The Kenya Times got it fantastically wrong last week. By all standards, the Thursday 22 front-page story, "Pope steps in as review splits Catholic bishops," was erroneous both in heading and content.

The story starts out by saying that there have been reports about the Vatican having appointed one of the local bishops as head of the Church in the Kenya. Yet, the Catholic Church does not have country heads – despite the Media’s repeated reference to Nairobi’s Archbishop Ndingi mwana ’a Nzeki as head of the Catholic Church in Kenya.

The story then refers to John Njue as bishop and identifies him as chairman of the Kenyan conference of Catholic bishops. Njue is Nyeri’s second archbishop, and not the chairman of the bishops’ conference; Eldoret Bishop Cornelius arap Korir is. Bishop Philip Anyolo is identified as Bishop of Kisii; he is bishop of Homa Bay.

The story further says that there are 18 Catholic bishops in the country; there are at least 33. Then, the story says that Kisumu Archbishop Zacchaeus Okoth and Kakamega Bishop Philip Sulumeti were criticized by their colleagues, Archbishops Ndingi and Njue. That is an assertion that, in journalism, cries for a quote. None is offered; thereby seriously compromising the credibility of the assertion.

In the end, there is no mention of the Pope’s alleged intervention in a national Catholic split, as the headline stated.

Two reasons can be advanced for this huge gaffe. One: poor research. Two: an obvious lack of experts on the beat the paper attempted to cover – religion. Contrary to what local Media professionals appear to believe, religion is a valid beat in journalism. Just like journalists specialize in covering politics, women issues, education, environment, etcetera, so should they specialize in covering religion.

The international Press frequently reveal stories with a religious angle and it would help a great deal if local journalism took the religion beat with the same seriousness.

And that does not simply mean going to attend a church service in which a fiery preacher will lecture the public and Government about this and that on Sunday.

At the Moscow Times, for example, reporter Andrei Zolotov is so versed in the beat that he can narrate without script why the Roman Catholic Church cannot have a Bishop of Moscow. The reason lies in an intricate detail; in the way these two churches are constituted, he told this writer last March. The Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches are two quarrelling siblings of the same mother, he said.

They have a common definition of Church, which clamps their faithful under a local bishop. Appointing a Catholic Bishop of Moscow would not only create a diplomatic row with the Vatican, it would be a constitutional contradiction between the two churches, which understand they are both direct descendants of the Apostles, said Zolotov. Consequently, the Vatican may only appoint a bishop in Moscow.

A reporter referring to the Catholic official as "Bishop of Moscow", therefore, would be making a factual error. It may sound petty in this case, but taking the trouble to grasp the distinction between the all-important articles, "of" and "in", would make all the difference between credible reporting and courting a diplomatic row. And the Moscow Times evidently cares enough about this to retain Zolotov in its staff.

From the UK, BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg has for over a decade specialized in the post-communist religious revival in the former Soviet Union. Part of the veteran reporter’s job is to frequent synagogue services, a habit that has turned him into an expert in Russian Judaism. Across the Atlantic, the New York Times keeps a religion desk. Columbia University Journalism professor, Ari Goldman, who wrote for the desk for 10 years, made a career covering the late New York Catholic Archbishop John Cardinal O’Connor for the Times. Goldman, an Orthodox Jew, became so versed in Catholic rubrics that hardly a story touching the Church ran in the paper with factual errors.

What our Press here fails to acknowledge is that religion so permeates the fabric of modern society that journalists as stenographers of the goings-on cannot simply avoid it.

Yet we here cover the beat as a pastime — for lack of better news, read largely as politics. When reporters arrive on a religious scene, their shyness screams discomfort.

They quickly get bored with talk they can’t decipher or rituals they can’t sketch out in an anecdote. They look for political angles. Take the example of reporters dispatched to cover the release of a Pastoral Letter, something the Catholic bishops do every other year or so. Okay, this is mostly boring stuff for Dick, the average reader on the street. But this is where a skilled reporter comes in.

The skilled reporter works much like a doctor. When a patient narrates to his doctor symptoms of what ails him, the good doctor does not respond by clobbering him with biological jargon. He tells the patient stuff he understands; like Aspirin and Panadol. Similarly, the reporter’s job in this instance is to strip the Pastoral Letter of its choking religious babble and present its essence to Dick in an intelligible language – without compromising the message.

The idea is not to advance religious causes in what are secular publications, but to understand the beat well enough to report on it factually and authoritatively. Otherwise, there will be too many of the Kenya Times-type gaffes.

And we could take this to the next level.

The local media frequently calls in political scientists to elucidate political intrigues. What’s so wrong in calling religion experts to the news desk to expound on corresponding issues that so polarise society today?

Kodi Barth teaches journalism at United States International University-Nairobi.

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