Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A significant news morsel buried in the middle of a ho-hum article about a meeting with President Bush in the Savannah Morning News deserves attention. In an interview with author Bruce Feiler, Larry Peterson went with the metro news headline stating that local boy makes good and meets with leader of the free world.
ABC News’ 20/20 messed up big time. In a March episode the show showed a video clip of the Rev. Frederick K.C. Price, founder of the Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles, saying that he lives in a 25-room mansion and owns a $6 million yacht, a private jet, a helicopter and seven luxury cars. The problem for ABC News is that Price wasn’t stating facts about himself. It was a hypothetical.
An Associated Press story on Muslims worldwide rejecting violence against civilians provides a great lead-in to the latest Newsweek cover story on Islam in America. Based on a survey by the Pew Research Center, the AP article tells us that Muslims are “increasingly” rejecting suicide bombings, and support for Osama bin Laden is collapsing.
Reporters have not surprisingly played up the religious aspect of Turkey’s elections this past weekend. While religion has no doubt played a significant part in bringing the country to early elections and will be a big factor in voters’ decision-making, there are other aspects of the story that reporters risk missing if religion is all they focus on.
David Crumm, the Detroit Free Press religion writer, had the enviable task of coordinating a rather significant open-source religion journalism project that involved “forty strangers in a virtual room” talking about their faith.
How do you tell a story that’s essentially been told over and over again? That is the trouble for reporters who are assigned to write about the release of a book by Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy, who is as consistent as anyone when it comes to expressing the important things in his life.
Sometimes being witty gets in the way of being thorough and nuanced. Dana Milbank, The Washington Post‘s ubiquitous page 2 columnist, wrote a lament Tuesday on what he described as the faded culture wars in the wake of Sen. David Vitter’s scandal and other supposedly connected events.
When Terry sent around this Christian Science Monitor story on how presidential candidate Barack Obama was “putting faith out front,” I groaned.
Amid the mania earlier this week surrounding the move of the David Beckham family from Europes to the United States is a quiet religion ghost that reporters ought to take a look at.
