As for whether they can report on their own faith, there’s no single rule for all of journalism. Editors do ask the question but I don’t know if any news organisations have strict rules on this. One reason for not having such a rule is that, if editors set up such a ban for religion reporters, they’d also have to consider such bans for political, financial or other reporters. Should journalists who vote for the Democrats be barred from covering the White House? Or reporters who support capitalism from covering Wall Street? If the rules were that strict, it might be very hard to find enough reporters to cover some beats. Imagine if U.S. newspapers could only assign non-Americans to cover the State Department, on the argument that Americans might be partial to U.S. foreign policy and open to manipulation by appeals to their patriotism. One could push the argument to the extreme and say only atheists and agnostics should cover religion.

Let’s take a practical case several news organisations have faced. Should they refuse to post a foreign correspondent to Israel because he/she was Jewish or elsewhere in the Middle East because he/she was a Muslim. In such cases, being from those religious traditions might actually help those correspondents understand those countries better than other reporters with no such religious background. If bylines that hint at presumed ethnic and/or religious backgrounds are anything to go by, many news organisations seem to have a mix of correspondents with and without these religious backgrounds. It would take a lot of research to find out if this is intentional or just a coincidence.

So the responsibility lies with journalists to maintain a critical distance to any groups they are linked to and editors to keep an eye on journalists to ensure their copy is balanced. But that applies to all beats.