Page 205 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

194 Believers, dogmatists, and secularists

David: . . . that’s something that we’re trying to instill in our kids is
that . . . that there is good things out there and if you look at the good
things, or look for the good . . . that’s what you need to be looking for.
I mean, you can find, I was just telling you about the bad things about
all these shows and stuff, but, and there’s good . . . in the same
amount there’s as much good and things that way. I’m not as, you
know, as far as The Simpsons, I . . . I’m like, you can find good there
too if you really look hard enough. I mean, they’re cartoons, if you
don’t take them to heart [laughs] you know, but they’re not kids’
cartoons. A lot of cartoons are not.
Interviewer: So you have less of a problem with The Simpsons than . . .
David: Than what she (Kathy) does, yeah. And the Rugrats do not bother
me. [laughs] I just, but, you know, it’s the thing, but it’s, you know, it’s
the same thing with, whatever, scary movies, or whatever. . . .

There is an echo of others we’ve heard from in David’s assertion that
media use should be about individual ideas and responsibility. Unlike
many, though, he suspects that the so-called “mainstream media” are not
trustworthy sources of news or information. He looks to a multiplicity of
sources to avoid being ideologically misled.

David: I don’t like Dateline and 20/20 shows because most of them are a
crock, I mean, they’re one person’s opinion, um, and it’s the same with
any news article that you read in the newspaper, or radio, or whatever,
it’s one person’s opinion that’s bringing you that story. And . . . that’s
why I like, you know, the Internet newspaper news because then you
can read six different reporters on the same subject, and. . . .

There is some of what we expected to find among dogmatists in the
Muellers. They make some clear distinctions between the world repre-
sented by the media and the world represented by the Mormon faith. They
tend to refer to the Church and its ideas in relation to their media choices,
though it is hard to see how the resulting behavior actually represents
those ideas in any systematic way. They don’t at the same time see their
role as prohibiting things as much as helping their children learn to make
their own choices.

The Donegals
Glenn Donegal, who we met in Chapter 4, exhibits many of the character-
istics of what Roof would call “dogmatism.” He has left Catholicism for
Evangelical Protestantism, but treats the latter more as a set of codes or
doctrines than is the case with the “born-again believers” we’ve met.
Glenn seems “dualist” in his understanding of the media, speaking from