The annual meeting of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association apparently was exactly the sort of activism fest you’d expect — and was underwritten by the usual bigfoots from the “objective” media: McClatchy, CBS, CNN, Gannett, ESPN, Hearst, NBC, Fox Business, Fox News, News Corporation, The Washington Post Co.

Brian Fitzpatrick was on the scene:

NBC/National Journal reporter Matthew Berger said he experienced “reverse Stockholm syndrome” while on the campaign trail covering GOP religious conservative Mike Huckabee. … He acknowledged how difficult it is for a journalist to do his job when you “hate” the people you’re covering. Berger said he was happy when he was transferred to the “gay-friendly” Rudolph Giuliani campaign.
Sending an outspoken activist like Berger, the former president of NLGJA’s Washington D.C. chapter, to cover the Huckabee campaign is like sending a hard-right activist to cover the Obama campaign. What was NBC thinking? Maybe they had no choice. Does NBC have anybody on staff who doesn’t hate religious conservatives?

The next “long march” for the Left, Fitzpatrick reports, will be targeted at the religion desks of America’s newspapers:

A panel supposedly intended to foster accurate coverage of religion quickly turned into a political strategizing session aimed at “retaking Christianity” from conservatives. The moderator and organizer of the panel, furniture magnate Mitchell Gold, is the founder of Faith in America, a homosexual activist organization targeting the religious community.
Gold said, “The single biggest [obstacle] to gays having equal rights in the country is religion,” so “I set myself to learn about it.” One of the panelists, Ann Craig, director of Religion, Faith & Values for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), said, “We’re not getting anyplace until we begin conquering the debate” in the religious community.
How to do it? Panelist Jimmy Creech, the former United Methodist pastor defrocked in 1999 for conducting same-sex “marriages,” told the journalists to seek out “other voices” rather than quote the 700 Club’s Pat Robertson and Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson. According to Creech, conservative Christian leaders like Robertson and Dobson are “the most radical Christians in America today,” and represent “a very minority point of view.”

Religion editors tend to be pretty liberal already, in the bland, corporate way that characterizes most newspaper editors. If you want to get a feel for where they’re coming from, check out this response from Eric Gorski, who now covers religion for AP but was writing for the Denver Post at the time of this exchange, in 2005. He dismisses allegations of media bias as a “witch-hunt” and in general takes the snide, sanctimonious, dismissive posture that comes naturally to journalists enduring a discussion of bias. Gorski writes:

The most disturbing thing about all of this: In these pretty innocuous stories, one of the authors of this blog is on a media bias witch-hunt, suggesting to readers that we may have an ax to grind in our approach to these stories. This is so patently ridiculous that it doesn’t really even deserve a reply.

That’s how much regard for the opinions of religious conservatives AP’s religion writers have.

Among those unimpressed with the coverage was Archbishop Chaput, who wrote:

Some of you may remember that a year ago I was part of a rally on the Capitol steps to protect state funding for the poor and homeless. But you didnÂ’t read about it in the Rocky or the Denver Post, because they didnÂ’t cover it.
Last September, just a few weeks before the election, I preached a homily to 5,000 people at Red Rocks, and I had them repeat out loud three times that if we forget the poor, weÂ’ll go to hell. ThatÂ’s one of the principles of Catholic social teaching. If we forget the poor, God will forget us. By our indifference, we will damn ourselves. But you didnÂ’t read about that in the press either, because  – again — nobody covered it.
Our diocesan website has at least 18 articles IÂ’ve written and talks IÂ’ve given against the death penalty in the past few years. TheyÂ’re just a fraction of what IÂ’ve said and done against capital punishment for more than three decades. The press covered that one time recently — when I criticized our Republican governor.

So is the archbishop also somebody whose opinion is so “patently ridiculous that it doesn’t [sic] really even deserve a reply”?