Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
To the surprise of few, presumed 2008 Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama announced that he plans to out-do Bush in integrating faith-based programs on the federal level. What surprised some, at least initially, was an inaccurate report from the Associated Press that said that Obama’s plan would support religious organizations’ ability to hire and fire based on faith.
Remember that CDC statistic alleging that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease? Before we even knew that the statistic was completely unreliable (its relative standard error was greater than 30 percent), we criticized the media coverage for uncritically parroting the Planned Parenthood talking points about what the study meant.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a story in The Washington Times which reported that employees of Catholic Charities of Richmond helped a teenage foster child procure an abortion. Now in a follow-up, the Times‘ Julia Duin reports that both the Richmond bishop and Catholic Charities director knew about the plannned abortion and did nothing to stop it:
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has 2.3 million members. By way of comparison, the Episcopal Church has 2.15 million members. I’ve remarked before at how odd it is that the Episcopal Church gets so much more coverage than the other American church bodies with more members. It’s not completely surprising, perhaps, that they get more coverage, given the large Anglican communion, the pomp and circumstance of liturgical worship and the dramatic way in which the church is imploding. But still, it seems out of balance.
The growth of Christianity in non-Western cultures and societies is widely acknowledged to be one of the biggest religion stories these days. A significant subset of that story is the rapid growth of Christianity in China to a point where it is the country’s second largest religion (behind only Buddhists and ahead of Islam).
One of the most important decisions made in a newsroom is story selection. The editors of the New York Times Sunday Magazine made a very interesting decision in choosing to run a lengthy story about the demographic collapse of Europe. Reporter Russell Shorto, whose work we’ve looked at before, examines various explanations for the low birth rates in Europe in his piece titled “No Babies?”
Rare is the reporter who writes about blacks and abortion. So give credit to Julia Duin, a-friend-of-this-blog who covers religion for The Washington Times. She wrote about a topic that the rest of the Washington press corps avoided: a demonstration late last week by black activists against the nation’s abortion laws.
Both The Washington Post and The Washington Times covered a Virginia state court ruling Friday regarding the constitutionality of a longstanding state law that could allow the 11 congregations who have left the Episcopal Church over the last couple of years to keep their multi-million dollar properties. The tone and perspective of the two stories are rather stark. Just look look at the headlines.
Major, major news coming out of the Jerusalem meeting of Anglican primates. The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) has produced a statement with major implications for the Anglican Communion. Before looking at any coverage, you should read the clear and concise statement here. In a section analyzing the current state of affairs in Anglicanism, the GAFCON document says that the church is in crisis over “three undeniable facts”:
