When I saw the headline “Black Mormons Face Tough Election Choice Between Romney And Obama,” I naturally presumed it would lead to a parody news piece in The Onion.
Instead it was a Huffington Post story apparently repurposing the identical report in USA Today and circulated by something called the Religion News Service.
Aside from the obvious point in the lede–“Twenty years ago, who would have predicted the 2012 U.S. presidential race would pit a black incumbent against a white Mormon?”–there’s actually zero news in the story. We learn that “African-Americans still represent only about 3 percent of the Mormons’ 6 million U.S. members” and get no data whatsoever on how they vote. They interview a handful of black students at Mormon schools and don’t even ask most of them who they plan to vote for.
