Rod Dreher at Beliefnet is offering a little sage wisdom from Robert Novak, along with some ideas of his own about religion and journalism:

It is hard to convey how unfriendly, even at times hostile, American newsrooms are to conservatives, especially religious conservatives. I know a person who works at the very top of American broadcast journalism, who is literally afraid that her colleagues will find out that she’s an Evangelical Christian, for fear of what this will do to her career. There are so few conservatives working in daily journalism that it’s easy for stereotypes to be taken as fact by journalists. The thing that’s striking to me, coming to the end of my second decade as a professional journalist, is not that the media are liberal, but that so many journalists have no idea how liberal they are. That is, they take their own political and cultural views as normative, because most of the people they know share those beliefs.

Now this is interesting to me, since it’s not exactly what I’ve known and experienced over my 25 years at the Eye web.

Everyone at CBS News knows I’m a Roman Catholic deacon. I’ve never experienced any hostility about it. Quite the opposite. People are curious and intrigued by it, and several Catholics have approached me with questions or requests for prayers. On Ash Wednesday, I distributed ashes in an upstairs office for those who wanted them. (I got about a dozen takers, including the President of CBS News and CBS Sports, who himself is a regular visitor to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.) And it’s not like everyone in the newsroom is a godless heathen. Until recently all the writers on the CBS Evening News were practicing Catholics. The anchor of the CBS Evening News has written about her own church-going experiences. And she affectionately refers to me now as “Deacon Kandra” (having learned, belatedly, that I’m not “Father Kandra.”)

I will concede that around the newsroom, the Lord’s name is usually taken in vain, if it’s taken at all. But I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone (including one or two prominent and outspoken atheists that I’ve worked with) who has not treated me and my religious convictions with anything less than respect. (A couple years ago, I wrote about straddling two worlds, the church and the newsroom, in America magazine.)

But that’s just my experience. Your mileage may vary.