Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As you may have heard, there was an earthquake in Washington, D.C., and other parts of the center-of-the-universe Northeast corridor. While people immediately started joking about the ratio between news reports and the actual damages (my personal favorite, here), the event has served up one major story (so far) for folks who cover the religion beat.
First things first: I want to stress that I feel nothing but sincere pity for the world weary and stressed news editors who recently had to sit around conference tables and, perhaps in the presence of oracles who read focus-group tea leaves, discuss one of the big questions of this news cycle.
It’s amazing how much religion works its way into funeral services, especially into rites performed in churches that have ties that bind them to the language and the symbols of the early church. It’s really hard to edit the Godtalk out of these events.
Anyone who has been near a news rack knows that one of the major stories in the world today is the birth of South Sudan as a nation, rising out of an ocean of bloodshed and oppression over the past few decades.
A story that has been hotly discussed among my Episcopal and Anglican friends has received, near as I can tell, almost no mainstream media coverage. And I have no idea why. But it’s been going on long enough that it certainly deserves a “Got news?” post.
One of the problems with journalism in the Internet age is that once a major publication makes a mistake on a major story, that mistake tends to be repeated in the work of other newsrooms — until someone corrects the error.
Yesterday we looked at the bizarrely-limited-but-not-otherwise-bad coverage of the religion angles in recent debates over whether to change marriage law. I suggested in the comments to that post that some reporters were neither curious nor terribly thoughtful in how they approached the topic.
Back in my days as a full-time reporter on the religion beat, I had my share of arguments with editors in which I attempted to convince them that (a) worship attendance is much higher among their readers (and former readers) than among newsroom personnel and (b) that religious people care deeply about seemingly ordinary issues linked to life in their congregations.
