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Ross Douthat, an associate editor at The Atlantic, wrote an inspired piece in the August/September edition of First Things taking apart, piece by piece, theories about a “theocracy movement” in America. Here’s a snippet:
Buried throughout this New York Times piece on the attempts of conservatives to get into the documentary film business is the question of whether these conservatives are motivated by something more than a political desire to promote conservative ideas.
A 6,800-word Los Angeles Times article by Glenn Bunting on the cigar-chomping, money-making, deal-cutting multibillionaire Philip Anschutz is a piece of journalism for which newspapers live.
Fred Phelps is getting help from the American Civil Liberties Union. Phelps, of the Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, is suing in federal court, challenging a Missouri law that prohibits protesting at military funerals.
The good news is that The Boston Globe corrected its mistake when it said that Jesus Christ was born in Nazareth. It took a few days, but the article has been updated and a correction posted at the end. But I doubt we’ll see CNN.com posting a retraction anytime soon.
CNN.com, one of the most heavily visited news sites on the Internet, posted these headlines this morning in an attempt to cover the rapidly developing cycle of violence in the Middle East:
On a more ominous side of religion-morality coverage of the World Cup, the most obvious and glaring case is the legalization and promotion of prostitution in Germany. The New York Times did a somewhat wishy-washy piece dealing largely with the business of prostitution while failing to give proper attention to the horrors of sex trafficking:
Last week found me stumbling around trying to write about religious issues in the World Cup. The event is one of the most significant worldwide. Certainly there were more religious issues than merely an immature head-butting, we thought.
Some ghosts are just too obvious to miss. But sadly, in an attempt to cram reams of issues into an eight-minute radio broadcast, National Public Radio did what so many media outlets do in attempt to write about Islam: give theological issues the short stick.
