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And on the fourth day of coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit, reporters gave their readers accurate and insightful characterizations and interesting quotes. Now if only they would give their readers a bit more context.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s ace religion reporter Ann Rodgers had an innovative angle on the pope’s address to U.S. bishops. Whereas most people focused on Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks about sexual abuse or immigration, Rodgers focused on his comments about the life of the church:
John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter provided a GetReligion-style service by performing, as he said, “rumor control,” in the hope that inaccurate or overblown material can be put in its proper context before it spins out of control.
Major props to Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post for a wonderful story on the front page of yesterday’s Style section analyzing the significance of Pope Benedict XVI’s papal garments.
Pope Benedict XVI held a private meeting yesterday with a small circle of victims of clergy abuse, which, following a surprisingly large number of references to the issue in sermons and speeches, steered the mainstream media coverage in a totally different direction here in Washington, D.C.
Tmatt will write about The Washington Post’s fine job in linking the church sex-abuse crisis to “the wider context” of relativism. Three other dailies also mentioned Pope Benedict’s critique of secularism and relativism, though not to the extent that I think they should have.
Writing about a court’s opinion in a lawsuit should be easy. At least you may think it would be. The court’s opinion typically contains all the relevant facts, important quotes, the history of the law and how it applies in the particular case. For example, you’d expect that news reports of a opinion finding a coach’s participation in pre-football game prayers unconstitutional would include the words of the prayer, right?
With Pope Benedict XVI in town, the media are running with every angle imaginable on the Catholic Church.
Historian Martin Marty once told me that many people have a definition of “ecumenism” that goes something like this: “I don’t believe very much and you don’t believe very much, so we must have a lot in common.”
