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This has been a big day for news, has it not? In Washington, D.C., President Obama nominated (see tmatt’s post) a woman who could be the first Hispanic ( which has prompted some debate over why Benjamin Cardozo didn’t count) and the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
One of the ongoing temptations here at GetReligion — for the GetReligionistas as well as the reader/commentators — is to focus on interesting events and trends in religion news, instead of keeping our unique focus on how the mainstream press attempts to cover those stories in an accurate, balanced, professional manner.
Yesterday Doug complimented American media on showing “commendable restraint” in reacting to the more than 2,500-page report documenting decades of child abuse by Irish monks and nuns. I have to admit that I am torn between being convinced that the facts do speak for themselves, and a sense that readers should be faced with the scale and breadth of the horrors inflicted on institutionalized children — all the more ghastly because it was done by men and women “of God.”
Celebrity confessionals are a vertiginous business. Not so much for the authors, who get to beat their breasts, name a few names, absolve themselves and move on, but for us, their market, consumers, fans or critics.
It is, of course, one of the most famous lines in the classic final scene of Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects.” You’ll want to cue the YouTube video at 4:40.
Your friends here at GetReligion are not big on reading the tabloids, but we have received a few notes from people asking what we think of the tabloid-esque coverage of Father Alberto Cutie, the famous “Father Oprah” of television and South Beach.
If you do a Google News search on the phrase “abstinence only,” you get hundreds of results and most of them are for one of two stories. There’s the media coverage of teen mother Bristol Palin and her promotion of abstinence as the only completely effective way to avoid teen pregnancy. And there’s the media coverage of the news that President Obama has removed hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for abstinence-focused programs.
