Inside PBS Blog

Few reporters have spent as much time covering the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as the team at PBS's Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

What's it like to see everyone else jump on a story you've owned for more than a year?

"It's interesting. It's also kind of frustrating because I see so much distortion in the mainstream media," says Kim Lawton, the weekly newsmagazine's managing editor and correspondent.

"On the one hand, I don't want to criticize my colleagues, but on the other hand I see a lot of ignorance. People don'st necessarily understand the relationship between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright has been a spiritual one. It's not a political advisory relationship. I'm not sure all of the reporters see that.

As its name implies, R&E reports exclusively on the intersection of faith, spirituality and culture. The program, now in its 11th year, also offers an extensive Web site with streaming video, transcripts and more.

Regular viewers knew about Rev. Wright long before he made headlines.

R&Eprofiled his church in 2005.

Last year, the reverend told the show politics might force Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to eventually distance himself from the church.

"Sometimes people see religion as a little niche," Kim says. The MSM's recent coverage of Rev. Wright "shows the importance of the issues we've covered," she says.

R&E is focused these days on the broader issues stemming from the controversy.

On this weekend's show, anchor Bob Abernathy will discuss the black church's role in modern America with Harold Dean Trulear, associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity.

R&E is also using its Web site to delve more deeply into the issues.

Its new One Nation politics-and-religion blog features an essay on modern prophecy by African American biblical scholar Allen Dwight Callahan. (Columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. cites a piece in the Washington Post.)

In a video interview on the blog earlier this week, Iva Carruthers, an advocate for faith-based social justice, called for a national conversation about race, politics and prophecy.

Kim is working on a report for a future edition of R&E that will examine the boundaries between religion and politics.

"Religion has played such a fascinating role in this campaign. We're going to be covering all sorts of things that are related to this story," she says.

What do you think of the mainstream media's coverage of religion and politics? Do shows like R&E bring a different perspective to the conversation? Are you using online resources like One Nation to explore these issues more fully?