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Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s joke after lightning disrupted the sound system at a debate hall as he started talking about his position on abortion has picked up a decent number of news notes around the Internet, in newspapers and on television newscasts. CBS News has a good summary for those of you who missed it:
There’s a lot of talk in the wake of Monday night’s Sojourners/Call to Renewal Forum on whether the subject of faith has become too interwoven in American politics and public life. That is an excellent question, but one I’m not going to address here because there are more relevant topics to discuss, such as the media coverage of the CNN-broadcast event.
The big winner in last night’s Democratic debate, according to a bunch of thinker-types, seems to be Sen. Hillary Clinton. She sounded presidential, she knew her stuff and remains the clear leader of the field, they say. But did she sound like a Midwesterner?
In case you were wondering, the Associated Press reports that presidential aspirants include seven Roman Catholics, three Methodists, three Baptists, one Episcopalian, one Presbyterian, one Mormon and one who is “simply” a Christian.
Horror of all horrors, Hollywood is seeking to make more movies that appeal to Christians, and it might even try to market the films to those audiences. The latest is yet another sequel from Hollywood that has Steve Carell of The Office playing a political guy who quits his career so that he can build an ark (like Noah).
I am the last person anyone should go to for fashion advice, but I do recognize the importance of fashion and what it says about a society. So with that in mind, I found the recent spate of stories on the shifting mindset of women in two major Middle Eastern countries toward fashion a fascinating look inside the countries’ culture.
Earlier this month, I wrote that the Mitt Romney presidential campaign had “hired” Mark DeMoss, an evangelical publicist who focuses on faith-based organizations (and author of The Little Red Book of Wisdom). My use of the word “hired” was inaccurate, since DeMoss was not receiving any money from the Romney campaign.
Whenever I have the pleasure of writing a story based on another organization’s work (I actually cringe when I have to do this), it’s always interesting trying to come up with a news hook that is relevant but not what everyone else is going to do. In these situations you usually have a press release with the preordained lede, but there is nothing forcing journalists to use it. Sometimes the press release lede is a no-brainer, but sometimes there is room for creativity.
It would be interesting to know if New York Times reporters Michael Luo and Laurie Goodstein started work on their above-the-fold A1 story on the “new breed of evangelicals” before Jerry Falwell died last week. The story has been much discussed in the blog world (it’s currently number 9 on the NYT‘s list of most blogged stories in the last three days), but there really isn’t much new in this report.
