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Tmatt posted last week on the saga of a lesbian softball coach whose team was kicked out of an adult women’s league by a Southern Baptist megachurch. He pointed out that “too many gaps and unanswered questions” characterized the coverage by The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn. If you missed that post, please read it first or this one won’t make any sense.
When people ask me to describe the toughest part of what we do here at GetReligion (other than trying to keep up with all of the blog-related emails flying around all day, with most of these cyber-gnats originating with yours truly), I always offer a two-part answer.
The other day, Cathy Lynn Grossman suggested that some of ironic twists she’s seen in the news come from someone who offers truth claims and then turns out to be hypocritical. You might think another one of those stories is brewing if you read Poynter’s Romenesko blog.
Last week we looked at a piece by Newsweek that suggested Sarah Palin was the new leader of the religious right. I suggested then that Newsweek should have at least mentioned one of Palin’s potential contenders: Mike Huckabee.
Religion News Service has a story about Southern Baptist chaplains opposing reversal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. An edited version ran in the Washington Post on Saturday. They aren’t terribly different but I’ll be working from the Post version for this post. Here’s how it begins:
Firings are always sensitive, but when you throw a pregnancy and a religious school in the mix, you have a national scandal ripe for television drama.
The Pew Research Center examined the recent coverage of the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. They analyzed U.S. newspapers, websites, network television programs, cable television programs and other media and found that it was the most intense coverage the church had received since 2002, when coverage of the American scandal flared up.
