The Revealer Goes Bicoastal, Again

By Peter Manseau

A few years ago, when Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet and I were touring in support of our book, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, we spent just enough time in San Francisco to meet the quintessential West Coast media man. No, not David Geffen — Diamond Dave Whittaker. A radio talk show host, Rainbow Family elder, and aging beatnik often mistaken for a hippie gone gray, Diamond Dave told us that his one claim to fame was that he had turned Bob Dylan on to pot. He was being modest; in fact, the man is a walking monument to the counter culture, as likely to be stopped on the street by a dreadlocked white girl from Marin County as by an African-American businessman with a Black Panther beret in his past. His philosophy and his life were summed up best by a mantra he repeated at every opportunity. “Cast a wide net,” he liked to say, “and find a common thread.”

Yet to call Diamond Dave “quintessentially” West Coast is not to support the usual stodgy vs. trippy bicoastal dialectic. Rather, it is simply to say you’d be hard pressed to find someone similar on the other side of the country. Dave is so far from what the East Coast media expects of its cultural figures that geography is the easiest way to explain his existence, his endurance, and his — how would they say it in California? — his energy.

Because they do see things differently out there, don’t they? Do they tell different stories because they’re never cold? Do they notice different details because of all the extra sunshine? Here at the Revealer, we’re about to find out.

This fall, the usual line-up of editors and writers from NYU’s Center for Religion and the Media will be joined once again by voices from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications. For the second year running, we’ve enlisted a team of USC’s best student journalists to serve as watchdogs and critics of media representations of religion, wherever it may be found.

We’ve given the Revealer’s West Coast writers no region-specific guidelines, but we will be interested to see how perceptions of religion in the news might differ depending on zip codes, time zones, and relative humidity.

Fittingly enough, our first installment offers a Los Angeles writer’s assessment of a New York Times story about a convent not far from the Sunset Strip. Lilly Fowler’s take on “For 56 years, Battling Evils of Hollywood with Prayer” shows how a reporter’s religious assumptions can lead to belittling depictions of his subjects, a misstep which can’t be undone with a forced upbeat note in the closing lines.

Watch the Today and Timely columns for new dispatches from the Revealer‘s West Coast team throughout the fall. They’ll be casting wide nets and finding commmon threads with their criticism from now until to December.

Peter Manseau is the West Coast editor of The Revealer, and author most recently of Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and their Son, available in paperback this fall.