Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
My sense is that reporters often look to religion when covering people who are against abortion. It might seem obvious, since people do often cite their underlying religious beliefs as their reason for opposition. Though when reporters explore why people do provide abortions, religion suddenly disappears from consideration.
Of all the Smithsonians, my favorites are the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Health and Medicine (or as I call it, the Museum of Medical Oddities). The NPG was closed for something like five years while undergoing a costly renovation. But it reopened a few years back and is back in the news with an exhibit (“Hide/Seek”) exploring sexual identity in art.
It seems that we are going to see more mainstream coverage of those debates about religious liberty, military chaplains and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” So let’s back up and note a few basic fact, some of which were handled quite well in that CNN.com report that I praised the other day in the post called, “Chaplain questions older than DADT.”
Religion writer and reporter Mark Oppenheimer mentioned GetReligion on his worthwhile blog. He highlighted our critiques of two recent pieces — the Arizona gay Mormon suicide story and the Amish forgiveness story.
It’s no secret that reporters struggle with statistics. But this story combines that problem with weak reporting on Mormonism and gay issues. And it is a doozy. This might be the most illogical and bizarre story I’ve read in some time. I passed it along to a few other reporters and they couldn’t believe it had been published. So with that, I present MyFoxPhoenix.com’s (KSAZ FOX 10 KUTP My45) “Suicide Rate Disturbingly High Among Arizona Mormons.”
Please forgive (and, yes, that word will play a key role in this post) my inability to come up with anything more eloquent to say about an absolutely riveting news-feature from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Last year when late-term abortion provider George Tiller was killed inside his church, the media devoted many stories to late-term abortions. One of the things that I noted at the time was that I erroneously believed there were only three men in the country willing to abort late-term and full-term fetuses: Tiller, LeRoy Carhart and Warren Hern. This was based on the claims of the men themselves, which were repeated by many in the media.
I am a horrible Christian traditionalist (Eastern Orthodox, actually) who cares about liturgical traditions that are not good for the global economy. I get spooked or even angry when I hear a reggae-musak version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” over the speakers in a hamburger joint and it isn’t even Nativity Lent (think Advent) yet.
