CNA<\/a>).- News media coverage has \u201cranged from imbalanced to near-fraudulent\u201d in its contrasting reports on the religious freedom rallies and the controversy over Vatican action towards the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, media observer Mollie Hemingway says.<\/p>\n\t\u201cWhile the dissenters against the HHS mandate are marginalized by the media, the dissenters against the Vatican are uplifted,\u201d she told CNA June 13. \u201cDissent against the Obama administration seems to be questioned while there are few things the media like more than dissent against the Vatican.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tHemingway, a reporter who writes on the religion news analysis blog GetReligion.org, said 2012 \u201chas not been a great year for media coverage of religious news.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tShe suggested this is because it is an election year \u201cand everyone gets more partisan.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe first six months of the year have witnessed several major Catholic news stories.<\/p>\n
\tThe Department of Health and Human Services in January mandated that most employers provide insurance coverage for sterilization and contraception, including some abortion-causing drugs, as \u201cpreventive care.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe mandate won praise from feminist groups, Planned Parenthood and secularists.<\/p>\n
\tHowever, the Catholic bishops and other faith leaders objected that the mandate requires employers to provide coverage for procedures and drugs to which they have religious and moral objections. The bishops particularly objected that the mandate\u2019s religious employer exemption is so narrow that it will not include many Catholic colleges, charities and health care systems. They also said a proposed compromise from the Obama administration is unacceptable.<\/p>\n
\tRecently, the news media have focused on the reaction to a doctrinal assessment by the Vatican\u2019s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith concerning the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The assessment found a \u201ccrisis\u201d of belief and \u201cserious doctrinal problems\u201d in the leadership organization, whose members represent 1,500 religious congregations and some 57,000 women religious.<\/p>\n
\tThe LCWR argued that the assessment process was \u201cflawed.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tHemingway saw differences in how the media has dedicated time to covering the stories and how the issues are framed by it.<\/p>\n
\tShe noted that on the day of the June 8 Stand Up for Religious Freedom rallies, National Public Radio dedicated 14 minutes of \u201cscarce broadcast coverage\u201d to highlight the religious sisters\u2019 organization but gave no coverage to the rallies.<\/p>\n
\tWhen the controversy over the HHS mandate first began in January, media attention was \u201cslight and slow, if it was there at all.\u201d News coverage similarly neglected the religious freedom rallies held in March.<\/p>\n
\tIf they did cover the rallies, many media outlets \u201cdiminished the religious liberty concerns expressed by attendees.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\u201cSome media outlets took to scare-quoting the terms \u2018religious freedom\u2019 and \u2018religious liberty,\u2019 to show how much they disputed these concerns,\u201d Hemingway told CNA.<\/p>\n
\tShe suggested that the news media can get \u201ccarried away\u201d by \u201ca desire to turn everything into a partisan fight.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tWhile reports on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious pointed out \"how helpful the LCWR had been to President Obama and Democratic supporters of Obamacare,\u201d very few accurately described the decades-old roots of the conflict between the conference and the Vatican, she said.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThey mischaracterized the actual words of the doctrinal assessment, stating wrongly that the Vatican had derided their social work,\u201d Hemingway continued. \u201cOne of my favorite media missteps was seeing a story about the Vatican crackdown accompanied by a picture of a bunch of habited nuns attending a Rick Santorum rally in Michigan.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tShe said stories on the controversy \u201croutinely\u201d used pictures of traditionally dressed religious sisters, while LCWR members often do not wear traditional garb.<\/p>\n
\tHemingway also saw problems in how the HHS mandate controversy has been covered as a battle about \u201caccess to contraception.\u201d This viewpoint \u201ccertainly matches the talking points of its supporters but doesn\u2019t accurately reflect the concerns of its opponents.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tMisstatements of fact have also marred the coverage.<\/p>\n
\tShe said media outlets wrongly depicted a religious liberty hearing as a hearing on \u201cbirth control\u201d and ignored the hearing\u2019s two female panelists \u201cin favor of a narrative that no women were present.\u201d Other reports wrongly claimed that\u00a0 98 percent of women take birth control.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cSince the media's primary job is to inform and accurately describe opposing positions, they're failing and that failure hurts civil discourse,\u201d<\/p>\n
\tShe said the disparity in coverage is \u201cstriking\u201d when compared to the \u201cmajor media onslaught\u201d after the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer foundation briefly withdrew grant opportunities from Planned Parenthood, or to the \u201cheavy and high profile coverage\u201d of Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, who supported the HHS mandate.<\/p>\n
\tHemingway did find some good examples of media coverage, like St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Tim Townsend\u2019s reporting on the local religious freedom rallies.<\/p>\n
\tShe also had some advice for how reporters can improve.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cI have no doubt that reporters have the best of intentions in covering these issues, but they need to expand their rolodexes to include better voices in their stories, redouble their efforts to frame stories fairly, put aside their partisan inclinations and reflexive defense of the Obama administration, and simply work to inform readers about what's going on,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cJournalists can and must do better. And news consumers should be aware that the media aren't always informed or thoughtful in the way they handle religion news.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n
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