Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Of all the Smithsonians, my favorites are the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Health and Medicine (or as I call it, the Museum of Medical Oddities). The NPG was closed for something like five years while undergoing a costly renovation. But it reopened a few years back and is back in the news with an exhibit (“Hide/Seek”) exploring sexual identity in art.
I’ve written several solder-dies-in-Iraq stories, so I know it can be quite uncomfortable for a reporter to waltz into someone else’s tragedy and capture the heart-wrenching details. Paul Schwartzman has written a beautiful story for the Washington Post about a father’s care for his son after a horrible beating.
It seems that we are going to see more mainstream coverage of those debates about religious liberty, military chaplains and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” So let’s back up and note a few basic fact, some of which were handled quite well in that CNN.com report that I praised the other day in the post called, “Chaplain questions older than DADT.”
I don’t understand organizations’ rush to build iPhone apps when Android is clearly the better option. Before I anger the Apple enthusiasts (including my colleagues here), let me quickly move to an interesting story about how the iTunes store removed a Manhattan Declaration application. Change.org garnered 7,700 signers asking Apple to remove the “anti-gay and anti-choice” app. At the time of this post, about 24,000 people have signed the petition to restore the app.
Religion writer and reporter Mark Oppenheimer mentioned GetReligion on his worthwhile blog. He highlighted our critiques of two recent pieces — the Arizona gay Mormon suicide story and the Amish forgiveness story.
Allow me to start with some personal confessions before I take a look at the following CNN.com news feature about the debates about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the state of chaplains in the U.S. military.
It’s no secret that reporters struggle with statistics. But this story combines that problem with weak reporting on Mormonism and gay issues. And it is a doozy. This might be the most illogical and bizarre story I’ve read in some time. I passed it along to a few other reporters and they couldn’t believe it had been published. So with that, I present MyFoxPhoenix.com’s (KSAZ FOX 10 KUTP My45) “Suicide Rate Disturbingly High Among Arizona Mormons.”
Please forgive (and, yes, that word will play a key role in this post) my inability to come up with anything more eloquent to say about an absolutely riveting news-feature from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
