Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Today’s immigration news becomes a little more real when you know people it will directly affect. Whether or not you personally agree with the decision, it will impact faith communities as much as the rest of the country.
As the battles continue over religious liberty issues — by which I mean battles over issues that the White House has described as having religious-liberty implications — journalists continue to struggle with that old, old issue of simplistic labeling.
If you want to make a story go viral, you might have NPR do a dramatic reading of some pop song or discuss more epic autotune potential that could come out of PBS.
We heard a few comments last week about NPR’s coverage of various nun issues. Some thought it was one-sided or too shallow but I was intrigued by this report claiming that NPR devoted 14 minutes on Friday to support of nuns who’ve been criticized by the Vatican for failing to uphold Catholic teaching. I wondered how many minutes were devoted to religious freedom rallies that were held nationwide on Friday. And while I’m not sure if I’m doing the Google thing correctly, I think it looks like zero minutes. NPR did throw an Associated Press story up on the web site, but I can’t find anything else.
In one of my favorite scenes in the original 2001 “Shrek” movie, the title character explains to Donkey that “there’s a lot more to ogres than people think.”
Some news organizations are working in their editorials and opinion pieces (if not elsewhere) — to downplay, denigrate or outright dismiss the religious liberty concerns some Americans have expressed recently. And yet, particularly when it comes to a new federal mandate requiring some religious organizations to violate their doctrines or face strict fines and penalties, people keep expressing these concerns.
Before we get going with what I’m sure will be a heavy duty week in GetReligion post (and yes, I have a couple of posts I’m writing right now on coverage of religious freedom issues) I had to share something from NPR’s Weekend Edition on Saturday.
