Saturday, September 13, 1997

New PBS show on religion and ethics makes its debut

By Kate Seago

The Dallas Morning News

"Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" is defined first by what it is not: It's not a talk show. It's not evangelizing. And it's absolutely not "The 700 Club."

"This is not a religious program," said executive producer Gerry Solomon, an Emmy-winning producer of such shows as "Meet the Press" and former managing editor of "Good Morning America." "It is a news program about religion and ethics."

Veteran journalist Bob Abernethy, for years the Moscow correspondent for NBC, is executive editor and host of the weekly news magazine, which made its debut last weekend on most PBS stations.

Because Abernethy and Solomon come from commercial network news, "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" will have top-drawer production values. "We want the program to look like the best network news and news magazine programs," Abernethy said.

Abernethy has spent three years creating the program.

"We want to cover stories that are really interesting, and that are not being told by most of the commercial news programs," he said. "And we want to give them time to be told right. We want to get at what people are feeling, and give them a chance to tell why they're doing what they're doing."

The program will use taped and live material, interviews and segments from correspondents in the field. Each show will begin with a news summary and will include a cover story and in-depth segments. Roundtable discussions will feature newsmakers and experts. At the end of each program will be a religious calendar, with interviews with people observing holidays and religious events.

"Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" will draw on an advisory board of 25 journalists, academics and religious leaders, some of whom will appear as commentators. "The common denominator in my mind is: Can that person state, very clearly, what the underlying principle or teaching or tradition is behind some news story? And do it in an interesting way? I want that done, and then comes the discussion," Abernethy said.

Religion & Ethics Newsweekly is produced by Thirteen/WNET, the New York public television station that launched the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour." Funding for the first season's 39 half-hour episodes comes from $5 million in grants from the Lilly Endowment Inc.

The program will be produced early Friday afternoons out of the Reuters Broadcast Center in Washington, then feed to PBS for broadcast as early as that evening. But contingencies are in place to take seriously the word news in the show's title, Solomon said.

"On those occasions when something happens after we tape the show ... we will redo whatever has to be redone," he said. "We are prepared to go back into a studio in Washington and redo the program for a breaking news story."

But, he added, the goal is to "be ahead of the news, to the extent that we want to report what's right below the surface." He said one model is "the nightly news broadcast on any network that covers the important news stories and also does in-depth stories on a variety of subjects."

No topic will be off-limits, said Solomon, who counts medical and political ethics, campaign finance and "the ethical underpinnings" of business and labor as possible subjects.

And, said Abernethy, there's the larger issue: "More broadly, how do you live? How are people figuring out how to live the kind of lives they profess they want, in modern society?"

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Solomon said the same news judgment they brought to secular reporting will apply to "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly."

"How many people does it affect? What's the nature of it? What is this group doing? A cult that has 15 members, goes about its own lives, doesn't impinge on anyone else - it's not going to be on anybody's radar screens," he said. "You're not going to cover it.

"When 37 or 38 people commit suicide, it has to be explored, but not in the same way that everybody is going to cover it. We might use that as a jumping-off point to look at alternate searches for meaning. What do religions have to say about this kind of behavior?"

Solomon said that after the Heaven's Gate suicides this year, he saw only one television news story in which a reporter sat down with a theologian "to explore the whole idea of making the ultimate sacrifice for a belief."

"It was the closest thing to the way we'd treat a story like that," he said.

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Stressing the objective approach he's seeking for "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly," Abernethy bristles at comparisons with "The 700 Club" and other religious programming: "I don't acknowledge Pat Robertson as a predecessor. We're reporters; we're storytellers. And he's a preacher."

Not that he doesn't bring his own perspective to the work. "I resent it when somebody automatically assumes that because I am a reporter I am some sort of secular infidel. I tell them so."

Abernethy said the principle is: "We find good stories and we tell them. What I hope we can do is let people talk for themselves about what they believe, and why they're doing what they're doing in everyday life. I want them to define what they're doing; I don't want to be trying to explain what somebody else believes or feels. It will be much more powerful if it comes from them."

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Creating "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" has had implications for Abernethy's own faith journey, he acknowledged.

"I don't know what the process has done to my faith, but I feel myself becoming more and more interested in the roots of what I have professed," he said.

"I think (that) as I learn more about other people's traditions, it makes me, not question, but want to know more about my own. And I'm told ... by people who know a lot about religious pluralism that the result of that process is that your own faith is strengthened."

He's shaping his approach to the material as he goes, he said. "It's got to be personal, so the more I've thought about it, the more I've felt myself moving from defining it as a hard news program to defining it as a news magazine because I want to leave room for the stories that give people the opportunity to say why they're doing it."

Abernethy was still at NBC when he began working on the idea for "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly." He said he took the concept to his network bosses first.

"I didn't have a lot of confidence that they would drop everything and say 'Let's do this,' " he said, laughing. "And then I went to PBS and to WNET, and it was at WNET that things really got going."

In fact, he said, "We think there's a great big niche that's not being filled. One of the reasons is that a lot of people in the national media are uncomfortable with religion in general, with religion stories.

"We're not uncomfortable with it; we think there are wonderful stories to be told."

(c) 1997, The Dallas Morning News.

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