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There’s more big news from the Catholic Church this week. As most of you probably already know, the Vatican is considering a ban on homosexuals from the priesthood. This is certain to create a new intense round of debate in the mass media on the nature of homosexuality and of the priesthood. I haven’t had the time to do a thorough search yet of the coverage, but it seems that The New York Times is on top of the issue:
There is an old saying in the world of mass media theory (especially if you hang around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) that “technology shapes content.” This is certainly true in the world of newspapers. Ask any layout specialist or headline writer who has ever tried to make the move from a broadsheet newspaper to one that uses a tabloid format.
Please consider this a short follow-up post after my recent “Watching Katrina with Sen. Moynihan” effort. You may recall that this raised some questions about the moral, cultural and even religious issues looming in the background of the failed evacuation of New Orleans.
The current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review contains an essay that is must reading for anyone who cares about the future of American newspapers and the classic “American model of the press,” which is (or was) built on the concept that newspapers promised readers fair and accurate coverage of both sides in heated debates.
Stephen A., I think you’re missing a critical distinction. The Mormons are not Trinitarian, to put it mildly; their 19th century Scientology-like theology is in contradiction to every other Christian group, and certainly to doctrinally focused traditions such as fundamentalism. The fundamentalists think that the Catholics are wrong, to be sure, but the scope of error is entirely different. Listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” sometime and notice how they’ve changed the words. Indeed, that is part of the discomfort about the Mormons. Externally, they are relentlessly normal; their theological innards are, well, weird. . . .
I’ve sensed anger from some who are upset over the negative tone the mass media have taken toward the federal government in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. Some are asking why we couldn’t all come together the way we did after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Why has this become a left/right political issue that is dividing the country?
Let me offer a follow-up remark or two about the Newsweek “Pray For Us” cover story on Hurricane Katrina. I’ll put this in a separate post, so that readers don’t confuse my take on this with Doug’s piece. It’s not that I disagree with Doug. But something nagged me as I read the lead article through twice.
Maybe it’s because I’ve written more for magazines than for newspapers since the late 1980s, but I often find newsweeklies more helpful than other media for making sense of broad-sweep stories, such as Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans.
Alan Cooperman’s article in Sunday’s Washington Post on the how some see God at work in the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina disappoints. In taking on such a heady issue, Cooperman fails to go outside the usual sources and seems to trip up over the fact that the typical heavyweights in Christian circles failed to issue harsh condemnations from heaven on the sinners of New Orleans.
