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Oh dear. Just as the rumors about Newsweek are becoming more positive, the news product offered by Time is suffering. Last week we looked at a very poor piece of journalism about female priests in non-Roman Catholic churches. And we looked at the odd defense offered by the reporter.
I’ve been meaning to cover the story of the four Christian evangelists who were arrested at the Dearborn Arab International Festival in June. It is fascinating to me how much coverage the media devoted to the non-burn of the Koran in Florida compared to the actual “going ghost” of Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris or the actual arrest of four street evangelists in Dearborn. I would just love for someone who was involved in the coverage of the Koran burn threat to explain why they wrote eleventy billion stories on the Florida pastor and none on these other situations.
It has been some time, let me tell you, since I read a mainstream news report linked to this era of clergy sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church that left me, well, smiling with appreciation. It’s hard to even imagine such a thing, right?
As I was tying the knot last year, most of my peers were not, according to a new study that suggests the recession has accelerated a decline in the number of people getting married.
Earlier this year, we looked at the story of Father Mark Gruber, a popular Benedictine monk who was let go from St. Vincent College after porn was found on his computer. When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the story in February, tmatt noted that some of the hardest news stories to cover are personnel disputes inside private colleges and universities, particularly religious ones, due to privacy issues. It turns out he was particularly prescient.
The other day, we observed the interesting fact that editors of the Baltimore Sun were not interested in the story of how a priest from here in Charm City — Father F. Richard Spencer, to be precise — ended up being named by the Vatican to serve as the new auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese for U.S. Military Service. His record as a military chaplain under fire is actually rather fascinating.
Whatever else might be said of the current political climate, there’s no doubt that it’s interesting. No one quite knows what might happen in the coming election but we do know that we’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift from 2008, when Democrats seemed unstoppable. Most of the excitement right now is happening in the Tea Party.
Week after week, your GetReligionistas receive mail from people who genuinely distrust or dislike America’s mainstream media.
Several of you felt passionately about Archbishop Charles Chaput’s boycott on the New York Times and jumped into a lively discussion about expectations between religion reporters and religious leaders. Then we discussed the various challenges for reporters with online media and how reporters balance puppy stories with broccoli stories. Guess what: I discuss these juicy topics on our third GetReligion podcast.
