Will Media One Day Do A Mea Culpa On HHS Mandate and Religious Liberty Issue

Get Religion has an column up that I am in a 100 percent agreement with. See Scaring people away from religious freedom.

How the media has gone out of their way to frame this issue really seems to me to malpractice. As the Get Religion notes:

But this piece embedded here is more of the same from the Church of Planned Parenthood. From Andrea Mitchell and NBC Nightly News. Brian Williams introduces the segment on what he calls “a push to limit women’s access to contraceptives and abortion.”
Now, let’s be clear about something. The reason why this topic is news is not because Catholic bishops or anyone else out there “pushed” to “limit” anything. The reason why we’re dealing with this political battle is because an entirely different group of people “pushed” to “limit” something. What they pushed was a mandate by the Health and Human Services administration to limit religious freedom. The status quo right now is that people are not forced to fund abortion drugs, sterilization or contraception. But they will be, because of actions taken by the current administration.
That is not how the media has framed this battle. But that’s who instigated this action. It is a deliberate misrepresentation to state otherwise.

Exactly! I keep asking this question , but it never gets answer. If what these Faith Groups were doing was such a War on Women then why hardly a peep before this year in the media. In other words if we living in the Catholic Dark ages that was such a threat why no reporting on this issue before the Obama rule. No one cared.

Get Religion also goes into the now almost comic use of scare quotes we see every day. That is " religious liberty ".

The not very sophisticated analysis of the legal issues has been something else.


Each year I enjoy observing the annual Religion Newswriters Association conference.

I do wonder if when they are among themselves if some self inspection on how they as a group ,and their more secular media handled this issue will happen. I sadly doubt it. But in a conference 5 to 10 years from now it might be a topic sadly. Then it might be too late.