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Whenever I get on my high horse about the ways in which mainstream journalists abuse the term “fundamentalist,” I always urge journalists to simply allow religious believers to describe their beliefs. It is also fair game, of course, to describe the people’s actions in the public square, then ask them to explain how their beliefs shape those actions.
Analyzing media coverage of sexual abuse is tricky. Any appeals to fairness in how the topic is covered can be interpreted as a defense of the indefensible. Watching media coverage unfold, it’s a bit easier for me to understand how hysteria built around the supposed Some aspects of the recent media coverage of the supposed epidemic of Satanic sexual abuse in day care centers in the 1980s.
Let me take you back to the morning after the election last fall when Maine voters overturned that state’s same-sex marriage law. You’re a veteran newspaper reporter named Larry Grard. You’re a Christian. You work for the Morning Sentinel, part of a chain of papers owned by MaineToday Media. Your company editorialized in support of same-sex marriage, but you disagree.
At least 10 years ago, a conservative Catholic friend of mine told me something that totally changed how I viewed this whole era of clergy sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
So after a two-year uptick in 2006 and 2007, the teen birth rate fell in 2008. You might recall that when the teen birth rate went up, many mainstream stories attempted to link the increase to abstinence education.
If you read a daily newspaper somewhere in the United States, other than New York City, and you care deeply about the latest wave of clergy sex abuse cases in the Catholic Church, then you may have spotted the following Associated Press report about the case of Father Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul of India.
It could not have been easy for Peggy Noonan to write her Good Friday column on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.
Just when you thought that the relationship between the Vatican and the mainstream press couldn’t get any worse, the powers that be at MSNBC had to grit their teeth and issue a public apology for the fact that a headline — somehow — reached the network’s live website that read, “Pope Describes Touching Boys: I Went Too Far.”
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.
