Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As most of you probably know, the New York Times has a Public Editor, Clark Hoyt. A veteran newsman, and only the third to serve in this position (created in 2003), Hoyt’s job, in a nutshell, is to (re)present the voice of the New York Times reader.
After Michael Crichton’s death last week, a few different obituaries hinted at his iconoclastic questioning of global-warming certainties. What’s striking is that Crichton’s criticisms of global warming attracted more hostility than his attacks on religion — a generic religion that stands as the enemy of all things scientific. New York Times science columnist John Tierney quotes from a speech, “Environmentalism as Religion,” which Crichton delivered in September 2003 at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club:
Sometimes one or two words can make a lot of difference when you are dealing with complex issues of law and doctrine.
Probably the best example of how the mainstream media completely games the coverage of same-sex marriage is an article from the Los Angeles Times. “Election leaves gay couple feeling isolated in conservative bastion” is about these two heroic lesbians who opposed Proposition 8 while living in a conservative neighborhood in Riverside County.
When I started thinking about a career on the religion-beat, the first professional that I met was another Baylor University graduate who was on the rise at the Houston Chronicle.
The Chicago Tribune‘s version of the pew gap story that permeated news outlets last week focuses heavily on the slight percentage shifts in party preference among Catholics, white evangelicals, and “worshipers who attend church frequently.” The article’s focus on these three statistical categories emphasizes that a factor in President-elect Barack Obama’s victory was his slight improvement in the pews over the failed 2004 Democratic Nominee John Kerry. This runs contrary to the notion that Obama failed to close the pew gap.
So the protests against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because of its support for Proposition 8 are continuing and receiving quite a bit of mainstream media coverage. Proposition 8 passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as an institution involving one man and one woman. Stories involve everything from Mormon churches being vandalized to large-scale protests in urban areas.
Three of the major festivals of the church year are Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. In America, we celebrate Christmas with abandon, Easter with a minor uptick in chocolate sales, and Pentecost hardly at all.
