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When one of the country’s most prominent evangelical leaders uses the word “fruitcake” to describe a leading presidential contender’s interpretation of the Constitution, you’re guaranteed to get headlines. You’re not guaranteed to get context.
As I promised in that earlier post, I have kept my eyes open for any additional material about the closed-door meeting in Chicago between Sen. Barack Obama and that group of 40 or so Christian leaders. It seems that much of the gossip about it has moved into more private forums.
As you may have noticed — if you have taken a turn or two around the WWW in the past 20 hours or so (click here) — those amazingly productive people over at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have rolled out the second half of their lay-of-the-land study of religion in the United States.
We have some GetReligion readers out there who are beginning to think like reporters, when it comes to watching the Anglican wars.
One of the hardest things to do is to cover an important “off the record” meeting that takes behind closed doors.
After one brief palate-cleansing look at decent stories on the same-sex marriage issue, we can now return to the mainstream media’s attack on defenders of traditional marriage. At this point, I’m not sure how inadvertent the biased stories are.
Again and again, we need to stress that newspaper reporters rarely, if ever, write the headlines for their stories.
Last month, Mollie criticized reporters for marginalizing opponents of same-sex marriage. Rather than presenting marriage traditionalists in full, journalists portrayed them as fringe types.
Yesterday, I wrote a post noting how the mainstream media were following to a tee the media plan of same-sex advocates. I asked for stories that broke the mold. A few readers obliged, sending along a story written and broadcast by National Public Radio’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty. It’s beautifully written and crafted and really enlightens readers and listeners about the tensions involved in legal battles over gay issues. Here’s how the story is framed:
