Mark Stricherz
I wrote Why the Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People's Party (Encounter Books), released this October. The book touches on many subjects I intend to write about for GetReligion: the media's treatment of secularism; the Catholic Church and Catholic social thought; American politics and government; and American mores and culture. To see why I am interested in and qualified to write about these subjects, a little background seems in order.
I was born in San Francisco in 1970 and raised in the Bay Area. I earned a B.A. in political science from Santa Clara University and an M.A. in the social sciences from the University of Chicago. In between, I worked for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps to redevelop an inner-city neighborhood in Baton Rouge, La., and worked as a literary assistant at America.
After school, I became a newspaper reporter. My stories on a contracting scandal in Brentwood, Calif., led to the resignation of a top city official. In 1997, the late great Michael Kelly hired me as a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. I then covered Congress for States News Service and was a staff writer at Education Week.
My stories have been cited by The Week in August 2003 as among the best in the country and received an honorable mention in 2005 from Washington Independent Writers.
My articles have appeared in many national publications, including The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, Christianity Today, Commonweal, National Catholic Register, and Inside Catholic. To research Why the Democrats are Blue, I received grants from the Phillips Foundation in Washington, D.C., and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation at the University of Texas in Austin.
I am the product of an eclectic, wonderful, and enfeebled Bay Area Catholic culture from the 1970s and ’80s. This helps explain why I play basketball and follow most team sports; love the Bay Area, especially San Francisco; read newspapers, magazines, and books; listen to U2, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and ’80s pop music; watch mainstream movies; jawbone with my friends; and attempt to follow the Seven Sacraments.
I live in Washington with my wife, Angy, and our daughter, Grace. We are parishioners at St. Peter's Catholic Church on Capitol Hill.
This is one of those stories that could have shown up with a "Got news?" notice in a GetReligion headline. It's rather amazing that this Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog item -- it's hard to tell if it was given serious news treatment -- did not receive more attention from the national press.
It's a classic example of a "mirror image" story. Try to imagine the coverage if a liberal Catholic or a traditional Muslim had been the target of this kind of ad.
Here's the top of the PI report:
Not so long ago, in the days when the country’s financial system was not falling down a cliff, Barack Obama was said to have a problem with white Appalachians. He couldn’t connect with them; he didn’t speak their language; he had denigrated them. Why?
Another controversial preacher is making news. His name is Thomas Muthee, a Kenyan pastor who has preached at Gov. Sarah Palin’s former Assembly of God church in Wasilla, AK and claims to have cast out demons. Both Newsweek‘s On Faith blog and The Christian Science Monitor ran stories about Muthee, and the two were entirely different in subject matter if not quality.
Last month, Catholic writer and blogger Eve Tushnet urged us to write more about coverage of the religious debate over the Bush administration’s policies regarding torture. For weeks, I looked in vain for the press’ treatment of the issue, which has fallen into eclipse. But then evangelicals inaugurated an annual conference about torture and the neo-conservative publication The Weekly Standard wrote about it. Now I had something to write about.
About three months ago, Stephanie Strom of The New York Times broke the news that hotel heiress Leona Helmsley had given $5 billion to $8 billion in her bequest to her dog Trouble. As I wrote, the otherwise fascinating story failed to account for the origins of Helmsley’s misanthropy.
In his new cover story for The Atlantic Monthly, writer Jeffrey Goldberg portrays John McCain as a believer in the military in general and the right use of military power specifically. My summary of Goldberg’s article is lengthy, so please bear with me.
Newsweek‘s cover story this week focuses on the historical and social roots of female voters’ embrace, so far at least, of Gov. Sarah Palin.
For months, I criticized the print press for not covering the Democratic presidential candidates’ outreach to religious Democrats in general and Catholic Democrats specifically. I didn’t get it. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had religious outreach directors. Yet until the Pennsylvania primary in April, reporters avoided writing about their efforts.
When I was a cub reporter lo many years ago, I was advised to get great quotes. Getting the full context of the story was important; ensuring that the story was accurate and fair was important; but nothing was quite as important as getting great quotes. Great quotes, and only great quotes, made the Story.
In The New York Times, reporter Jan Hoffman found an ingenious angle on an old story — a political candidate’s self-image.
Two weeks ago, I criticized national magazines’ coverage of Sarah Palin’s faith for providing more facts than explanations. Today I criticize Newsweek‘s cover story about Palin for … providing more facts than explanations. As you can see, I am breaking new intellectual ground!
Give credit to Michael Slackman and Nadim Audi of The New York Times. For their story about Egyptians’ perceptions of the 9/11 attacks, the two reporters were not content to flip through their rolodexes and call a bunch of experts. No, they interviewed ordinary Egyptians on the street. The fruits of their shoe-leather reporting were mostly ripe.