For instance, local media in the UK tend to be much better informed about actual church life and work than the national media, which tend to repeat and perpetuate standard secularist misconceptions about Christians.

When it comes to features, magazine programs, etc., it all depends on the editor and producer -- an obvious point but it can be frustrating. I have had a good deal of experience of being interviewed at various levels about various things, and sometimes I have been well served by the program and sometimes not (e.g. when it turns out that I have been set up as the 'fall guy' for someone else to contradict!).

In news, most of our main channels here show, like the national newspapers, that mostly they don't really understand what the issues are. They collapse them into the false either/or questions that they, the newspapers and broadcasters, think are 'newsworthy'.

In particular, though many newspapers have 'religion correspondents', the latter seldom if ever report interesting and 'good news' stories about the millions of fascinating and encouraging things that are happening in churches -- but if a clergy person is caught taking money, or running off with someone else's spouse, they pounce and give it a big headline.

There are really only two or three 'religion' stories they want to tell: (a) religious people in general and clergy in particular are actually hypocrites; (b) religion in general and orthodox Christianity in particular is based on a mistake and bad for your health/society in general, not least because it is obsessed with outmoded sexual morality; (c) old-fashioned fuddy-duddies make church boring and unattractive; (d) silly happy-clappy modernizers make church embarrassing and unattractive.

The latter two, of course, cancel each other out but still make good copy; (a) is a special argument for (b) which is what most of our national journalists (with a small, heroic minority of exceptions) want you to believe...