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I’ve mumbled to myself how interesting it is that New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, not known for his strong defense of property rights, has been so good on the issue when it comes to the proposed Cordoba mosque project. This Wall Street Journal story attempts to show a similar discrepancy on Bloomberg’s religious views. I think it fails because it confuses personal religious views with civic duty. Here’s how it begins:
The Washington Post ran an intriguing story Sunday about the apparent lack of state funding to provide Muslim chaplains in Virginia prisons.
No one can make you feel guilty like a pastor. Or in this case a New York Times story about pastoral burnout that I’ve been meaning to write about for two weeks:
We’ve had an interesting conversation going on in a recent comment thread about how the media cover Islam and Christianity. Some people have speculated that political correctness or moral relativism harms some media coverage. I wonder if it might just be some problems with history. A GetReligion reader sent in this CNN article cheerily headlined “Muslims in Spain campaign to worship alongside Christians.”
What we have here is your basic story about idealistic interns who have come to Washington, D.C., to learn how to make a difference in this complex and troubled world — only with one big twist.
We could probably spend weeks looking at the media coverage of the mosque proposed to be built near Ground Zero. One of the things I find so interesting about this story is how so much of the reporting on the mosque and its backers is being done by non-traditional media. And many of the mainstream reports seem less interested in that aspect of the story than looking at the opposition to the mosque. It creates a weird media climate where the best news and analysis comes from blogs and pundits and, well, the worst treatment and analysis comes from blogs and pundits.
One of the things that annoys me about reporting is how we spend so much time looking for and writing about dramatic news hooks that we miss the day-to-day drama of real life. I almost never see my religious life reflected in a given news story. My congregation is not driven by trends. We worship in largely the same way Lutherans have always worshiped. This does not make for exciting news coverage, as you might imagine.
I was really hoping to avoid another Clinton-Mezvinsky-wedding story after Monday’s discussion of the poor coverage of the Jewish traditions included in the ceremony. Really hoping. It just feels a bit too paparazzo for me.
You’d hope that with all the navel gazing (live blogging!?) that led up to Chelsea Clinton’s marriage to Marc Mezvinsky — with all the speculation about the role of religion in the wedding of the Methodist former first daughter to a Jew from a powerful stock — that someone would have cared to provide a little nuance to the different religious imagery that made appearances in their no-luxury-spared ceremony Saturday.
