From GetReligion to Rational Sheep

Bonus podcast: tmatt visits Newsbusters to discuss why news bias has become business as usual

This is a quick post, since this aging Baby Boomer has medical complications that require attention. Sorry about that. However, I still have something to share that I hope Rational Sheep readers (and listeners) will find interesting.

Rational Sheep is still in “launch mode” for a few more weeks, as I try to figure out how this project can reach parents, pastors, teachers and others who will want to explore faith and family life in this age of omnipresent digital screens and niche entertainment and news media.

However, there’s another reality here. I am still a religion news writer — with this week’s “On Religion” column (my deadlines are on Wednesdays) kicking off year 36 for my nationally syndicated column. And it was only a few weeks ago that I ended my 20-year run as editor of GetReligion.org, a project studying how the mainstream press struggles to cover religion news. Here is my essay on why we closed (“GetReligion will close on February 2, the 20th anniversary of this blog's birth”) and here is the website’s finale (“Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did”).

This week, I visited the the Media Research Center’s “Newsbusters” podcast — hosted by executive editor Tim Graham — to talk about what I learned from all those years with GetReligion. The MRC website noted:

We know several things from years of study. First, the media report very few religion stories. Second, the religion stories they choose to do typically focus on when churches are interjecting into the political arena (which secular reporters don't like). Third, since reporters are generally not religiously observant people, they show their ignorance of internal church matters, and bored with controversies like Catholics struggling with the Traditional Latin Mass, or religious concepts like sin and repentance.

Graham is a Roman Catholic, and quite a bit of the podcast focused on elite-press coverage of Joe Biden and the “devout Catholic” label that is almost always featured in news about this president’s life and work.

Anyone interested in that topic should visit the GetReligion.org archive and enter “Biden,” “devout” and “Catholic” in the search engine — which will yield several pages of relevant posts. Stated in pure journalism terms, the key is that Biden is a church-going Catholic (fact), with a rosary in his pocket (fact), who has been publicly embraced by Pope Francis (fact), but as vice president he performed same-sex union rites (fact) and has openly stated his opposition to ancient Catholic doctrines on several issues in moral theology (fact).

Why do journalists settle for the vague “devout” label when they can, in a sentence or two, mention relevant facts?

Yes, we also discussed former President Donald Trump selling Bibles (the MRC team knows that I remain a third-party #NeverTrump #NeverBiden guy). Political-desk reporters are eager to explore how that symbolic move clashes with years of colorful facts about Trump’s life and career.

But here’s the key to this bonus podcast. As a Catholic layman, Graham was also interested in what’s going on here at Rational Sheep. Thus, I hope that readers of this Substack project will enjoy hearing why Rational Sheep is so important to me. And, yes, the MRC summary did note:

Mattingly wraps up with 3 Big Questions for religious people facing a screen-obsessed culture, and he says churches need to engage with their flocks on these measures of your faith:

1. How do you spend your time?

2. How do you spend your money?

3. How do you make decisions?

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and listening.