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A few days ago, Terry looked at a few of the initial stories that came out of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life megastudy. In the comments, a few of you noted one particularly odd statistic from the survey. Here’s how Ed Stoddard of Reuters put it on the news service’s blog:
When one of the country’s most prominent evangelical leaders uses the word “fruitcake” to describe a leading presidential contender’s interpretation of the Constitution, you’re guaranteed to get headlines. You’re not guaranteed to get context.
As I promised in that earlier post, I have kept my eyes open for any additional material about the closed-door meeting in Chicago between Sen. Barack Obama and that group of 40 or so Christian leaders. It seems that much of the gossip about it has moved into more private forums.
As you may have noticed — if you have taken a turn or two around the WWW in the past 20 hours or so (click here) — those amazingly productive people over at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have rolled out the second half of their lay-of-the-land study of religion in the United States.
One of the hardest things to do is to cover an important “off the record” meeting that takes behind closed doors.
After one brief palate-cleansing look at decent stories on the same-sex marriage issue, we can now return to the mainstream media’s attack on defenders of traditional marriage. At this point, I’m not sure how inadvertent the biased stories are.
Our friends over at the diversity and ethics offices at Poynter.org have run a really interesting commentary on a media issue at the heart of debates about fair and accurate coverage of same-sex marriage.
Of the many stories dealing with same-sex marriage in California, one San Francisco Chronicle story in particular deserves a look. Headlined “Bay Area churches opened door to same-sex vows,” the reporter skims the surface of the history of same-sex rites in Christian churches and managed to get the attention of more than a few GetReligion readers in the process:
