Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Bill Blakemore of ABC News dropped a blunt assessment of the Tom Cruise-Paramount situation Thursday: It’s all about Scientology. (By the way, did you hear Cruise has inked a new deal already?) It’s the link that everyone has been wanting to make, but no other reporter has had the guts to run with it, until now.
I was reading Seymour Hersh’s excellent New Yorker piece on the Bush administration’s interest in the Hezbollah-Israeli war when I stumbled across this paragraph:
Reader John Hoh sent us a note regarding a photo caption accompanying this Associated Press article. It describes snipers killing 20 people in Baghdad who were on their way to commemorate Imam Moussa Kadhim at his golden-domed shrine.
Tom Cruise‘s dumping by Paramount Pictures for his off-screen behavior brings Scientology back into the news. It’s still too early to say for sure, but early news accounts are fairly clear that Paramount executives were put off by his crazy antics over the last year.
Oh the confusing tales that we journalists weave, except when we attempt to deceive by making them too simple.
Kudos to Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press for catching this excellent religion-beat story on the debate within Muslim communities on when to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the end of the Ramadan fast. Zoll avoids using troublesome labels like “traditionalist” and “progressive” as a crutch and allows Muslims’ thoughts and beliefs to speak for themselves.
“British Muslim Leaders Facing Generation Gap,” a Los Angeles Times headline informed us on Thursday. Is this news to anyone? Aren’t most leaders in Western cultures facing a generation gap of some kind or another? I know for a fact that there are gaps between generations [insert snarky comment here].
Altering photographs is nothing new, especially in this digital era. When applied to the news business, it is a Jason Blair-style crime along the lines of plagiarism and fabrication — maybe worse because altered images are sometimes difficult to detect and images are so powerful. The media watchdogs have largely failed in covering this issue of altered and staged photographs, and they are failing the public.
There are, of course, huge differences in the two stories. Great Britain seems to be dealing with genuine terrorists bent on mass murder while the French rioters were less terrorists and more gangs intent on creating havoc, and not necessarily death, in their neighborhoods.
