One of FPL's intrepid interns who helps put together the daily newsreel asked me an interesting question on Tuesday:

after doing the newsreel for several weeks now, all of the "romney is a mormon" and "the religious right hates guiliani" stories are getting old/boring...should i still be clipping them?

Says a lot about faith and politics news, doesn't it? Part of my response to the incisive intern:

I include [Romney] Mormon stories if a) it's a fresh perspective, b) it ties into current news, or c) is by a prominent writer...Also, sometimes the duration of a storyline is a story in itself. As much as I want to give subscribers good stories to read, I want to give them a sense of what the dominant narratives are in religion-and-politics news. But that's a good observation; thanks for bringing it up

I think both of us are right. To people who scan dozens of outlets every day, the news about certain candidates gets repetitive and saturated. The pack-animal nature of the press, coupled with the campaigns' sophisticated PR operations, ensures that stories linger longer than most readers would care to read. My interest never tires, though, and I want to make sure that the newsreel reflects what's going on, even if the same stories stick around for weeks.

Yet sometimes these Big Stories peter out just when they should be coming to fruition. For instance, there has been a months-long debate among pundits about whether Romney should give The Mormon Kennedy Speech (a speech analogous to JFK's 1960 speech assuring Protestant Texans that his Roman Catholic faith wouldn't influence his governance). Columnist and editorial boards have said he must do it, he can't do it, he should do it now, he should do it later, he owes it to us, how dare we expect it of him, etc., etc., etc.

Well, Bob Schiefer kind of coaxed The Mormon Kennedy Speech out of him on Sunday, and it hasn't received that much attention:

I'm only halfway interested in what Romney's saying here because the content isn't all that surprising. What's more noteworthy is that he is talking at length about his religion on national television. People have been opining about this for months, and now he talks about it, and no one cares. Granted there were bigger things in the news cycle, but still, the silence is conspicuous.

In unrelated news, my favorite story of the week was William McKenzie's Dallas Morning News column about the theology of empire. After hearing about American exceptionalism from candidate after candidate at last weekend's Values Voters Summit, I needed an antidote to the militarism underlying that worldview.