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Singer Sheryl Crow has been in the news recently for her confrontation with Karl Rove and her thoughts that we all need to use less toilet paper. But it was a local story out of St. Louis that caught my attention. Religion reporter Tim Townsend writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a trip the singer was making to St. Louis to raise money for a Catholic hospital that helps children with cancer.
Sometimes readers wonder why we look at mainstream media coverage of abortion. A few have suggested it’s not a religious issue. Yet many religion reporters routinely cover both the pro-life and pro-choice movements and cover abortion regularly. Well, the losing side of the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has been noticing religion. Readers have sent along various anti-Roman Catholic opinion pieces — most notably The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s cartoon and Rosie O’Donnell’s screed on The View. But we don’t care whether editorial writers or pundits have opinions on religious issues. That’s just what makes for an exciting editorial page. Although even Rosie O’Donnell’s crazy conspiracy theories don’t salvage The View, do they?
We set a record at GetReligion last week for the post that received the most comments — 112 at this point. We looked at some of the coverage of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. For such a divisive issue, and with comments coming at it from all sides, almost all of the perspectives offered in the comment thread about how to improve media treatment of the issue were fantastic and informative.
In a 5-4 ruling earlier this week, the Supreme Court upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The mainstream media are known for struggling with abortion coverage.
Maybe it’s really difficult to write about Pope Benedict XVI. We noted that bad Newsweek International piece last week. And here’s another one that’s not the best example from the genre. Jeff Israely filed something from Rome for Time that was given the headline “A Step Backward for Pope Benedict?” Intriguing. Let’s learn more:
Laurie Goodstein had a very interesting feature in Sunday’s New York Times on Hispanics abandoning religion in the United States. Goodstein brings life to recent polls and surveys about the trend by speaking with immigrants about why they have ceased worshiping. One Guatemalan immigrant says he stopped feeling the need to pray to God when he came to America. Goodstein says research suggests that secularization is part of assimilation into American society. Studies indicate that Hispanics who identify themselves as having no religion are more likely to have previously been religious than other Americans.
A few days ago we looked at Russell Shorto’s big New York Times Sunday Magazine piece on Pope Benedict XVI’s first two years in office. I mentioned a few quibbles with it but was overall very impressed. Readers shared their mixed responses.
Thank you to all the readers who sent along their favorite or least favorite stories published this past weekend. There are too many to get to, but I’ll begin with The New York Times Sunday Magazine‘s cover story on Pope Benedict XVI. Good timing on that piece, as it ran on Easter Sunday. The author is Russell Shorto, who has written previously for the magazine on people who oppose contraception and people who oppose gay marriage. Both of those pieces took a liberal view not out of place in the Sunday Magazine. But Shorto is a good writer who researches his topics better than, well, the average New York Times Sunday Magazine author. Not that that’s saying much.
