Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
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.
And then there was the funeral, with flowers, politicos, hymns, memories, televangelists and that final ironic detail — a potential whiff of napalm as a Liberty University student prepared a few makeshift bombs to drive away the right, right, right fundamentalists who planned to protest the work of that infamous liberal and sell-out Jerry Fallwell.
For the past few days I have been on the road and away from a steady Internet link. However, even during a drive from Boston to Baltimore, I was plugged in enough to the mainstream media (and the Drudge Report) to know that GetReligion’s friend Frank “Bible Belt Blogger” Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had an interesting story on his hands.
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.
Both Time and Newsweek have chosen to bid farewell to Jerry Falwell with one-page essays on whether Falwell’s death also means trouble for the political involvement of conservative evangelicals in politics.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that an unnamed candidate could generate substantial interest in the Republican Party, particularly among the evangelical voters. The current crop of main tier candidates has been disappointing to them, and they are yearning for a candidate with whom they can fall in love. At least that’s the story line that journalists have been giving us lately.
Let’s not bury the lede: I have been surprised and pleased by the excellence of the mainstream media coverage of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death. I think it is crucial that, because his power has faded so much, journalists were able to step back and evaluate his life with less venom.
The general consensus in the day-after coverage of the passing of the Rev. Jerry Falwell has been that he ignited the political movement that is today known as the religious right. Here’s Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times:
The news of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death will undoubtedly receive mounds of additional press coverage beyond what is currently out there. Two news organizations that have a tendency to influence the rest — The New York Times and The Associated Press — have already weighed in and their reports are worth a close look.
