Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As a rule, your GetReligionistas think that veteran religion-beat specialists do a consistently better job of getting the basic facts right, especially when their work is compared with general-assignment reporters who are shipped off to cover complicated stories that often have years, decades or centuries of past history.
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.
From time to time, your GetReligionistas have joined with the general public in moaning about the degree to which mainstream journalists are obsessed with matters of political “process” and that whole “inside baseball” school of news coverage in which reporters pounce on tiny changes in process or personnel as alleged evidence of earthquakes in national or world affairs.
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.
So, let’s let the whole progressive nuns vs. the Vatican thread spin on a bit, since the regional stories continue to pop up in the mainstream press.
It’s one thing to try to drag political labels over into religion coverage. That’s inevitable, I guess, in this highly politicized world in which we live today.
