Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Our friends over at the diversity and ethics offices at Poynter.org have run a really interesting commentary on a media issue at the heart of debates about fair and accurate coverage of same-sex marriage.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s speech on Father’s Day about the importance of fatherhood is drawing praise from some surprising quarters that the day-after stories struggled to pick-up on. The New York Times rightly focused on the impact the speech had on the African-American community, but this speech is having effects in other communities as well.
Of the many stories dealing with same-sex marriage in California, one San Francisco Chronicle story in particular deserves a look. Headlined “Bay Area churches opened door to same-sex vows,” the reporter skims the surface of the history of same-sex rites in Christian churches and managed to get the attention of more than a few GetReligion readers in the process:
Same sex marriages will be performed in California beginning on Tuesday. In fact, some will take place tonight. And the media are pretty giddy about it. What’s happening is very important and very historic, so the amount of coverage is proper. Less proper is the complete lack of balance in stories this past week.
I realize that it is Father’s Day. Still, I think that one of the most interesting stories that the mainstream press missed — or seriously, seriously underplayed — during the past few days was the death of a truly revolutionary mother.
I was pleasantly surprised last Monday morning to see in my morning newspaper a story of significant length on the Southern Baptist’s convention, held this week across the street from where I work. Indianapolis gets all sorts of conventions, from Gen Con to the National FFA. The newspaper does a reasonable job covering them, but some fall through the cracks.
Tim Russert, moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, died yesterday at the age of 58. The news shook the media establishment. Sunday morning’s Meet the Press is basically required viewing in Washington. Russert always had Washington’s most powerful guests and they routinely subjected themselves to his probing. I particularly liked that he would remind guests of past statements that contradicted their current positions. He helpfully displayed those statements on screen to force the guest to respond. Media figures are rarely loved by so many across the political establishment. Russert was generally regarded as fair and decent, two traits that are not typically the first to come to mind when describing the average newsman.
So the Rev. Michael Pfleger, last seen mocking Sen. Hillary Clinton from the pulpit of Barack Obama’s church, will be back at his parish by June 16. He was told to take a couple of weeks off from St. Sabina’s to reflect on Catholic rules regarding priests and politics. Those couple of weeks up, he’s been told he can go back.
We’ve heard this before: Young evangelicals are abandoning the Republican Party; they are sick of being identified with the Religious Right and its narrow-minded agenda; they want a politics that extends to issues such as global warming, Darfur, and (illegal) immigration; and as a consequence, they plan to vote Democratic. If there were one meta-narrative after the 2004 election, this was it.
