Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I’m out of the country right now visiting my in-laws in Mexico. They don’t have wifi! So my posting may be a bit lighter the next few weeks as I cobble together trips in search of internet.
I can’t recall which television program I watched recently that had an interview with Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, but I remember thinking that I’d like to see more local coverage of this man who is so prominent among the Catholic bishops and their religious freedom focus.
A week ago I wrote a post headlined “Savvy PR firms drive coverage of HHS mandate.” I wrote it because it struck me that a Los Angeles Times story hewed pretty closely to the public relations campaign I’d been seeing — since first alerted to it by CNN — of a PR campaign orchestrated by Faith in Public Life, heavily funded by the Open Society Institute of prominent atheist billionaire George Soros.
Sen. Marco Rubio was in the news quite a bit yesterday. Part of it was that he released his new book. Part of it was that an old Charlie Crist campaign foe who now works for Romney allegedly told a reporter that Rubio wasn’t even being considered for the Veep slot. Another day in the fun, fun world of political reporting.
For some reason I’ve been fascinated with looking at how different media outlets report the same news. Sometimes what they choose to highlight, the angle they go with, the people they interview, etc., are all the same. Sometimes they’re quite different.
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.
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:
There were a couple of interesting posts on CNN’s Belief Blog that caught my eye yesterday. The first was a post extrapolating from Bryce Harper’s “clown question” retort a deeper meaning relative to the Washington Nationals phenom’s Mormon beliefs. I then caught myself researching various baseball players’ religious affiliations and was quite surprised to find out that another player I’d met in a bar once was also identified as LDS. But the point being it’s a great hook for a religion angle.
I’m going to back into the media analysis here by mentioning that there is a very media-savvy, progressive public relations non-profit called Faith in Public Life. The Washington Post describes the group as one of several organizations that “that meld religion and liberal politics” and the group itself describes its work here:
