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As I was tying the knot last year, most of my peers were not, according to a new study that suggests the recession has accelerated a decline in the number of people getting married.
Earlier this year, we looked at the story of Father Mark Gruber, a popular Benedictine monk who was let go from St. Vincent College after porn was found on his computer. When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the story in February, tmatt noted that some of the hardest news stories to cover are personnel disputes inside private colleges and universities, particularly religious ones, due to privacy issues. It turns out he was particularly prescient.
For reasons known only to New York Times editors, Kate Zernike is continually given free rein to write about the Tea Party. There have been a litany of complaints about her coverage, perhaps most notably when earlier this year she accused Human Events editor Jason Mattera of speaking in a “Chris Rock voice” and using “racial stereotypes” to mock Obama. Mattera was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Zernike didn’t realize that was just how he talks. Not content with the amount of racial phrenology she’d employed to date, she wrote a piece about race and the Tea Party pegged to the Glenn Beck rally that contained this immortal sentence:
The other day, we observed the interesting fact that editors of the Baltimore Sun were not interested in the story of how a priest from here in Charm City — Father F. Richard Spencer, to be precise — ended up being named by the Vatican to serve as the new auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese for U.S. Military Service. His record as a military chaplain under fire is actually rather fascinating.
Whatever else might be said of the current political climate, there’s no doubt that it’s interesting. No one quite knows what might happen in the coming election but we do know that we’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift from 2008, when Democrats seemed unstoppable. Most of the excitement right now is happening in the Tea Party.
When Helen Thomas said Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine,” I thought her canning was warranted. But there was room for debate about whether her statement that they should go back to “Poland, Germany … and America and everywhere else” was anti-Semitic. Paired with her previous treatment of Israel in the opinioneering she did for UPI, I argued the statement was. But, again, room for debate.
Week after week, your GetReligionistas receive mail from people who genuinely distrust or dislike America’s mainstream media.
Several of you felt passionately about Archbishop Charles Chaput’s boycott on the New York Times and jumped into a lively discussion about expectations between religion reporters and religious leaders. Then we discussed the various challenges for reporters with online media and how reporters balance puppy stories with broccoli stories. Guess what: I discuss these juicy topics on our third GetReligion podcast.
