Did a pastor in your area endorse a candidate from the pulpit Sunday? It's a national story

In a move that could put their tax-exempt status at risk and result in fines, an estimated 1,500 pastors nationwide endorsed presidential candidates Sunday. The move was a challenge to the law prohibiting political endorsements by religious and other tax-exempt organizations, policed by the Internal Revenue Service. (Bloomberg News photo)

The goal of "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" was "to defy this rule and prompt the IRS to take action against a church that could become the basis for a court case to test whether the amendment infringes on constitutional rights to free religious and political speech," reported Jennifer Hawes of The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. The event was first organized four years ago by the Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom. All participants pledged to film their sermons and send them to the IRS.

Rev. Steven Baines, religious outreach director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told Hawes the political action "opens the door to politicizing our pulpits." The risk is that churches and pastors could become political fronts, he said. "They have freedom of speech. They can preach about their values, and we encourage pastors to preach about their values. But they cannot relate those to a particular candidate or party."

Participating pastors said they were taking part because their messages shouldn't be filtered through the IRS. But the average voter doesn't want pastors politicizing their sermons, according to a decade's worth of Pew Research Center polls, Hawes reported. In a July survey, 66 percent of people polled said churches and other places of worship should not endorse candidates. Even 90 percent of Protestant pastors polled in a May LifeWay survey said they shouldn't endorse from the pulpit. (Read more)

Postal discount to direct mailer OKd; newspapers going to court, say watchdog role threatened

UPDATE, Sept. 2: For a PDF of frequently asked questions about the deal, with answers from NNA, click here.

The Postal Regulatory Commission has voted 4 to 1 to support to a U.S. Postal Service plan to give a discount to a prominent direct mailer, a move that struggling newspapers say will probably reduce an important income stream for them. For background, click here.

Under the service's three-year deal with Valassis, the company will get a discount on additional pieces sent. Ruth Goldway, the commission’s chairwoman, acknowledged that newspapers were upset with the proposed deal, but said that the discount given to Valassis would not give the company an unfair advantage. “The Commission understands that both newspapers and the Postal Service are experiencing declining revenues as new technologies based on the Internet grow in popularity," she said. "Today’s decision affirms that fair competition between these two important institutions is consistent with the law.”

The Newspaper Association of America, representing most dailies, said it was “stunned” by the decision and would take it to court. (Read more)  National Newspaper Association President Reed Anfinson, publisher of the Swift County Monitor-News in Benson, Minn., said the association of weeklies and small dailies was "deeply disappointed" in the commission’s analysis.

"The commission begins with the presumption that having a federal enterprise competing head-on with the newspaper industry is a good thing, but it does not explain how any business can be on a level playing field when competing with its own government," Anfinson said. "The mailing contract with Valassis is an unfair deal in which the principal result is to drive down the advertiser’s prices and not necessarily to bring any new mail volume to the Postal Service. What the commission does not explain is why this goal is in the best interest of either newspapers or the Postal Service. Nor does it take seriously the arguments raised by many that this deal will force more newspapers out of the mail and create a net loss for the Postal Service after the deal kicks in."

Anfinson took issue with the commission's view, as he described it, that there is no "problem with the Postal Service’s draining revenues from news-gathering organizations. Somehow it seems to believe the centuries-old mailing category for periodicals created by Congress is able to equal out the harm from contracts like this one. . . . We know that in thousands of communities around this nation that newspapers remain the most vigorous watchdog of government as well as the primary source of community news."

Editor of 1½-year-old, prize-winning weekly tells how and why

The Yancey County News, a weekly founded just last year, recently won two major journalism awards  -- the E.W. Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism.  On the Burnsville, N.C., newspaper's masthead are only two people, Jonathan and Susan Austin. In a Q&A with The Awl, an online journal, reporter Dan Cooper asked Jonathan Austin, right, about the prestigious prizes, both awarded for stories reporting on corruption in the county’s official channels. In one series, the paper revealed that the county’s deputy-sheriff had pawned county-owned firearms for personal gain; another series uncovered absentee ballot fraud, voter coercion, and voter anonymity rights violations in the county.

Austin told Cooper that he came to Yancey County after working for 30 years for various media companies and after a family decision was made that he should come and live with his aging father and stepmother. He said he also had read the competition and knew there was a lot of room for some better news coverage in the county. As for the awards, he said he was just trying to write "about what was going on. In many ways, it's just what you learn in Journalism 101. It's not investigative aggressive; it's showing-up aggressive. It’s covering as many of the items of what goes on in a community in any given week. We're storytellers so when I’m talking to journalists, I try and remind them that we come up with scripts for the things we don’t necessarily want to tell our grandma and I remind them — who, what, when, where and why. That community I felt didn’t have anything aggressive enough.”

His guiding principles of community journalism: He relies on "almost 30 years of experience; that’s where the editorial process gets going, where the rubber hits the road. As Garrison Keillor would say, "that’s righteous time." I try and subscribe to the theory that everything is important to someone. I doubt that anyone not in school bothers to read the lunch page but I bet they understand the purpose for it being there."