Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the biggest problems that your GetReligionistas face week after week can be stated this way: We know that many problems on the religion beat would vanish if reporters had more time to write and were given longer story lengths.
What do you think of the media coverage of the latest religious news being made by and around Sen. Barack Obama?
We have covered more than a few of the mainstream media stories declaring that female priests are being ordained in the Roman Catholic Church. Since the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t ordain females, we usually have a few nits to pick with the coverage.
Several years ago, I wrote a Scripps Howard News Service column about one of the more obscure disputes linked to the death, or death by starvation, of Terri Schiavo — whether or not her body should be cremated, against strong opposition of her devout Roman Catholic family.
I criticized an Associated Press story yesterday for failing Journalism 101. Another AP story, about nonreligious camp, does not suffer from this problem.
Sometimes I get discouraged at how much significant religious news gets completely ignored by mainstream media. Two weeks ago, one of the country’s most prolific hymn writers died. The death of Jaroslav Vajda was the kind of news that got passed around among fellow Lutherans and fans of his lyrics.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a Newsday story that examined a trend of older men entering the seminary and becoming ordained in a New York diocese. The otherwise solid story failed to examine whether the bishop had contributed to the influx of seminarians and ordinations. In response, faithful GR reader FW Ken wrote that the personal involvement of the bishop encouraged vocations:
Yesterday I complained about a Los Angeles Times story that profiled only one couple — an Evangelical Christian one — to represent the 61 percent of California voters who voted to limit marriage to one man and one woman. It was their support of the traditional definition of marriage that was ruled unconstitutional by the California State Supreme Court last week.
One would think that major changes at America’s second largest church and one of the most influential would make some news, but sadly most news organizations missed the story.
