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Religious persecution tends to make for sensational stories. There’s a lot of human drama, and for better or worse, it’s easy to confirm the worst fears of certain segment of the population that is skeptical of the “organized religion” behemoth. It’s no wonder that journalists pounce on them when they find them.
Rather than update my previous Armenian genocide post with a link to Julia Duin’s article on its anniversary in the Washington Times, I wanted to highlight it separately. I noted that most stories about the events of 1915 were solely or almost exclusively political. Very few touched on religion in any meaningful way.
There are times when I really feel the pain of the brilliant folks who work with the polling and research division of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Though we’ve looked at a bit of the coverage related to Notre Dame University’s conferral of an honorary degree and speaking slot for President Barack Obama, there’s a lot that we haven’t highlighted. Mostly that’s because the stories are fairly straightforward or just local repetitions of previous stories. The Washington Times reported that, as of Friday, 46 bishops had publicly castigated Notre Dame:
On Friday, President Barack Obama broke a campaign promise to Armenian voters to declare the 1915 massacre of Armenians an act of “genocide.” As Glenn Kessler noted in a March Washington Post story anticipating that this might happen, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Joseph Biden for years have not minced words about labeling as “genocide” the deaths of Armenians. They regularly lambasted President George W. Bush for not using the word “genocide.” And Obama’s promise that he would use the word — compared with Sen. John McCain’s position — got him enthusiastic support among the Armenian community.
From Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, addressing a question on whether Serena Williams’ choices in clothing are appropriate for a Jehovah’s Witness:
Back in the 1980s, when I was at the Rocky Mountain News, I covered the long legal battle between St. Mary’s Parish and the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado.
So The New York Times covered Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s first Mass in New York. This is a good thing. Depending on when and how you accessed the article, its headline was either:
One of our informal house rules here at GetReligion is to try to give reporters the benefit of the doubt, when we spot something fishy, unbalanced or downright messed up in a news report.
