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Who is going to represent the United States as ambassador to the Holy See? In a government headed by a President who is favors abortion rights and has opened the door to broader use of embryonic stem cells for research, this question is getting a lot of attention, both from advocacy organizations and from the press.
I rarely post my weekly Scripps Howard New Service column here at GetReligion, but this week is a unique situation.
The debate about Newsweek’s cover story of a few weeks ago by editor Jon Meacham, “The End of Christian America,” continues to intrigue journalists both across the pond (as noted earlier this week) and over here. When an opinion column addresses a topic we’ve covered (numerous times) then we consider it worth a mention.
Can you believe it was seven years ago that Attorney General John Ashcroft was outed for covering up the statues of the naked ladies in the Department of Justice building? He apparently didn’t like being photographed in front of the statues (representing “The Spirit of Justice”) when he gave speeches and press conferences. It was major news and, as a result, fodder for weeks of late night talk show jokes.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, Newsweek has published a poignant but sloppy story about two pastors scarred by the experience. The contrasts are strong:
Most news stories I have surveyed on President Obama’s speech Tuesday on the economy (among other things) have mentioned his use of the biblical metaphor of the nation’s economy being built on a rock, but few have gone beyond the message’s surface. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here.) For starters, none of the stories I read mentioned that President George W. Bush used a lot of religious metaphors and was at times criticized for using such language.
Yesterday I noted a Detroit Free Press story that referred to a Good Friday Mass at a Catholic church. No Mass is celebrated on Good Friday but the service is called the Mass of the Presanctified. So I sort of gave the reporter a pass, even though it violates Associated Press style guidelines.
I must confess that I was pretty harsh, when it came time to pass judgment on that Easter-free front page of the dead-tree-pulp edition of the Sunday Washington Post.
Every year I steel myself for the onslaught of Holy Week stories the mainstream media love. You know the ones — media pieces attempting to undermine miraculous stories about Jesus and his life. Some of them have been very bad. But this year those attacks have not been limited to Holy Week. Hurrah.
