Dr. David A. Ferman presented a paper about evangelical journalists at a conference in Fort Worth.

The paper, “God’s objective truth, as far as we know it”: Journalism ideology at an evangelical news magazine, was presented on Nov. 6 at the Southwest Symposium of the Southwest Education Council for Journalism & Mass Communication. The symposium was co-sponsored by Texas Wesleyan and was held on the Texas Christian University campus.

The paper is a condensed version of Ferman’s dissertation, which he defended in the spring of 2014 to receive his doctorate at the University of Oklahoma. A look at how ideology shapes news coverage and opinion articles, it includes both interviews with more than a dozen members of WORLD Magazine, a bi-monthly evangelical news magazine based in Asheville, North Carolina, and textual analysis of one year of the magazine’s content. It is the first paper to study journalism ideology at a religion-based news magazine.

Ferman has presented four previous papers at SWECJMC conferences since 2007. His last paper at the conference, which looked at college students’ religiosity and their opinion of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, was presented in 2011 and named one of the conference’s top six papers. He has had three studies published in the organization’s Southwestern Mass Communication Journal.