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With Bon Jovi, Angela Merkel and Mikhail Gorbachev likely to steal the spotlight at the Berlin wall 20th anniversary celebration, Reuters’ Tom Heneghan says Protestant leaders feel overlooked:
TMatt has been looking at some of the larger issues of framing in coverage of Maine’s vote to overturn a law legalizing same-sex marriage. But I’m also curious about some of the nitty gritty. I’ve been meaning to look at some of the coverage for days so let’s begin with this pre-election story by the Washington Post‘s Karl Vick. The story explains the situation — the legislature passed and the governor signed a bill to permit same-sex couples to marry and gets his perspective that the “libertarian” Maine will note vote to overturn that law. The campaign against same-sex marriage, we learn, is drawing heavily on its communications strategy from their successful fight over the same issue in California last year. And then this:
As my GetReligion colleagues and the media (particularly the Brits, of course) have again and noted this week, again portrayed Pope Benedict’s move to create a personal ordinariate for conservative Anglicans as a bold move to poach members from the world’s third-largest denomination. Terry had praise for a story in the New York Times which noted that accepting Anglican priests into the Catholic Church was by no means without precedent.
Coverage of the new arrangement being offered by Pope Benedict XVI to traditional Anglicans is making mention of the division within the Anglican Communion over ordination of women, ordination of openly gay clergy, the elevation of a noncelibate homosexual to the bishopric, and the blessing of same-sex unions. And when discussing those issues, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Episcopal Church has come close to schism over these issues.
You’ve heard of religion reporters becoming atheists. And you’ve heard of religion reporters becoming agnostic. But have you heard of religion reporters becoming pastors?
Whenever I read in-depth coverage of disaster stories, I always remember something that the late Peter Jennings of ABC News once told me. For Jennings, disaster stories almost always served as perfect examples of how mainstream journalists fail to “get” the role that religion plays in ordinary life or ordinary people.
Much to my parents’ chagrin, I resisted early bedtimes from a very young age. So they would let me stay up and watch Johnny Carson. When Carson retired, I moved to Letterman. Somewhere along the line he lost me. He’s just seemed off for, well, a decade. And now I have Craig Ferguson, who I greatly enjoy. Here’s a sample.
This past June, I commented on the popular use of the word “icon” to describe Michael Jackson. In a way, the story below is a fitting follow-up to the summer stories of the deaths of other icons, such as Farrah Fawcett and Ted Kennedy. (Don’t forget this Wall Street Journal piece that made fun of how low the “icon” bar had been set.)
