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When journalists write stories about people doing good things with seemingly pure hearts, it’s not unusual that the reporting ends up being a bit on the soft side. There is nothing particularly flagrant about this offense. I confess to being guilty of it on occasion. However, failing to be skeptical, provide the needed context and ask tough questions leads to stories that leave readers with questions.
Yesterday I pointed out the Los Angeles Times‘ rather incomplete survey of “liberal and conservative congregations” on the issue of same-sex marriage. Seventy-five percent of the religious figures who took a position in the article were exuberant about the recent California Supreme Court ruling redefining marriage to include same-sex couples.
Yesterday I complained about a Los Angeles Times story that profiled only one couple — an Evangelical Christian one — to represent the 61 percent of California voters who voted to limit marriage to one man and one woman. It was their support of the traditional definition of marriage that was ruled unconstitutional by the California State Supreme Court last week.
Today is Pentecost, one of the three chief festivals in the Western Christian church year. It would be hard to imagine a complete lack of coverage of Christmas or Easter but Pentecost, the least commercial or secularized of the three days, doesn’t receive much media coverage at all. I don’t have any statistics to back this up but I think that media coverage is particularly sparse during those years, like 2008, that the High Holy Day of Mothers coincides with Pentecost.
Long-time GetReligion readers may remember that I have been, and remain, very confused about the meaning of the term “emerging church” and how it relates to that other confusing term “evangelical.” There was even a time, two years ago or thereabouts, when GetReligion.org was named one of the top weblogs linked to the “emerging church” movement. That struck me as most strange. It still does.
Hey, there you go. It has taken almost the whole primary season, but it now appears that the national press — or, at least, the Washington Post, which is a big deal in my zip code — has accepted that there are religious believers in the Democratic Party. Hurrah.
News reporters are starting to step up to the challenge of exploring the complicated issue of why a person joins a church. A pair of articles published this week explore both sides of the coin that is a person’s decision to attend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
