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So Vice President Dick Cheney gave a commencement speech this week at Brigham Young University. He told the gathered assembly of about 20,000 to savor second chances and be prepared for the unexpected throughout life. A small group of College Democrats and anti-war activists protested outside the venue where he spoke. Some students and faculty were upset with the choice of commencement speaker.
It has been a very busy week for me as we ended the spring term at the Washington Journalism Center. I have been away from my keyboard quite a bit.
A fair share of you loyal readers noticed the fair share of mistakes I made in my previous post on the Veterans Affairs Department’s decision to include the Wiccan pentacle on a list of approved religious symbols for gravestones. For those mistakes I apologize, particularly to New York Times reporter Neela Banerjee. I’ll use this as an opportunity to revisit the subject briefly, because we had many thoughtful comments that I thought I would highlight.
Sometimes readers wonder why we look at mainstream media coverage of abortion. A few have suggested it’s not a religious issue. Yet many religion reporters routinely cover both the pro-life and pro-choice movements and cover abortion regularly. Well, the losing side of the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has been noticing religion. Readers have sent along various anti-Roman Catholic opinion pieces — most notably The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s cartoon and Rosie O’Donnell’s screed on The View. But we don’t care whether editorial writers or pundits have opinions on religious issues. That’s just what makes for an exciting editorial page. Although even Rosie O’Donnell’s crazy conspiracy theories don’t salvage The View, do they?
As an Orthodox Christian, I have to admit that my heart lurched a bit when I read the early wire stories about the funeral of Boris N. Yeltsin.
We set a record at GetReligion last week for the post that received the most comments — 112 at this point. We looked at some of the coverage of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. For such a divisive issue, and with comments coming at it from all sides, almost all of the perspectives offered in the comment thread about how to improve media treatment of the issue were fantastic and informative.
News coverage of the Veterans Affairs Department’s decision to include the Wiccan pentacle on a list of approved religious symbols that can be engraved on the headstones of veterans has been high on the politics and low on the religion. The story comes down to a classic case of religious freedom. Unfortunately, the story has been swept up by politics when it is not clear that it was directly related to politics.
Every now and then, you read a feature story in a major newspaper and, as you read and read, you think to yourself: “OK, at some point, the reporter just has to raise a moral or religious question about all of this. Don’t they?”
One of the hardest things to teach a journalism student is how to know when to use a paraphrase quote and when to use a direct quote — other than when the length of the story is an issue or you have an out-of-this-world stunner on your hands.
