there’s no room to include each of them in any given story, then the journalist should try to make explicit what is being left out.

From this perspective, most religion news today seems obsessed with the objective social angleQ/LR (what mainstream Christian or Jewish denominations are doing what, and whether they will divide in order to accomodate for disagreements within their communions, etc.). Such coverage usually seeks fairness and balance by quoting individual experts to give their “professional”Q/UR opinions regarding the social events happening in their midst. Reporters may interview, say, a religion professor who will offer that (a) US christian denominations are constantly multiplying and dividing and there is a historical precedent for mainstream denominations to schism when confronted with a controversial social issueQ/UR, but personally (b) she sure wishes everyone could just alongQ/UL. But then the reporter will ignore the “fluffy” opinions and just print the hard “professional” opinions.

There’s nothing wrong with focusing on the social angles on religion, of course. But this approach does have its shortcomings. GetReligion recognizes that unlike other types of news stories, religious stories are often influenced by doctrinal disputes–disputes with long and complex histories going back centuries. Would it kill journalists to occasionally treat religion news with the respect of acknowledging that religionists may be motivated by doctrine and faith/skepticismQ/LL, UL as well as by politics and objectivity/biasQ/LR, UR? When GetReligion makes this case, as they so often do, they are becoming unwitting advocates of a more integrally informed journalism. Include the Lower-Right Quadrant, they might say (if they were fans of AQAL theory), but please also look at the Lower-Left Quadrant and take it just as seriously.

Unfortunately, GetReligion falls short of a truly AQAL-based look at journalism, primarily because it neglects the roles of two of the four quadrants, types, states, lines, and (especially) stages. In terms of the STEAM acronym, they don’t look deeply or self-consciously at the Stages, Types, Experiences, or Modes (and their analysis of Angles falls short, too).

On types, for instance, GetReligion always speaks about good v. bad journalism and rarely seems to get that different personality types have an important role to play by shining through the supposed objectivity of the prose. Evidence of a particular type on display isn’t poor journalism; it adds color and nuance and relevance, thereby enhancing journalism. There is no appreciation for the contribution of both feminist (communal) and masculinist (agentic) types to journalism, for instance. Instead, there is is usually only GetReligion’s plea for “objectivity” and abandoning petty prejudices and agendas. In other words, their agenda is of the masculine type, not feminine (whether it’s being mouthed by a woman or a man). A more feminine approach is generally more comfortable in acknowledging the actual relationships between the reporter, the subject, and the audience.

On states, to take another example, GetReligion bloggers often insist that good journalists must do a certain sort of precise craft, generally impersonal and carefully-written, stodgy or breezy depending on the circumstances. But I say: Why not let journalists write in various modes of traditional prose, or light and lively personal reflections, using words and multimedia, with occasional forays into giving expression to alternative states of consciousness?

Give me Maureen Dowd. Then, once or twice a year, give me Maureen Dowd drunk or stoned (or strapped into a straightjacket). Let me see if I can tell the difference, and then float her actual state of consciousness into the column notes somewhere. Some alternative media outlets already do a fine job of this, and I’d like to see more of it. Perhaps the folks at GetReligion would also be okay with this, but I’ve never heard them mention it let alone recommend it as a technique for enhancing the media’s coverage of religion. I would love to see journalism that consciously gives expression to a variety of different states, including forays into prerational and transrational consciousness.

But GetReligion’s most significant shortcoming is its failure to acknowledge the existence of multiple stages of consciousness along various key developmental modes (e.g., the worldviews line or the spiritual line). Many of the problems they attribute to differences between “mainstream” v. “alternative” journalists, or between “good journalists” v. “bad journalists”, or “objectivity” versus “bias” are very good and usually healthy expressions of a mythic-membership journalist’s reading of how folks at other levels of consciousness are doing things. As such, it’s fairly predictable and can often be used to identify the mythic-membership or mythico-essentialist point of view on any problem involving religion and the media. However, it’s NOT truly being an advocate of objectivity. Real objectivity in journalism would be more like taking an integral approach.

Toward a More Integral Journalism

Make no mistake, GetReligion is NOT truly an advocate and friend of objectivity. Real concern for objectivity among journalists is expressed by self-consciously making itself aware of its particular location and contexts of expression AND, to the best of its ability, being aware of its own Kosmic Koordinates. With awareness of both cosmic and Kosmic coordinates, such journalists would formulate principles and theories for doing good, effective, integrally-informed communication. See the scholarly work done by contributors to the Integral Institute and other integrally-informed groups such as ARINA ’s Integral Review for more substantive critiques of contemporary communcation theories. Integrative theories would generally insist that the proper role of the newsroom is to offer stories that strive for fairness, inclusivity, comprehensiveness, sensitivity, accuracy, and trustworthiness … NOT merely a mythico-essentialist style of psuedo-objectivity.

Yes, reporters should generally present two or more sides to every issue in their news pieces. But they must not pick out what they hear as the two loudest voices in the dialogue, usually one a classic republican and a classic liberal, or a modern conservative and the other a modern socialist/liberal, allow those voices to speak at high volume, and then say that they’ve done their job. Instead, journalists should acknowledge their own situatedness in various contexts and personal commitments (just as the GetReligion bloggers often wisely do), but then strive to gain a broader, more expansive viewpoint that sensitively embraces the whole field. They should try to include as many quadrants and levels in the discussion as they can (with some attention to states, lines, and types insofar as it’s possible).

Good religion journalism won’t just stick to the big page-one stories, and then offer the top two conflicting sides of the issue equal time. As GetReligion rightfully insists, good journalism should penetrate the sociological conflicts of institution/politicsQ/LR to the cultural sources in theology/philosophyQ/LL. However, why stop there?

To survive and thrive, newsrooms must strive for diversity of gender, race, class, and point-of-view (including religionists of different stripes) so as to maximize the fertile fields of universal types that are allowed to be given expression. Whether there are more postmodern Wiccans or high-church Christian Orthodox in the newsroom isn’t nearly as important as whether there are personalities that take seriously both Descending and Ascending currents (i.e., types) of religion, because journalists who don’t “get types” or “get altitude” will often write in a way that always ridicules the contrasting perspective.

This is a somewhat technical way of making the common sense point that whites and blacks, men and women, gays and straights, etc., will often reflect their own tastes and styles in different and valuable ways (and even within those groups there are differences). Embracing diversity in the newsroom should enrich the stew of universal types (e.g., masculine v. feminine styles) of writing that are offered to the news audience. The result is good for everyone, especially newspapers, in building stories that accurately present the types of thinking done by readers of various types of persuasion.

But let’s not stop with increasing diversity to get more universal types flowing more freely into a wider context. Let’s also aspire to a journalism that is sensitive to the evolutionary dynamics at work in all human contexts. Objectivity must not be seen as the exclusive domain of the GetReligion-style journalism, lest we become confused about the ability for any human beings to truly “leap over” their own range of opinions, cultures, preferences, and modes of being into some sort of otherworldly (and delusional) “objective” truth. The alternative is not to abandon Truth. I advocate an integrally-informed style of journalism that seeks to coordinate and arrange the multifarious voices of the newsroom into an effective whole, suitable for its diverse audiences, and with demonstrated mastery of the evolving understanding of professional standards of excellence.

Of course, we must give the mythic-membership and rationalist/essentialist journalists a valued place at the table! Plus, let men and women, blacks and whites, yellows and browns, children and adults, rabbis and atheists, old age and new age, humorists and scientists, abled and disabled, overdeveloped and underdeveloped, shine their lights! In religion coverage, let the infirm, new age, totalitarians, mythic believers, essentialists, conservatives, greens/liberals, existentialist/naturalist, integralists, visionary, soulful, and mystical types speak.

