Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the things that annoys me about reporting is how we spend so much time looking for and writing about dramatic news hooks that we miss the day-to-day drama of real life. I almost never see my religious life reflected in a given news story. My congregation is not driven by trends. We worship in largely the same way Lutherans have always worshiped. This does not make for exciting news coverage, as you might imagine.
As I may have mentioned here a few times, I bleed orange and blue. My dad raised me to be a Broncos fan and I will never shake it. This year’s pre-season coverage is interesting because we obtained one Tim Tebow in the draft. Now, I’ve had lots of discussions with other Broncos fans about whether they think this was a fantastic move or not, and none of them have centered on Tebow’s faith in Christ.
In a move surprising precisely no one who followed his handling of the case, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker overturned California’s Proposition 8. Something tells me we’ll be looking at media coverage of this story for a while. I’m reading the 138-page ruling now but it will take me a while to get through. Imagine being a reporter on deadline who needs to get a story up as quickly as possible. I may have never said this before when it comes to coverage of Proposition 8 but the Los Angeles Times actually got a lot done in a short period of time, I think. That may be because they had to keep the analysis to a minimum and just get a quick take on the facts out:
The Associated Press reported on the return to the pulpit of a Minnesota Lutheran pastor. He’d taken some time off after a gay publication crashed a support meeting for those facing unwanted same-sex attraction. The journalist did so under false pretenses and it created quite a bit of a firestorm because the pastor in question was a vocal opponent of changing church doctrine to affirm homosexuality.
Only yesterday I was happily writing about how great it is when media coverage of a given topic improves over time. But then you read a story like this one from the San Diego Union-Tribune and you wonder if things are actually going downhill.
You can oppose something and still think it shouldn’t be opposed by the government. Many people seem to have trouble with this distinction and its corollaries. The media tend to have trouble with this distinction because many journalists consider the provoking of government action as a good metric of success for their rabblerousing or reporting. But it’s true — you can oppose things and still think they should be legal.
This Time cover has led to much consternation on the internet. Most of the outrage isn’t over the image but, rather, the headline. Still, the image itself is shocking. It depicts Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by the Taliban to have her nose and ears cut off after she fled her abusive in-laws. Time managing editor Richard Stengel explained his decision to run the image:
