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Theme stories frustrate me. The stories that are written annually are particularly annoying. Like around the start of school, or Christmas time. Typically reporters avoid them, and I don’t think they’re very popular with readers. But I guess they are necessary and some people enjoy them. If it’s Christmas time, you simply have to do something, right?
I’m back in the great Hoosier state for the weekend, celebrating Christmas. I was given the opportunity to play in my high school’s alumni basketball game this evening and generally have had an opportunity to kick back and enjoy time with the family.
Writing about atheism here at GetReligion would seem somewhat oxymoronic since we are well, a blog about the media’s coverage of religion. But even atheists have a degree of faith since it takes faith to believe that there is in fact no God out there.
We’ve been snatching up the hints, eating up the intimations and listening to mesmerizing speeches, but we are all still waiting for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. — the latest Next Big Thing in the 2008 presidential race — to tell us what he believes. No, not his position on the issues, or that he thinks Democrats should court evangelicals, but what he believes.
When a compelling book hits the stores, journalists covering the same subject can’t help but write about it. Rare and special are the books that break news with any real content, so in lieu of that, journalists seek external news angles in order to write about the book. It’s better than simply shilling for the publishing industry and writing a review, right?
Do you hear what I hear? Conservative evangelicals are migrating their presidential hopes from Massachusetts to Kansas because of a letter Mitt Romney wrote in 1994. Or are they?
Jeff Stein, the national security editor for Congressional Quarterly, has been doing some brilliant reporting lately. Yet it’s all so simple. Ask the leaders of our nation, particularly those in positions of power in intelligence, national security and international affairs, to explain the basic differences between Sunni and Shiite Arabs.
We here at GetReligion typically like just about everything the Los Angeles Times’ Stephanie Simon writes. She thrives on writing highly descriptive narratives that manage to touch on all sorts of issues, usually with religious themes. For instance, her piece on abortion still sticks in my mind and is a must read for journalists covering the subject.
