Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Our friends over at the diversity and ethics offices at Poynter.org have run a really interesting commentary on a media issue at the heart of debates about fair and accurate coverage of same-sex marriage.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s speech on Father’s Day about the importance of fatherhood is drawing praise from some surprising quarters that the day-after stories struggled to pick-up on. The New York Times rightly focused on the impact the speech had on the African-American community, but this speech is having effects in other communities as well.
Of the many stories dealing with same-sex marriage in California, one San Francisco Chronicle story in particular deserves a look. Headlined “Bay Area churches opened door to same-sex vows,” the reporter skims the surface of the history of same-sex rites in Christian churches and managed to get the attention of more than a few GetReligion readers in the process:
I was pleasantly surprised last Monday morning to see in my morning newspaper a story of significant length on the Southern Baptist’s convention, held this week across the street from where I work. Indianapolis gets all sorts of conventions, from Gen Con to the National FFA. The newspaper does a reasonable job covering them, but some fall through the cracks.
Those who are not deep into the comments thread on the Rick Warren post will want to note this development.
Associated Press writer Angela Delli Santi wrote a story about a Muslim student’s lawsuit against his public high school:
We’ve heard this before: Young evangelicals are abandoning the Republican Party; they are sick of being identified with the Religious Right and its narrow-minded agenda; they want a politics that extends to issues such as global warming, Darfur, and (illegal) immigration; and as a consequence, they plan to vote Democratic. If there were one meta-narrative after the 2004 election, this was it.
We get our share of interesting comments here at this weblog and we also get lots of straw-man sermons that have nothing to do with religion-news coverage. And from time to time we hear from the reporters, editors and religious leaders involved in the actual coverage.
This is hardly breaking news, but the late Pastor Jerry Falwell was a really funny guy, by which I mean funny in terms of humor. Many of the obits mentioned this fact and also mentioned that a wide variety of people actually liked the man.
