Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Though we’ve looked at a bit of the coverage related to Notre Dame University’s conferral of an honorary degree and speaking slot for President Barack Obama, there’s a lot that we haven’t highlighted. Mostly that’s because the stories are fairly straightforward or just local repetitions of previous stories. The Washington Times reported that, as of Friday, 46 bishops had publicly castigated Notre Dame:
As the battle of Notre Dame rages on, I have seen few, if any news reports that actually offer any hard information about what is happening on the campus.
Back in December, Daniel Pulliam looked at the rather curious lack of coverage pertaining to undercover videos of Planned Parenthood employees providing advice that could violate Indiana criminal statutes. A University of California – Los Angeles student, posing as a 13-year-old impregnated by a 31-year-old boyfriend, had taped Planned Parenthood counselors at two Indiana clinics telling her how to avoid state laws about parental-consent on abortion and the reporting of child sex-abuse.
What is a religion story when it surfaces in the Style section of the New York Times? Let’s add another layer of complexity: what if that story is told as part of an ongoing series that aims to chronicle a generation through story-telling and personal reflection?
An aftermath of the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision to require the state to allow same-sex couples to marry is reported by the The Des Moines Register as a major story with potentially significant implications when in fact it is not that significant of an issue. At least it’s not significant based on the facts buried in the story. Here, a magistrate, not a judge as the headline inaccurately proclaims, announced that he will no longer perform marriage ceremonies partially in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Newsweek has an interesting story about black parents adopting white children headlined “Raising Katie: What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era.” As you may have picked up from the headline, the story struggles a bit with trying to pack way too much into one family’s story. Still, it’s an interesting piece:
Back in the 1980s, when I was at the Rocky Mountain News, I covered the long legal battle between St. Mary’s Parish and the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado.
One of the more interesting stories regarding stem cell research is one that has been woefully under-reported. Even though scientists have been performing embryo-destructive stem cell research for a decade, there are no clinically available treatments that have resulted from the research. In the past two years, however, scientists have discovered ways of inducing pluripotent stem cells that many see as more promising.
Who is going to represent the United States as ambassador to the Holy See? In a government headed by a President who is favors abortion rights and has opened the door to broader use of embryonic stem cells for research, this question is getting a lot of attention, both from advocacy organizations and from the press.
