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Those of you who have missed the posts of our Elizabeth Evans should head on over to Reuters FaithWorld where she has written about clergy sexual misconduct. She digs a bit deeper and wider on the topic than most treatments of the issue.
We’ve previously looked at media coverage of the rather public dispute between Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., and Bishop Thomas Tobin. Last week I suggested that reporters at least explain the Catholic understanding of scandal as it relates to the case. And this week, I noted the confusion many reporters have between banning a communicant and suggesting he refrain from taking communion.
Last week I wrote a news story about the recent passage of the amendment restricting abortion funding and subsidies in the House health care legislation. I was interviewing various activists and one of them told me that they’d had to work solely through alternate media for the last 10 months because the mainstream media wasn’t doing a very good job of looking at the abortion issue as it related to the health care bill. Until, that is, about 48 hours prior to the vote on Rep. Bart Stupak’s amendment to the House legislation.
That’s not a rhetorical question, but a literal one explored in a Washington Post story by William Wan entitled, “Christian Scientists seek reimbursement for prayers.”
I was having a private conversation the other day, soon after the Fort Hood massacre, with a specialist in issues of religious freedom and, in particular, Jihadist persecution of moderate Muslims and various religious minorities in predominately Muslim lands.
We’ve had quite a few readers submit stories dealing with Rep. Patrick Kennedy’s (D-R.I.) ongoing public battle with Bishop Thomas Tobin. The latest news arose from from this report of the Providence Journal headlined “Kennedy: Barred from Communion.” Here’s the beginning:
It’s time to head back into the tmatt GetReligion folder of guilt. To make matters worse, this is an example of a GetReligion theme that we keep trumpeting, like a call to battle. The fact that it’s something we say all the time, however, is evidence that it’s a journalistic sin that we keep seeing all of the time.
If you were creating the Ten Commandments of daily Journalism, you would certainly find the statement, “All news is local,” somewhere near the top of the list (but after “Don’t bury the lede”).
Why, oh why, must all religion stories be told through the prism of politics? It really gets tiring. For instance, there was this Washington Post piece last Sunday about how Pat Robertson had said something intemperate (I know! Stop the presses!) about Islam that reflected poorly on Virginia Governor-elect Bob McDonnell. Robertson hadn't made the comments with McDonnell or at a McDonnell event or in McDonnell campaign literature or anything like that. But he was a big donor to McDonnell's campaign and McDonnell attended a graduate school affiliated with Robertson and so the Post argued that he might have to respond to the remarks.
The story was published in another context, which is that the Post worked hard during the campaign to tarnish McDonnell, a Republican, as a particularly bad social conservative. Unfortunately for them, he won in an 18-point landslide over his Democratic opponent. But if the Post is going to start paying attention to the controversial affiliations of politicians, it's a good thing for everyone.
Okay, so CNN now picks up the story and we get this update, headlined "McDonnell won't disavow Robertson's Islam remarks":
Virginia Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell on Wednesday would not disavow Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson's recent claim that Islam is not a religion, but "a violent political system."
So McDonnell agrees with Robertson? Or, at the very least, doesn't disagree with him that Islam is not a religion but a violent political system? Well, not exactly. Here are the final two paragraphs of the story:
