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Cathy Grossman of USA Today talked to a lot of Catholics sources for her mini-profile of Pope Benedict XVI. Yet the one source she did not quote from, aside from one seven-word sentence, was the pontiff himself.
If you were looking for a newspaper article on what other African-American preachers thought about Barack Obama’s former pastor’s fiery sermons from a religious perspective (and not exclusively related to politics), look no further than Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News.
The Pew Form on Religion & Public Life had a great forum the other day for journalists preparing to cover the upcoming visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Washington, D.C., and New York City. The speakers were two of the world’s top English-language Vatican watchers, John L. Allen, Jr., of the National Catholic Reporter and George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. If you have any interest in the pope and what he might have to say during this visit, you really need to check out the transcript.
Yesterday I raised some of the journalistic questions surrounding coverage of the raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in Texas. And I was happy to see I wasn’t alone in being intrigued by those questions.
One of our standard criticisms at Get Religion is that reporters focus on politics to the exclusion of religion. I wonder if the press grasps the flip side of this notion. By overlooking or underplaying religion, reporters fail to illuminate politics sufficiently.
I can’t remember when, exactly, the mainstream media decided that it would stop with the unilateral caricature of evangelicals as the Christian Right, but I’m not sure the new caricature is much improved.
A recurring problem with stories about lawsuits is that only one side of the story is presented. Due to understandable hesitations, the party that is being sued is unlikely to comment on the lawsuit until they are able to formally respond to the lawsuit. You generally don’t win lawsuits on the news pages.
This is a strange moment for Black America. A major black celebrity frets about its values, while black Christian ministers worry about structural problems. Bill Cosby scolds black men for not being responsible fathers, while civil-rights era preachers encourage their flock to attend job training classes.
Surrogate pregnancy was the focus of Newsweek‘s cover story last week. Its angle was on the women who are surrogates as opposed to the medical advances of assisted reproductive technology or the laws and regulations governing the practice.
