Why the Mainstream Media Are Clueless About the Religious Right

"Wifely Submission? Really Michele Bachmann? Houston... We have a Problem!"

Though it has shaped American politics for the last 40 years, the religious right still baffles reporters.
August 16, 2011

Every four years, just as a presidential campaign kicks up, legions of media types who make their living outside the right-wing echo chamber emerge as a militia of Margaret Meads, descending on flyover country, trying to make sense of that exotic phenomenon, the religious right. In the end, those who actually get it are few.

From the attitudes shown by media toward the religious right, you'd never know that more than one-quarter of the U.S. population identify as evangelicals, according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and among white self-identified evangelicals, 62 percent told Pew in 2006 that they believe the Bible to be the literal word of God.

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