The Week’s Insight

The top headline-getter of the week was, without a doubt, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the pick for the GOP vice president’s spot. Between reaction by community organizers to her comments last week at the Republican National Convention that “her experience as ‘a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities’ ” to her interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, news feeds were acting like a lipstick-wearing pig, gobbling up blogs, comments and musings about Palin and reactions to Palin.

So let’s look at that pig, and the shade of that lipstick that could really wreck the complexion of the political process.

The pig, of course, is the press, which spent a good portion of the week covering whether there’s a link between Gov. Palin’s joke at the RNC about the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull (“lipstick”) and the old saw tossed out off-hand by Sen. Barack Obama about how a splash of Revlon color on one end of a porker can’t hide the curly tail on the other end. In a week that saw yet more hurricanes hitting the U.S. coast, the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the government rescue of the nation’s biggest mortgage lender program, we have the lipstick: How was it that this uproar over a seemingly trivial matter received so much play during the news cycle?

Politico’s The Arena pointedly asks the question: Is the press complicit — or even the principal engine — in making politics so conflict-driven and superficial? Participants in the conversation give thoughtful criticism to the press’ struggle to maintain is function and identity in the face of the vast changes of its industry and audience focus. For example, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer dinged the media for simultaneously decrying the silliness of politics while engaging in that silliness themselves, while Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessing and attorney Erik S. Jaffe engage in a discussion about the role of rhetoric, truth and bias in the political process.

The entire piece offers a fascinating read and analysis into the ever-fuzzier role of the press to cover what the public needs to know and what it wants to know.

Another issue lifted up out of all the Palin coverage came from the interview conducted Thursday night by ABC News’ Charlie Gibson. GetReligion slammed Gibson for taking Palin’s comments about the Iraq War — “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.”– out of context and changing their meaning. Her entire quote, lifted from the Spiritual Politics blog, was:

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.

GetReligion accuses Gibson of relying on poor sources for his interview and misunderstanding the nature of Christian prayer requests common to churches like Palin’s. In the first interview of the GOP vice presidential nominee, Get Religion says:

There is an incredible burden on you as a journalist. With the media reputation in the tank when it comes to Palin coverage, these questions should have been well formulated and really thought out. Palin’s religious views are interesting and completely worthy of coverage. Her real religious views, that is. Not some slice-and-dice media conception of what she said.

Of course, this type of coverage isn’t likely outside of blogs, online articles and other new media sources. Earlier in the week, religion scholar Martin E. Marty lamented the reduction of religion reporters in U.S. media, which means that news reports that can skillfully articulate the subtleties of faith of candidates are, sadly, getting the kiss-off from the mainstream media.

What do you think about the press’ coverage of politics and faith? Is the media playing a role in making news, politics and faith conflict-driven and superficial? Add your comments!