Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Normally we look at mainstream media, but I came across an essay in my church body’s monthly newspaper that is worth sharing. In The Reporter, veteran foreign correspondent and former religion editor at UPI (and my friend and fellow Lutheran) Uwe Siemon-Netto looks at how the mainstream media treat Christians and, conversely, atheists. He notes Christopher Hitchens’ fawning reception by CNN’s Lou Dobbs, among other examples.
In the discussion of a previous post about coverage of the Kathy Griffin brouhaha, Religion News Service reporter Kevin Eckstrom says the following about his piece:
Let’s make another trip into that massive GetReligion Guilt file in my computer. I kept trying to write something about this one while I was in Prague, but never got to it.
Few stories will change a journalist’s life. Even fewer stories change a journalist’s life for the better, but that’s exactly what happened to Seattle Times sports columnist Jerry Brewer since he started writing about Gloria Strauss, the 11-year-old daughter of a local high school basketball coach, who endured a four-year fight with cancer before passing away last week.
Let me note, following the gentle snark from the Divine Mrs. M.Z. the other day, that her GetReligionista comrades had, in fact, noted the pronouncement from the public intellectual Kathy Griffin. We simply were waiting for M.Z. to return with her soft, nuanced touch on the keyboard in order to address this weighty topic.
Eve Conant of Newsweek has written a curious article: In trying to describe Democrats learning to speak the patois of evangelicals, she writes in a style that is nearly tone deaf to evangelical culture.
USA Today‘s op-ed page on Monday had a nearly full-page opinion piece on a degree offered at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that could include a concentration in homemaking. The catch is that it’s offered exclusively to women.
This USA Today story has been in tmatt’s infamous GetReligion Guilt file for some time now, but I could not throw it away. It seems that, with the Pew Forum on such a roll, religion-beat reporters are awash in interesting poll data about religion, values, politics, etc. In other words, we are still in the aftershocks of the “values voters” and “pew gap” political earthquakes of 2000 and 2004.
What is it with my fellow GetReligionistas? It’s as if they’re completely disinterested in celebrity news. I just searched to see how we handled media coverage of the Kathy-Griffin-at-the-Emmys debacle (I was attending to other matters at the time) and see that we didn’t discuss it at all. For those who have more interesting lives, Griffin is a comedienne — and host of the 2007 gay porn awards! — who made scandalous remarks about Jesus when she accepted her Emmy for her Bravo reality series. There was so little substantive coverage of what she said that religion reporter Gary Stern hadn’t even heard about it last week:
