Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
You might think that the debut of his Christmas special was as good a time as any for journalists to explore the beliefs of Stephen Colbert, one of television’s most vocal comedians, and 2008 Presidential candidate who disappointed millions (thousands? his immediate family?) by being forced to drop out of the race in South Carolina last year (go on and laugh –but who could have envisioned Minnesota’s Al Franken?).
As far as I can tell, there is no faith, no religion, no hope and no positive sense of morality in the following story.
Some of this blog’s readers regurarly object to sports stories that deal with religion, particularly when they deal with professional athletes who are paid millions of dollars to play a game. I generally hold that regardless of salaries, the religious angles in athletes’ lives are generally relevant since they are part of the make-up of a person who has a faith.
MZ has just arrived back in town from a trip to the distant, distant West (think home state of the president elect) and she promptly posted on that non-Roman Catholic priest story. At the precise moment she clicked “post,” I was finishing up this post.
I am so sick of looking at the shoddy coverage of non-Roman Catholic priests who are female. But since it’s our job here to root out shoddy coverage, let’s look at this piece and then pray that the coverage improves. The latest one is from KSDK in St. Louis. The headline is: “St. Louis woman becomes world’s first Catholic priest to give birth.”
I don’t know about you, but out here in the Philadelphia exurbs we are in the grip of the kind of crisis that brings the area to its knees– about four more inches of snow than apparently anyone expected.
The theological term is “theodicy,” and, as I have said before, this concept is woven into many religion-news stories for at least two good reasons.
For the second week in a row, the Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell has devoted her column to the problem of media bias. I always get a kick out of how the media treats problems in the media industry relative to problems in other industries. All of that investigative journalism, take-no-prisoners attitude and hard-hitting reporting suddenly disappears and we get limp and timid copy.
Long, long ago, in a discussion of mainstream media coverage of trends in Iran, Bill Moyers told me that most journalists are “tone deaf to the music of religion.” He has used that same image in other settings.
