Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
You know, it really isn’t hard to get the Anglican-wars timeline right or to, at least, craft one or two short, editor-friendly sentences that do not mangle the facts. There’s no need to warp time in this story.
When you are talking about the history of the Anglican wars, you really have to remember that it’s really about the bishops.
The Associated Press report is very, very, very short and raises many more questions than it answers. Here is a typical version (or click here for a longer version in the Los Angeles Times):
I was stunned the other day by the total lack of interest in the religion elements of the big story here in Washington, D.C., as in the tragedy on our Metro subway system. The coverage has been major league, as you would expect, and the story on which I focused was one out of many worthy of discussion.
As interesting as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s bizarre and tormented press conference was — the one where he announced he had something going on with an Argentinian woman, it was his wife’s statement about the matter that I found the most intriguing. In her statement, she overtly references her Christian faith, even quoting scripture.
One of concepts that causes my journalism students the most grief is finding the line between making statements of personal opinion and making statements that draw logical conclusions from facts that have been stated on the record or verified in a document. It’s the line between editorial writing and news, when you get right down to it.
As I read the story from the Citizen-Times.com website, I tried to remember a few basics about what it’s like to write for a paper in a smaller market. Local papers (as in Asheville, North Carolina) might not have a full-time religion reporter. They often don’t have space for longer articles, thus making it possible for details to get lost. And they may assume that their local readers know about churches and institutions that those of us surfing from “abroad” might not know.
Here is another one of those strange little — repeat “little” — church-state stories that a few readers continue to ask about, via personal emails.
