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Blaine Harden of The Washington Post faults the Catholic church for keeping Filipinos poor. The gist of Harden’s story is that by opposing artificial contraception, the church has intimidated people in heavily Catholic Philippines into having more unwanted children.
Everyone knows what Sen. Barack Obama said about small-town Pennsylvania voters at a fundraiser in my native city, or at least everyone who listens to the news or reads a newspaper. For those who don’t know, click here. Obama’s remarks were fairly well publicized.
The greatest reporter you’ve never heard of is Samuel Lubell. In his 1950 classic The Future of American Politics, Lubell explained why Harry Truman, against all odds and the conventional wisdom, won the 1948 presidential election. What made Lubell’s book great was his skill at interviewing ordinary voters, telling their stories with nuance and subtlety, and detecting the larger pattern from their responses.
And on the fourth day of coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit, reporters gave their readers accurate and insightful characterizations and interesting quotes. Now if only they would give their readers a bit more context.
After saying Mass yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI spoke to Catholic educators from around the country. His speech was not easy to write about, as it was long on philosophy and theology. Still, reporters should have done more than treat his speech almost exclusively in terms of the culture wars.
Tmatt will write about The Washington Post’s fine job in linking the church sex-abuse crisis to “the wider context” of relativism. Three other dailies also mentioned Pope Benedict’s critique of secularism and relativism, though not to the extent that I think they should have.
I wrote yesterday about the six storylines of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States. In their stories this morning, the big dailies added a seventh storyline: the Pope’s Reaction to the Sex-Abuse Scandal.
Tmatt wrote about two storylines in the press so far about the pope’s visit. Daniel added a third. And in their spirit, I will add three more angles.
Cathy Grossman of USA Today talked to a lot of Catholics sources for her mini-profile of Pope Benedict XVI. Yet the one source she did not quote from, aside from one seven-word sentence, was the pontiff himself.
