Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Every reader of GetReligion should hurry over to the Columbia Journalism Review and read Tim Townsend’s comprehensive essay about the religion beat titled “Love Thy Neighbor.” I can think of no better window into the world of journalism in general and religion reporting in particular than this article.
As I keep mentioning, no organization in Washington, D.C., is having a greater impact on serious coverage of religion news than our friends over at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. They keep turning out waves of information, including large chunks of the kind of media analysis work that is catnip to your GetReligionistas.
Ever since I saw the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed last month, I’ve been waiting for some mainstream media coverage of the film. Other than surprisingly few reviews — some by reviewers who didn’t bother to actually watch the film — I haven’t really seen anything.
Sometimes media coverage of issues involving religion is so bad that there is just not much left for us to say at GetReligion that hasn’t already been said. Case in point is the media stumbling in an attempt to cover the resignation of Wheaton College professor Kent Gramm.
Anniversaries are anniversaries and several tumultuous events of 1968 have already been rehashed (see here) by reporters this year. You can bet that more (such as this one) stories of this kind are on the way. What angles should reporters look for?
In a story for CNN, reporter Eliott McLaughlin dove head first into a discussion of the religious views of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The hook for the piece is the group’s decision to open up and permit some public scrutiny of its lifestyle. They’ve started a Web site and a handful of polygamous wives have been doing a ton of interviews.
Today is Holy Saturday and, for Orthodox Christians around the world, the great feast of Pascha is only hours away. The key is to get some rest, between the many long and stunningly beautiful services.
It’s not mainstream media, but enough readers sent along this recent Cybercast News Service story by Pete Winn that I thought we’d take a quick look. The article features biblical scholars challenging whether a quote used by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in favor of political solutions for the environment is found in Scripture:
A long, long, time ago — before that Pope Benedict XVI person came to town and took over the lives of your GetReligionistas (with some help from a controversial sect in Texas) — the Los Angeles Times ran a short educational feature entitled, “Muslim true/false — What you think you know about them is likely wrong — and that’s dangerous.”
