Religion and Politics

Is Mitt Romney’s Mormonism Fair Game?

Jason Horowitz, The Washington Post reporter who has broken some of the most controversial stories about Romney and Mormonism this election cycle, explains how the Romney campaign has come to “determine whether coverage of the candidate’s Mormonism has crossed a line.” Horowitz writes that Romney spokespeople have developed a “test” to determine if journalists would have written a similar story about another candidate’s religion: they substitute “Jew” or “Jewish” every time a story identifies Mitt Romney as a “Mormon” or refers to the candidate’s “Mormonism.” According to Horowitz, “the campaign’s response gets at a crucial challenge for the news media: to educate the public about an unfamiliar faith unusually central to a candidate’s formation without treating Mormonism as biographical exotica that could fuel prejudices.”

Read at The Washington Post

• Email
• Print