Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Analyzing media coverage of sexual abuse is tricky. Any appeals to fairness in how the topic is covered can be interpreted as a defense of the indefensible. Watching media coverage unfold, it’s a bit easier for me to understand how hysteria built around the supposed Some aspects of the recent media coverage of the supposed epidemic of Satanic sexual abuse in day care centers in the 1980s.
Let me take you back to the morning after the election last fall when Maine voters overturned that state’s same-sex marriage law. You’re a veteran newspaper reporter named Larry Grard. You’re a Christian. You work for the Morning Sentinel, part of a chain of papers owned by MaineToday Media. Your company editorialized in support of same-sex marriage, but you disagree.
With March Madness behind us, reporters have moved on to other bracket-like stories, including the next Supreme Court nominee. As Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens openly discusses his upcoming retirement, reporters play guessing games about candidates in the running.
As GetReligion readers keep reminding us in the comments pages, it is getting harder and harder to know how to do news critiques of essays, commentaries, editorials and the occasional news reports that appear in the once towering weekly news magazines — by which I mean Time and nonNewsweek.
For Catholics and non-Catholics alike, it’s difficult to read the stories attempting to link Pope Benedict XVI to abuse of children. For our purposes here at GetReligion, I hope that it’s possible to simultaneously condemn the abuse of children that has taken place, to criticize the Vatican’s handling of the problem over the years, and to hope that the media work to cover this story more responsibly than we’ve been seeing.
At least 10 years ago, a conservative Catholic friend of mine told me something that totally changed how I viewed this whole era of clergy sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
Bishop Jose H. Gomez, ordained by Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic organization favored by the Vatican, was named to lead a predominantly Hispanic archdiocese. The pope chose Gomez to succeed a retiring 25-year archbishop seen in many ways as a legend among progressives — but also a prelate who faced scrutiny over his handling of clergy sexual abuse cases and questions over what some critics labeled his shaky moral theology.
So after a two-year uptick in 2006 and 2007, the teen birth rate fell in 2008. You might recall that when the teen birth rate went up, many mainstream stories attempted to link the increase to abstinence education.
Ann Rodgers has earned such a reputation for her thorough reporting that a reader e-mailed us recently describing her as “Pittsburgh’s queen of religion reporting.” What an appropriate title for a journalist who regularly covers local news that deserves national attention and national news from a local perspective.
