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CBSNews.com commentator Dick Meyer thinks he has a new, fresh insight into the pope, politics, faith and cutlure in his “The Devoutness Divide.” And that would be true, if he were writing pre-1991, pre-James Davison Hunter, pre-”Culture Wars” (as Hunter actually defined that term).
Everywhere I turn this week, reproduction and contraception are in the news. Maybe it’s the Spring factor (enemy of people with allergies and all haters of public displays of affection) or maybe the death and funeral of the pope have set off a few moral tremors. Who knows? Item: New York senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has promised to block a Senate floor vote in the new nominee for head of the Food and Drug Administration until he agrees to rule on the proposal to make “Plan B,” the “morning after” pill, available over the counter. Item: Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick threw a hissy fit over the wave of cases where pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions for the pill — either the pre-emptive variety or the morning after edition. Item: Economist Steven D. Levitt’s new book Freakonomics is getting a lot of mileage out of Levitt’s old charge that abortion reduces crime (by eliminating a lot of would-be criminals). “Ahem!” says movie critic/crack statistics guy Steve Sailer.
GetReligion readers may have noticed that Nicholas D. Kristof experienced a fit of journalistic paranoia this week, one inspired, in large part, by a topic close to the concerns of this blog. Basically, he is scared stiff — with just cause, in my opinion — that the American public now views the MSM as a bunch of biased jerks, or worse. Thus the headline: “A Slap in the Face.”
I sympathize with any reporter writing about Philip Anschutz, who has to be the most publicity-adverse tycoon in decades. That the self-made billionaire is now branching into buying newspapers and producing mostly family-friendly films makes him more a tempting target for journalists who believe, in the words of Slate‘s Jack Shafer, that “There’s got to be an angle.”
Slate‘s JPII lineup is less than ideal. First we get two articles that ran in 2003 — one moderately interesting explanation of how the voting will go for the next pope and a piece by Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman that makes a lot of jokes without really handicapping the race for the next pope. Then we have a short, bloodless exchange between the “Catholic Right vs. the Catholic Left on John Paul II’s Legacy.” The partners in dialogue are Michael McGough and Deal Hudson. And — yes — Hudson does use much of his space to flak for Republicans. Christopher Hitchens weighs in with his usual drunken bombast, but this denunciation doesn’t even rise to the level of his attempt to pour cold water on Ronald Reagan. Rounding out the coverage is a summary of today’s newspapers and a piece by television critic Dana Stevens, who complains that network coverage is turning the pope’s “death agony into a peepshow,” which is “accompanied by blow by blow by perky newscasters.” Better, please.
Scott Gold of the Los Angeles Times is the first mainstream reporter on the story about a new order of priests to be called Missionaries of the Gospel of Life. The order will devote the majority of its efforts to resisting abortion and euthanasia through political organizing.
Reuters religion editor Tom Heneghan has just used one of those verbs that taints an entire news story. At least, I think that “Pope’s ‘Living Will’ Wants Life Support to the End” is supposed to be a hard news story about the implications of a major papal address. Then again there is this: “The Catholic Church has traditionally taught that doctors and families could end artificial life-extending measures in good conscience if a dying patient’s prospects seemed hopeless. John Paul, who has long railed against a ‘culture of death’ he saw in abortion and artificial birth control, surprised moral theologians in a speech in March 2004 by insisting Catholics can no longer make such decisions even in extreme cases.” Whoa! Spot the loaded verb?