The resulting chorus need not be a noisy cacophany; it could be a beautiful harmony attuned to a new and refreshingly familiar melody. At the very least, it will be more interesting than listening to the GetReligion echo chamber of “see the infantile ,liberal, antireligious bias!” and “please, please cover traditionalist dogma more accurately!” passed off again and again, interminably, as the summit of media criticism.

Technorati Tags: altitude, GetReligion, media, religion

Originally posted April 17, 2007.

I enjoyed this KW.com post “Holons Critique: Are Pavlina and Schwyzer Integral?” by Colin Bigelow. Thanks, Colin. Well stated. I intend these remarks as my own take on the concerns you raise (coming from somebody not being affiliated with Holons except as a reader).

Judging from my experience, Colin’s post will likely be controversial in the blogosphere. Many bloggers with an interest in Integral Theory refuse to use altitude markers, color labels, or other indications of stages of development. How integral is that?! I also have some qualms and have written on the subject previously.

At the moment, I am choosing to mainly move beyond the two particular bloggers (Pavlina and Schwyzer) … and even beyond the issue of differences between “orange-green with an intense masculine-mastery type” or “healthy green”, “teal”, and “turquoise”. As I see it, the core issue boils down to this: How do you distinguish between different levels of altitude within the context of blogging or similar types of cultural writing? Let’s say the context is: I don’t know you; I haven’t performed a psychographical analysis; I haven’t analyzed your responses to numerous psychological questionnaires; I haven’t read your memoir or journal; I may only have read a few items you’ve ever written in your entire life. Given that, when reading a blog, do I judge the blogger’s structure-stage, vMEME, altitude, or Kronology station?

Yellow-green and lower says: no, what’s the point (for a variety of reasons, most commonly, they’re just not interested in either the question or the answer).

Green says: no, it’s rude and mean and you might hurt somebody’s feelings. Besides, it might burn a few bridges or be perceived as so undiplomatic. And getting people to co-exist peacefully is, of course, the summit of all endeavours.

Blue-green says: that’s an interesting question, but almost certainly unanswerable. In light of the impenetrable mystery of the universe and the many textures of the soul, it’s probably best to remain quiet on such matters. Who am I, in the grand scheme of existence, to make pronouncements of altitude? I shall judge not, lest I be judged.

Blue says: yes, you need to judge altitude as part of an integral analysis, and you should do the best job you can even though it’s not an ideal context (given the relative lack of information), and then qualify your comments appropriately. Altitude or stage or vMEME or station of life is an essential aspect in any truly comprehensive analysis, and therefore needs to be included, implicitly at least.

Just to be clear, I’m responding to this question from a perspective that I believe to be blue. I may be mistaken about that, but that’s where I think I’m coming from. Got those Kosmic Coordinates?

My answer, therefore, to the concern over whether yours are valid criticisms of Holons is maybe-BUT. The BUT: How qualified is the judgment call made in Holons? How clear is the background context, given the audience? How appropriate is the expression of judgment relative to the medium? How explicitly must the color label match a judgment of altitude with the appropriate stages and modes defined precisely according to a specified integral theorist or psychological researcher?

I see Holons’s color coding as merely a suggestion, a starting point for further discussion … and to get the conversation moving beyond the content of any particular bloggers towards a conversation about altitude. I consider it most relevant that Holons’s audience is the integrally informed community, mostly supporters of the mission of Integral Institute. I also consider it relevant that the assumed familiarity of the readership with the AQAL model creates the opening for writing with fewer qualifications and BUTs than would be possible if the piece were written for a more mainstream (i.e., first tier) audience. Therefore, I’m quite comfortable with Holons attaching color labels to reflect the altitude at a given mode (in the case with Pavlina or Schwyzer, the Cultural/worldviews mode).

That said, I can now address the concerns expressed in your post regarding the labeling of Pavlina’s and Schwyzer’s blogs with an altitude marker. After considering what I know about the two blogs as a reader (and fan of both), I would be inclined to express a bit more DOUBT about my own ability to make a judgment of altitude.

