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Were you thinking that the Vatican Media Frenzy had gotten a bit stale? Well, you’re in luck. Roughly eleventy billion media outlets are running a story about something Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said at a Chilean press conference yesterday:
So yet another story in the Vatican Media Frenzy 2010 came out on Friday. And the Associated Press did its best to make it seem like the story to end all stories:
In a different media environment, I suspect that the big Catholic news of the week would be the Opus Dei affiliation of Archbishop Jose Gomez, named to succeed the archbishop of Los Angeles.
Analyzing media coverage of sexual abuse is tricky. Any appeals to fairness in how the topic is covered can be interpreted as a defense of the indefensible. Watching media coverage unfold, it’s a bit easier for me to understand how hysteria built around the supposed Some aspects of the recent media coverage of the supposed epidemic of Satanic sexual abuse in day care centers in the 1980s.
For Catholics and non-Catholics alike, it’s difficult to read the stories attempting to link Pope Benedict XVI to abuse of children. For our purposes here at GetReligion, I hope that it’s possible to simultaneously condemn the abuse of children that has taken place, to criticize the Vatican’s handling of the problem over the years, and to hope that the media work to cover this story more responsibly than we’ve been seeing.
So after a two-year uptick in 2006 and 2007, the teen birth rate fell in 2008. You might recall that when the teen birth rate went up, many mainstream stories attempted to link the increase to abstinence education.
Yesterday I looked at a couple of stories covering President Barack Obama’s visit to a Southeast Washington church for Easter services. Reader Peggy noted in the comments:
I’m extremely nervous about how the media covers the religious life of presidents. Sometimes I wonder how one of my congregation’s services would be written about in the Washington Post if we had a president worship with us. I suspect it would be difficult for a random reporter to understand the liturgy, the sermon and the context in which they are received.
