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Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been around for a number of days. I have been busy giving birth to my second child, L.K., and adjusting to the craziness that is wrangling multiple children. The vitals for that birthday on the 12th were 8 lbs, 3 ounces (the exact birth weight of her mama) and 19 inches long. The baptism will be this Sunday, Pentecost, at our church.
One of the ongoing temptations here at GetReligion — for the GetReligionistas as well as the reader/commentators — is to focus on interesting events and trends in religion news, instead of keeping our unique focus on how the mainstream press attempts to cover those stories in an accurate, balanced, professional manner.
I am not an American Idol fan and have not seen a single minute of this year’s pop-machinery-industrial festival. I love music way too much to watch.
Yesterday Doug complimented American media on showing “commendable restraint” in reacting to the more than 2,500-page report documenting decades of child abuse by Irish monks and nuns. I have to admit that I am torn between being convinced that the facts do speak for themselves, and a sense that readers should be faced with the scale and breadth of the horrors inflicted on institutionalized children — all the more ghastly because it was done by men and women “of God.”
Mainstream media are showing a commendable restraint in their coverage of decades-long abuse of children in church-run schools in Ireland. The details are soul-crushing and they appear in each report: Thousands of children, from the 1930s and into the 1990s, subjected to humiliation, shaming, beating and rape. The government has paid 12,000 victims an average of $90,000.
An absolutely shocking story this morning about plans to bomb two synagogues and shoot down planes in New York. “Chilling Terror Plot Thwarted,” the New York Post headline screams.
The last time that we checked in on the long, slow slide of the nationally known Dallas Morning News religion section, which became the more conventional religion beat, I wrote the following with a cyber-sigh:
Journalists who have been around for a few decades may remember one of the “in” jokes that circulated after the birth of USA Today, the joke that claimed that there was going to be a new Pulitzer Prize awarded for the best investigative paragraph.
