Through the lens of the prevailing mainstream news media narrative, religious movements tend to be either completely invisible or distorted in order to play up violence and sensationalism. This complaint has appeared countless times in the USC Knight Chair blog, and for that reason the gripe would be tedious if the problem it laments weren’t so damnably persistent.

Take, for example, a pair of recent New York Times stories on current events in Myanmar. Last month the Times warned of an uptick in the anti-Muslim violence that has threatened to derail the country’s democratic and economic reforms. The primary agent of unrest—a monk named Ashin Wirathu—has spun the political capital of the Saffron Revolution into a nationalist crusade against the country’s tiny and largely impoverished Muslim minority.

Yet this week, in a Times article on dramatic changes in Myanmar’s commercial culture, efforts to economically marginalize non-Buddhists through the 969 Campaign received not a single line of analysis. This omission is all the more stunning for the fact that “969” branding is rife among the very peddlers and shopkeepers at the center of the story’s frame.

Obliviousness to the influence of religion on developments in politics, economics and other elements of culture is one aspect of the problem at hand. Another is a narrow focus on religious actors who prosper from conflict. Wirathu’s novelty as a Buddhist bad-boy has inspired breathless headlines like “Burma’s ‘bin Laden of Buddhism’” and “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” To their credit, Global Post (which has produced a series of stories on contemporary Myanmar) and the BBC have complicated this picture, most notably by offering contrary perspectives from monastic 969 dissenters like Kaylar Sa and U Nyarnisara as well as from Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. But, unfortunately, the narrow frame and distorted focus of the Times pieces come closer to typifying wider coverage of this story.

What’s the present nature of the power-play between Myanmar’s monastic elite and its gradually retiring junta? How are these shifting dynamics affecting the country’s economic and political transformation? Are other dissenting monastic voices speaking out against Wirathu and the 969 Campaign? What are the Dharma-related issues at stake, and how does this complexity play out in lay religious life? It’s not impossible to find answers to these obvious questions in news media coverage from Southeast Asia, but it’s far more difficult than it should be.

A New York Times piece on Mormons’ game-changing role in Senate approval of ENDA this week exemplified what smart religion coverage should be and do.  The most prominent political figures in a religious movement that threw its weight behind California’s recently overturned Proposition 8 were indispensible in passing a bill that would ban discrimination against LGBT people in the workplace. How has Mormon thinking on gay rights evolved since 2008? What common political interests link gays and Mormons? How far might the hierarchy of the LDS Church be willing to go in its support for a minority that both challenges and shares some of the core values of Mormonism?

These questions anchor an article that highlights complexity to reveal how a particular religious movement interacts with other cultural forces and changes over time.  Recent international coverage of Islam in the Times, by contrast, allows for little of that complexity or nuance. Muslims in Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, Tunisia and Nigeria are, at best, depicted as helpless victims of intra-religious strife or calculating negotiators trading the threat of violence for economic benefit. At worst, they come across as unreasoning madmen who must be contained at any cost.

This blinkered point of view has to do, in part, with shrinking news budgets. There simply isn’t enough money to support the kind of regular, on-the-ground enterprise reporting that would complicate the two-dimensional picture conveyed by the raft of international stories above. But that economic reality points toward a deeper tension in American news media culture: Given the limited resources that the Times and other legacy institutions are able to devote to reporting outside the U.S., should they focus on conflict (which leaves much of reality outside the frame of the narrative) or devote a greater portion of meager resources to subtler stories (which might cede clicks to outlets that are less interested in tempering sensationalism)?

A recent Knight Chair-University of Akron survey of news consumers suggests that audiences are eager for complexity. That kind of self-perception is itself ambiguous; perhaps most of those surveyed would simply like to think of themselves as eager for thorough reporting, while the aggregate of their metadata reveals a less sophisticated media palate. In the long run, the Times does no one a service by promoting a near-sighted reporting culture when it comes to religion coverage. Mister Magoo always managed to avoid stepping off a precipice at the wrong time. In our own shifting landscape, we have to depend on news media, rather than blind luck, to keep us from plunging into the void.

An October 30 article in the Los Angeles Times reports on a UN population study on child marriage and frames the problem as a primarily economic one. The 7.3 million babies born each year to girls under the age of 18 are cast as drags on developing economies since young mothers who might otherwise be in the workforce are at home caring for children. Add to that the expense of healthcare associated with adolescent pregnancies and child marriage can cost a poor country like Uganda 30 percent of its GDP.

What’s to be done? The article quotes  UN Population Fund executive director Babatunde Osotimehin as to what shouldn’t be done — namely, blaming the victim — but provides no hint to a possible solution other than to say it should be “holistic.”

Fortunately, the study itself offers up a number of approaches to reduce the number of child brides — including involving religious leaders in the effort. “Motherhood in Childhood” makes it clear that child marriage is primarily a problem borne of poverty, lack of education and cultural tradition, but notes that religion is often used as a pretext for the practice. Religious leaders of all faiths officiate child marriages, rendering them sacrosanct. For this reason, the UN, UNICEF, and the International Center for Research on Women have all called upon faith leaders to speak out.

In September, UNICEF  Nepal released a video featuring Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim leaders denouncing child marriage. Eleven percent of Nepalese girls are married before the age of 14 and 29 percent are married before age 18. In the PSA, Dr. Chintamani Yogi, the founder of the Hindu Vidya Peeth School in Nepal and an activist for women’s and children’s welfare, is unequivocal in his condemnation and, unlike the LA Times, is very clear about what needs to be done and who needs to do it.  Says Dr. Yogi:  “The holy books revere marriage as a holy union and a part of culture. Someone who does not send their children to school and prevents them from gaining an education is not a parent — but an enemy.”