Is Pavlina’s blog “orange-green with an intense masculine-mastery type”? Quite possibly. It’s also possible that the blogger is blue altitude on the cognitive line or overall with a strong concern mode fixed at orange-green and an agentic type. By “concern mode fixed at orange-green” I simply mean a person who is very interested in such things as healthy capitalism, personal success, achievement, maximizing individual personal potential, etc. Perhaps there are other possibilities worth considering as well.

Is Schwyzer’s blog “healthy green, critical of the mean green meme”? Quite possibly. It’s also possible that the blogger is blue altitude on the cognitive line or overall with a strong concern mode fixed at green and a communal type. By “concern mode fixed at green” I simply mean a person who is very interested in such things as the cultural construction of values, gender/sexual liberation issues, spirituality and harmony, etc. Maybe or maybe not.

In both cases, I’m inclined to think that the bloggers themselves are probably blue overall, or at the very least reaching into this area (best guess); however, the concerns that they are fixed upon in their blogs are (in Wilber’s color scheme) orange-green and green respectively.

Depending on whether one is focused on the blogger or the blog content, one could arrive at different judgments regarding the best color label or altitude marker. With blogs, it’s a very, very hard call. Much harder than with a magazine, newspaper, or mainstream media reportage. The blog is personal; the person and the blog are intertwined more so than any other medium. Judging altitude in the blogosphere should be different than other sorts of judgments one might make.

Therefore, I would be inclined to say that if Schwyzer were the editor-in-chief of a magazine called Gender and Culture Talk, the magazine itself would likely be green. However, Hugo himself would be (and could very well be in actuality) turquoise. Similarly, if Pavlina were to start a Personal Empowerment Institute, the organization would likely be orange. However, Steve himself might be turquoise.

That’s my take on why Holons is possibly correct in labeling Schwyzer and Pavlina turquoise, though it does seem that you and KW might disagree. In my opinion, assessing a blog must be done differently than assessing a magazine or newspaper op-ed. It’s harder to separate the person from the medium. Moreover, a single person may have different associated media that could be color coded differently.

I’m still working on the best way to add color codes to blogs for my own blog. I’ve been leaning towards an approach that separates the color marker from a strict identity with the altitude marker. The color marker may represent the stage, or it may represent something like a type, experience, angle, or mode.

For Until, I happen to list both Pavlina’s and Schwyzer’s blogs on my blogroll. I list them with a blue color label (for the station of life) like so:

Steve Pavlina
Hugo Schwyzer

However, this is shorthand. It’s vague. Intentionally so. The band of colors themselves, a suitable analogy, is also vague. Where does orange meld into yellow melding into yellow-green melding into green melding into turquoise melding into blue melding into indigo???? Vagueness, I think, is appropriate in this situation (not to mention diplomatic, which suits my green sensibilities just fine).

In the context of speaking about the major concerns of their blogs, however, I would color tag like this:

Steve Pavlina
Hugo Schwyzer

Furthermore, if I needed to be very precise, I would specify two different colors, say, one for the cognitive and the other for the concern/spiritual mode.

Steve Pavlina^S138 Steve Pavlina^S135
Hugo Schwyzer^S138 Hugo Schwyzer^S137

Pretty soon effective communion leads to markup of one kind or another such as Wilber’s “integral math” (tags) or its spawn, Whole Writing (tags). If precision in discourse is necessary, the conversation shifts entirely away from the subject matter at hand into a more meta discussion. Unfortunately, markup lingo is still in the process of evolving, with various standards and implementations arising in our midst. (Wilber: “Certain issues of terminology, especially in the math, are still being decided.”)

The contrast between precision and vagueness of color label is a typically blue(i.e., turquoise) concern, and at blue-violet (i.e., indigo) what was once seen as vagueness or fuzziness of thought may be perceived as a deeper union and communal harmony that allows for a level of theoretical disagreement (”a generous orthodoxy”). At a certain point, we just have to say “good enough” and allow for a little less theoretical precision and a little more disagreement, I think.

Technorati Tags: altitude, consciousness, dialogue, integral, Ken Wilber