Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Please be patient with me as I dig through lots of material that built up in my infamous GetReligion guilt folder. Here is a story from a few weeks ago that raises a very, very, very basic journalism question.
One of my first assignments during a newspaper internship in college was obituaries, fairly tedious writing with no byline for a much desired clip. I will never forget how my editor emphasized how people really do read them and if you get something wrong, family members, already distraught by the loved one’s death, will confront you pretty quickly. Pressure, much?
You may have read last week about a California jury awarding $28 million in damages to a Candace Conti, a woman who said the Jehovahâs Witnesses allowed an adult member of her congregation to molest her when she was a child.
I have been on the road for a week or more and, when I returned home, there was a huge stack of Baltimore Sun newspapers for me to triage. One of the first GetReligion-esque stories that I ran into concerned a local news event that the Sun has been ignoring for months (see previous GetReligion coverage here).
When newspapers began adding blogs to the traditional media mix, it opened up a whole new world for religion reporters who had all this content but only so much that could fit in print.
President Obama announced a shift on on Friday for how the government will handle immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents, a decision setting off a chain of reactions from outrage to elation to apathy.
Why does huge news frequently drop on a Friday? It's an old political trick to get bad news out in the Friday Night News Dump. Reporters loathe these as they want nothing more than to head to the bar (or whatever) and begin the weekend. This year has seen quite a few Friday news releases affecting religion reporters, mostly related somehow to the HHS mandate requiring religious groups to purchase insurance coverage that may violate their religious beliefs. And this Friday fit into that pattern with some pretty big news about one of the key players in this debate switching sides. Here's how the Washington Post put it:
The White House has lost perhaps its most prominent Catholic ally in its controversial effort to expand contraception coverage, with the huge Catholic Health Association saying Friday that the mandate for most religious employers to offer coverage would not “adequately meet the religious liberty concerns.”
The change of position at the association, the country’s largest group of nonprofit health care providers, comes as polls show President Obama and Mitt Romney tied among registered Catholic voters. In the last four of five presidential races, the candidate who won Catholics won the presidency.
Ah politics. Something tells me, however, that we won't see the same types of stories about CHA that we were seeing in recent weeks about the Catholic bishops and other opponents of the mandate having a secret partisan plot against the current chief executive. I liked how this paragraph explained the situation in laymen's terms:
When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water ⦠Begob, ma’am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot.
As a rule, your GetReligionistas think that veteran religion-beat specialists do a consistently better job of getting the basic facts right, especially when their work is compared with general-assignment reporters who are shipped off to cover complicated stories that often have years, decades or centuries of past history.
