Some days, I wonder if the United States could put a ban on pantyhose. The darn things rip so often, and it’s mind boggling why they are still culturally expected in the workplace.
Got news? Abortion is in the details
During the firestorm right after Rep. Bart Stupak approved the Senate’s take on health care reform, I posted an item here at GetReligion that asked some basic questions about a key religion element of the story.
Watching Human Rights Watch
“Nazi scandal engulfs Human Rights Watch.” Not a headline you would expect to ever see. But there it was in The Sunday Times of London. And all I could think was: Not again.
Probing the apocalypse in rural Michigan
Discrimination vs. religious freedom?
The banner headline on Page 1 of the Chicago Tribune blared the disturbing news: “Charity ripped for ‘hire’ calling.”
A moderate "sheikh of death"?
We’ve written at length about our frustration with the overuse of political terminology to describe religious groups. The labels “conservative” and “progressive” might mean something in politics, but they have their limits when it comes to discussion of faith.
NPR takes sides on abortion terms
Earlier this week, we discussed whether there are any neutral abortion terms to describe people on both sides of the debate.
We're 0.8% of the coverage!
There was some unsurprising but sobering news from the folks over at Pew this week. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life analyzed more than 68,700 stories from 2009 and determined that religion stories accounted for 0.8 percent of the total news coverage from last year. That’s down a smidge from 2008′s 1.0 percent. By comparison, news about health care comprised 11 percent. Education and immigration, on the other hand, are about where religion coverage is.
The sudden rise of violent rhetoric
Last week our powerful and very effective Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, of the health care legislation the House was considering, that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Well, we’ve passed that bill and some of us wish the media would have concerned itself with what was in the bill a bit more before the vote, much less after. But even before the House voted in support of the bill, most stories dealt with politics. And now that has descended into some pretty partisan media coverage. The media obsession of the moment is that health care legislation’s opponents are a violent and uncontrolled mob, the likes of which we’ve never seen (or something).
