Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In a way, the existence of the short New York Times story that ran with this headline, “Dolan Says the Catholic Church Should Be More Welcoming to Gay People,” is simply a matter of journalistic math.
The New York Times has been taking quite a bit of heat for its shockingly erroneous understanding of Christianity. Earlier this week, it published a brief story about Pope Francis’ Easter message and went on to say that “Easter is the celebration of the resurrection into heaven of Jesus, three days after he was crucified, the premise for the Christian belief in an everlasting life.”
That New York Times doozie-of-a-correction notwithstanding, many American journalists understand exactly what Easter means for Christians.
Your GetReligionistas don’t spend much time digging around in the growing world of first-person, advocacy journalism. We realize that opinion is cheap and reporting new information is expensive and that managers of many websites are going to do what they are going to do, which is print more and more opinion pieces about big news events. This is the new reality, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.
Every religion writer has experienced those awkward moments each year when an editor walks over to your desk and says, “Hey, it’s almost Easter (or Passover, of Christmas, or Ramadan, or …) and we have to have some Easter stories. What do you have going on that we can call an Easter story?”
So, this pope vs. pope theme has been building, in mainstream coverage, during the amazing early days of Pope Francis. Have you noticed? One of the world’s top reporters on all things Catholic has noticed, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Readers who have been following GetReligion for some time, or even reading my Scripps Howard News Service columns, may remember that I have been keeping up with the debates about the Shroud of Turin since the mid-1980s, when I worked at The Rocky Mountain News in Denver. That meant that I wasn’t that far from some of the key American players in this lively field, both in Colorado Springs, Colo., and in Los Alamos, N.M.
The Huffington Post’s Jon Ward is a thoughtful reporter and one who uncovers ghosts on his political beat with regularity. Earlier this week he wrote about the tension between evangelical morality and politics as it relates to changing marriage law to include same-sex couples.
