Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A federal judge ordered the Food and Drug Administration this week to make the Plan B “morning-after” birth control pill available over the counter to girls aged 17. It was already available over the counter to women aged 18 and older.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured an interesting package yesterday about prison inmates who are exonerated years after their convictions.
Because politics is religion to many reporters, far too many religion stories are seen through that prism. If you want coverage and you’re not embroiled in some hot-button issue or campaigning for some government action one way or another, you’re probably not going to get any.
National Public Radio’s ombudsman reports on a controversy over its March 5 package on same-sex marriage. On that day (the day that the California Supreme Court heard arguments about rescinding the Prop. 8 vote) Morning Edition ran a 4.5-minute interview with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, one of the more prominent civic leaders in support of same-sex marriage. They balanced that story out with a piece on the targeting of Prop. 8 supporters.
I wish the mainstream media would cover more denominational news. Or, should I say, more denominational but non-Episcopalian news. I also wish we’d see more balanced coverage of disagreements related to homosexuality.
On the same day that Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput was critiquing media coverage of the church, we got a real time example of some less-than-stellar religion reporting. Pope Benedict XVI landed in Africa this week and received breathless coverage because, as Amy Welborn put it over at Beliefnet, “the Pope has not booked a seat on the condom train.”
Yesterday Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput addressed a gathering of top religion journalists at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington, D.C. His speech was billed as a discussion on the political obligations of Catholics but he also spent a great deal of time discussing the strengths and weaknesses of media coverage. I had the privilege of attending, while also getting to put the names of reporters we discuss here with their faces.
If you’re one of those rare individuals who is interested in the topic of sex, you may enjoy Patricia Leigh Brown and Carol Pogash’s story in the Sunday New York Times about a co-ed live-in commune dedicated to the female orgasm.
A reader noted a brief bit in an Associated Press story about the Alabama man who killed 10 people and himself in a violent rampage last week.
