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I have a friend, and former editor, who used to watch televangelists with a drinking buddy. They would come home from a night on the town and keep drinking while watching CBN or some other preacher network. It was all fun and games until one night they accidentally donated $50 to Pat Robertson. The good news is that they realized they needed to cut back on their drinking.
By April 8 we should know whether Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is guilty of copyright infringement in Great Britain. According to reports in the Washington Post and New York Times, the judge’s questions seemed to indicate that he was not too thrilled with the plaintiffs.
Apparently Dan Brown’s use of “historical conjecture” in his wildly popular Da Vinci Code has landed him in the British legal system on a charge of plagiarism. The media are fascinated by the revelations on how Brown wrote his book, his wife’s involvement in forming the more controversial themes of the book and how strange it is to see the laid-back Brown among a bunch of powdered wigs in a British courtroom.
This does seem to be national Crunchy Cons day among conservatives of a certain ilk and, yes, I was planning on mentioning the long-awaited release of Rod “Friend of this Blog” Dreher’s book. After all, a major theme of this blog is the complexity of some of the “liberal” and “conservative” labels that journalists toss around all the time.
During that dizzying rush of recent Pat Robertson headlines, more than a few GetReligion readers protested that I was wrong to say the MSM should “excommunicate” him as a mainstream Christian, or even “evangelical,” news source. After all, said these readers, the czar of The 700 Club was still the czar of The 700 Club.
A dear friend of mine got married a few weeks ago in a service at a traditional Episcopal sanctuary. She’s not Episcopalian but she didn’t want to get married at her own church. That’s because her congregation meets for worship in a movie theater.
Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a profile of Kate Michelman. I’m not sure if they were trying to push her new book or push her appearance before the Alito hearings today, but they were pushing something. If NARAL Pro-Choice America itself had written the piece, it probably would have had more perspective.
This is slightly outside of the normal media coverage we follow, but I couldn’t help but notice that ghosts and religious terminology abound in recent stories about author James Frey. This is the man who wrote an exaggerated or possibly even fictional account of a drug- and alcohol-addled life of crime and successfully passed it off as his factual memoir A Million Little Pieces, which sold a gazillion copies and recently was selected for Oprah’s Book Club.
Do you ever wish that you could have been present during an interview between a major newspaper and a major newsmaker or popular personality? This happens to me when I read a really amazing quote and then think to myself, “OK, if the reporter didn’t follow up on that by asking this question, he (or she) should be abandoned in journalism purgatory.”
