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I am in between meetings and classes in West Palm Beach, where I am doing some recruiting for the Washington Journalism Center. With a brief shot at an Internet connection, let me slip in here with a quick note.
Has Rick Warren become a media darling or what? The man certainly knows how to communicate a message and apparently has no trouble using the mainstream media to do so. And reporters are eating up this guy and all the wonderful things he does, including his “reverse tithing,” in which he says he keeps 10 percent of his income and gives the rest away ($14 million in 2004).
So Seahawks and Steelers, eh? Should be a good Superbowl, I think, after watching all of the Broncos-Steelers game and a bit of the lesser conference game. I am an expatriate of Broncos Nation, which means many of my Sundays after church have been spent in front of the television.
I realize I’ve been covering a great deal of abortion-related stories recently and some, including myself, might be somewhat beleaguered by the topic. But today is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the media are running many stories about abortion with a religion angle. The feature I want to bring to light was written by an unabashedly pro-choice man in today’s New York Times Magazine. Author Eyal Press is the son of an abortion doctor in Buffalo who was a colleague and friend of murdered abortion doctor Bernard Slepian.
According to the Los Angeles Times website, the desk in the newspaper’s Atlanta bureau is currently “vacant.” This, for me, makes it even harder to understand the following story by reporter Jenny Jarvie. I predict there is a story behind this story somewhere.
I think, at this point, it’s safe to say that we can put the Ray Nagin and Pat Robertson thing to bed for a while.
From my previous post “Race and the Catholic Church” commenter Andy Chamberlain raised an issue that I want to put to rest on this blog. I know tmatt has dealt with this issue throughout his long career as a religion reporter, and it is important because it is critical for those in religion to GetJournalism, just as it is important for those in media to GetReligion.
Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal has, in an indirect way, jumped into our discussion of media bias. Her latest column has much to say about the impact — journalistic and financial — of that yawning culture gap that exists between most mainstream journalists and a rather large chunk of readers, especially out there in flyover America and the deadly red zip codes. Click here to get to “Not a Bad Time to Take Stock: Thoughts on the decline of the liberal media monopoly and the future of the GOP.”
So the Supreme Court issued an abortion-related ruling Jan. 18 that was fairly limited in scope and, as a result, unanimously decided. It really is hard to characterize court opinions quickly, but a few choices in coverage are worth noting. Even though retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor began the opinion by writing quite explicitly to the contrary, reporters seemed to think the ruling had covered abortion precedent. Here’s The New York Times‘ Linda Greenhouse explaining how the ruling didn’t touch the abortion issue:
