A study into media coverage of Christianity in Britain has showed that coverage is more more likely to take a negative tone towards the religion and is arguably biased towards coverage of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Christianity within the Media 2025 report found that around 24% of stories covering Christianity are concerning the Catholic Church – this despite the incontrovertible fact that the Church of England is the Established Church.
The media have also didn’t properly cover the Pentecostal community, which now accounts for around 10% of churchgoers in Britain and is currently the fastest growing Christian tradition.
The report was commissioned by Jersey Road, a PR agency, and checked out over 5,000 news stories published by British online media outlets over a one-year period.
The research suggested that a 3rd of reports stories about Christianity took a negative tone, lower than 1 / 4 were positive and around 44% were neutral. It was also found that persecution of Christians worldwide is of very limited interest to the mainstream media, with only two per cent of Christian-related stories covering the difficulty.
The commonest style of Christian-related news article related to private faith (1,635 examples found), followed by news concerning the Catholic Church (1,247 stories) and the Anglican Church (846 stories). Other popular topics included politics, public figures, the culture wars, and abuse.
Gareth Russell, CEO of Jersey Road, said, “For the past 15 years, Jersey Road has been pitching stories about Christian organisations to the media. Our founding motivation was that the general public narrative around Christianity – often influenced by the media – was narrow and stereotyped.
“The report shows a few of these concerns are justified and that the total picture of the lived reality of Christians and the impact they’re having within the UK is commonly under-reported.
“But there may be also excellent news – literally. The UK media and public love human interest stories, and the primary theme in Christian coverage is personal stories of religion and the positive impact it’s had on their lives.”
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