Church Explains Media Coverage of Handbook Changes

MR says: The Church explains how changes made in the handbook (specifically about homosexuality) could have been reported more appropriately. Agreed.

Veteran newsman Ted Koppel, in a Washington Post opinion piece this morning, laments the passing of what he calls “a long-gone era of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.”

Koppel’s essay is an increasingly common refrain as traditional journalism undergoes a metamorphosis in the face of declining revenues and wholesale shifts of readers and viewers to the Internet. Context and balance are, more and more often, the casualties.

A case in point: On Saturday, 13 November 2010, the Church distributed a new administrative handbook to hundreds of thousands of lay leaders around the world. The handbook provides guidelines for administering local Church programs, serving members and ensuring continuity of Church operations around the world.

The previous evening, reporter Brian Mullahy of Salt Lake City’s CBS affiliate, KUTV 2, presented the station’s viewers with his interpretation of the significance of the handbook. From the nearly 200 pages of content, his report focused entirely on four short paragraphs included under the handbook heading “Homosexual Behavior and Same-Gender Attraction.”

Read the rest of this story at Newsroom.lds.org