Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Remember that CDC statistic alleging that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease? Before we even knew that the statistic was completely unreliable (its relative standard error was greater than 30 percent), we criticized the media coverage for uncritically parroting the Planned Parenthood talking points about what the study meant.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a story in The Washington Times which reported that employees of Catholic Charities of Richmond helped a teenage foster child procure an abortion. Now in a follow-up, the Times‘ Julia Duin reports that both the Richmond bishop and Catholic Charities director knew about the plannned abortion and did nothing to stop it:
Most conversations about globalization focus on economic issues and, clearly, that engine of modernization turns many other cultural wheels. But anyone who has studied mass media knows that images from other cultures — especially advertisements and entertainment images — have a profound impact on their own. A professor of mine once said that that two main messages carried by most ads are (1) you do not own this and (2) you do not look like this.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has 2.3 million members. By way of comparison, the Episcopal Church has 2.15 million members. I’ve remarked before at how odd it is that the Episcopal Church gets so much more coverage than the other American church bodies with more members. It’s not completely surprising, perhaps, that they get more coverage, given the large Anglican communion, the pomp and circumstance of liturgical worship and the dramatic way in which the church is imploding. But still, it seems out of balance.
The growth of Christianity in non-Western cultures and societies is widely acknowledged to be one of the biggest religion stories these days. A significant subset of that story is the rapid growth of Christianity in China to a point where it is the country’s second largest religion (behind only Buddhists and ahead of Islam).
One of the most important decisions made in a newsroom is story selection. The editors of the New York Times Sunday Magazine made a very interesting decision in choosing to run a lengthy story about the demographic collapse of Europe. Reporter Russell Shorto, whose work we’ve looked at before, examines various explanations for the low birth rates in Europe in his piece titled “No Babies?”
Rare is the reporter who writes about blacks and abortion. So give credit to Julia Duin, a-friend-of-this-blog who covers religion for The Washington Times. She wrote about a topic that the rest of the Washington press corps avoided: a demonstration late last week by black activists against the nation’s abortion laws.
What do you know, I had no idea that Sen. John McCain was in the neighborhood. I didn’t see the security ‘copters buzzing around the mountaintop.
Both The Washington Post and The Washington Times covered a Virginia state court ruling Friday regarding the constitutionality of a longstanding state law that could allow the 11 congregations who have left the Episcopal Church over the last couple of years to keep their multi-million dollar properties. The tone and perspective of the two stories are rather stark. Just look look at the headlines.
