Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Sen. Marco Rubio was in the news quite a bit yesterday. Part of it was that he released his new book. Part of it was that an old Charlie Crist campaign foe who now works for Romney allegedly told a reporter that Rubio wasn’t even being considered for the Veep slot. Another day in the fun, fun world of political reporting.
For some reason I’ve been fascinated with looking at how different media outlets report the same news. Sometimes what they choose to highlight, the angle they go with, the people they interview, etc., are all the same. Sometimes they’re quite different.
Why does huge news frequently drop on a Friday? It's an old political trick to get bad news out in the Friday Night News Dump. Reporters loathe these as they want nothing more than to head to the bar (or whatever) and begin the weekend. This year has seen quite a few Friday news releases affecting religion reporters, mostly related somehow to the HHS mandate requiring religious groups to purchase insurance coverage that may violate their religious beliefs. And this Friday fit into that pattern with some pretty big news about one of the key players in this debate switching sides. Here's how the Washington Post put it:
The White House has lost perhaps its most prominent Catholic ally in its controversial effort to expand contraception coverage, with the huge Catholic Health Association saying Friday that the mandate for most religious employers to offer coverage would not “adequately meet the religious liberty concerns.”
The change of position at the association, the country’s largest group of nonprofit health care providers, comes as polls show President Obama and Mitt Romney tied among registered Catholic voters. In the last four of five presidential races, the candidate who won Catholics won the presidency.
Ah politics. Something tells me, however, that we won't see the same types of stories about CHA that we were seeing in recent weeks about the Catholic bishops and other opponents of the mandate having a secret partisan plot against the current chief executive. I liked how this paragraph explained the situation in laymen's terms:
Today’s immigration news becomes a little more real when you know people it will directly affect. Whether or not you personally agree with the decision, it will impact faith communities as much as the rest of the country.
I’m going to back into the media analysis here by mentioning that there is a very media-savvy, progressive public relations non-profit called Faith in Public Life. The Washington Post describes the group as one of several organizations that “that meld religion and liberal politics” and the group itself describes its work here:
As the battles continue over religious liberty issues — by which I mean battles over issues that the White House has described as having religious-liberty implications — journalists continue to struggle with that old, old issue of simplistic labeling.
The headline above is a reference to Bryce Harper’s response to another silly question from a reporter, but you simply have to check out this collection of utterings from CNN anchor Christine Romans. I’m pretty sure it’s the style that sets me off just as much as the content. She really thought that question about feminism was har-har-har funny, didn’t she!
If you want to make a story go viral, you might have NPR do a dramatic reading of some pop song or discuss more epic autotune potential that could come out of PBS.
A few readers sent along an interesting CNSNews.com report that says the U.S. State Department removed from its country reports on human rights those sections covering religious freedom:
