Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
On the same day that Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput was critiquing media coverage of the church, we got a real time example of some less-than-stellar religion reporting. Pope Benedict XVI landed in Africa this week and received breathless coverage because, as Amy Welborn put it over at Beliefnet, “the Pope has not booked a seat on the condom train.”
For those of you who haven’t had the experience of attending a mainline seminary or studying the Bible in an academic institution, the Essenes are almost as much a matter of contemporary Biblical orthodoxy as the historical-critical method.
I am of the opinion that what drives some media narratives is less overt bias than a love for drama that pits one protagonist against another in competition for the lowest common denominator. But most people don’t live their daily lives on protest lines, or suing one another, or testifying before Congress.
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Washington National Cathedral in March 1968. Robert Wright agrees, sort of, writing in the April Atlantic that “whether or not history has a purpose, its moral direction is hard to deny.” Wright’s essay is an 8,000-word argument that the three great monotheistic faiths may help create a more beneficent world through globalization.
Since we’ve been looking at so many bad examples of journalism about embryonic stem cell research, it might be worth looking at one paper that has been doing a bit better.
Since the day this blog opened for business, your GetReligionistas been saying the same thing over and over about the structure of modern American religion.
It’s early but this Washington Post headline about President Barack Obama’s changes to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research would have to be up for one of the worst of the year:
My husband and I went to see Milk, the film about the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, a few months ago. We enjoyed the movie, with some exceptions, and I predicted Sean Penn would win the Oscar for best actor — he was just that transcendentally good. And the supporting cast was also amazing.
Because my background is in economics and not religion or media, the media malpractice that gets me worked up the most usually involves numbers. No matter which newsroom I’ve worked in, the presence of numbers or numerical analysis seems to make journalists lose any brainpower. You should see what it’s like when reporters try to analyze polling data or governmental budgets. It’s just not pretty.
