An interesting comment was posted for the post below from Get Religion.  The comment is from Terry Mattingly:

The key, for me, is that the press is comfortable with faith, but not with claims of permanent doctrine.

The journalist William Proctor once told me, when discussing the NYTs and religion: http://www.tmatt.net/2001/05/02/the-gray-ladys-gospel-crusade/

Proctor (says) … critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward “fundamentalists.” Thus, when listing the “deadly sins” that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world’s most influential newspaper condemns “the sin of religious certainty.”

“Yet here’s the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths,” said Proctor. Its leaders are “absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right.”