Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A major challenge for reporters covering Tuesday’s speech by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the subject of race in America is getting the right amount of background. Obviously there are libraries of potential context that could arguably be inserted into a newspaper’s coverage, but that’s just not practical.
I watched Barack Obama’s speech on race and religion yesterday morning. But I imagine that I was one of relatively few people to actually watch the speech in its entirety (see it here) or read the whole transcript. That means that it’s been up to the media to summarize, translate and convey meaning about the speech to a larger audience.
I finally got around to reading Lauren Collins’ profile of Michelle Obama in the March 10 New Yorker. It’s sympathetic but no puff piece — packed full of information that isn’t necessarily flattering. Obama’s stump speech includes the idea that we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents, and so on.
What a campaign season this has been. It’s amazing how much religion has played a part this year — from Huckabee’s surprising win in Iowa to Mitt Romney’s big religion in America speech. And now this, as reported by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic:
At this point, I do not think that GetReligion will be creating its own special web site to cover the upcoming visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the United States (at least, to the parts of the U.S. that really matter).
So frequently the mainstream media reduces religion to a litany of moral statements. The only time you can get coverage of religion, it seems, is when these moral views intersect with public policy or politics. But then when there is a major moral issue in the news — be it prostitution, plagiarism or embezzlement — religious understanding is noticeably excluded from the coverage.
One more time, into the whirlpool of questions about how newspapers should handle stories that raise moral questions, yet questions that are — for many readers — may or may not not religious.
I have no idea if there is a religion ghost somewhere in the sad story of Ashley Youmans Rae Maika DiPietro Alexandra Dupre — the 22-year-old “escort” better known as “Kristen” in the icky story of Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York.
Yesterday I poked fun at the shoddy journalism that marked coverage of the Vatican’s supposed reissue of seven deadly sins. Most of the papers responsible for the bad reporting were British. Which, considering the different standards and approach of the British media, isn’t the most surprising thing in the world.
