General Assembly Council panel tightens role of Presbyterian News Service
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman Online, September 26, 2002
LOUISVILLE – The Presbyterian News Service will “shed light, rather than heat” under guidelines approved Sept. 25 by the executive committee of the General Assembly Council.
The full General Assembly Council will vote on the document regarding the official news agency of the Presbyterian Church (USA), approved as a companion piece to the “Editorial Guidelines for the Presbyterian News Service,” on Saturday.
In discussing the document, proposed by the Advisory Committee on the News, committee chairman Bill Lancaster said the document is “intended to educate the church” about the role of the Presbyterian News Service. He highlighted two points of the document while addressing the executive committee.
The first, Lancaster said, is that the news service, while fairly and accurately reporting the news, should also reflect the voice of the institution, meaning the voices of PCUSA leaders. Those voices, he said, include not only the leaders of the denomination, but also the constitution and current policies of the denomination.
His second point was that articles written by Presbyterian News Service staff should “shed light, rather than heat.” Only a few articles written by the news service generate problems, Lancaster said, not with accuracy, but in the way in which the stories were reported.
The document reads “The News Service should exercise special care in presenting information and, where appropriate, analysis in ways that foster understanding but do not exacerbate conflict or tensions within the denomination.”
The Office of Communications, of which the news service is a part, was established by the General Assembly Council in 1994 as part of the executive director’s office. To ensure the independence of the news, an Advisory Committee for the News also was created to develop editorial policy for the news service.
The advisory committee’s editorial guidelines were approved by the General Assembly Council in June 1995. The guidelines state that the news service shall “report the facts accurately, clearly, fairly, impartially and promptly [and] carry out its work with the faithfulness of the church of which it is a part.”
Gary Luhr, director of the Office of Communications, said the guidelines have worked for six or seven years and have met the needs of the news service and the General Assembly Council, but have not met concerns and questions arising primarily on articles written about sensitive issues.
Luhr said the tumultuous times in which the church has found itself the past several years has made people wonder why the news service reports some things the way it does. “Sometimes, the Presbyterian News Service gets caught in the middle of covering news of the PCUSA and other people’s expectations about how that should have been done,” he said.
The proposed document is not a way to restrict the work of the news service, Luhr said, but to help it as it goes forward – “to help the Presbyterian News Service on one hand; other staff at 100 Witherspoon [the denomination’s headquarters] on another hand and the wider church on the third hand.”
Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick endorsed the document, calling it a “positive step forward … We want to make sure the institutional voice of the church is heard.”