Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Associated Press writer Hillary Rhodes filed an interesting piece about how pastors are turning to the Internet to answer theology questions. One of the pastors she spoke with was Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church:
I can’t remember when, exactly, the mainstream media decided that it would stop with the unilateral caricature of evangelicals as the Christian Right, but I’m not sure the new caricature is much improved.
A recurring problem with stories about lawsuits is that only one side of the story is presented. Due to understandable hesitations, the party that is being sued is unlikely to comment on the lawsuit until they are able to formally respond to the lawsuit. You generally don’t win lawsuits on the news pages.
Several readers have written in to let us know about a new feature over at Poynter.org entitled “New Frames Needed for Religion Reporting,” written by Bill Kirtz of Northeastern University. This is a short summary of a recent forum on the subject at Northeastern and it offers some timely advice from veterans on the beat and some very good links to information.
One of the things I love about the religion beat is that valid and even interesting religious content can show up literally anywhere in the newspaper. If you needed evidence of that, check out this chatty little story from the Washington Times, focusing on the highs and lows of celebrity parenting.
Jonathan Martin, a great reporter for Politico, had a lengthy story looking critically at the lack of religious rhetoric coming from Sen. John McCain.
A significant story is brewing in California as diverse groups of people with clashing social values conflict with the American promises of religious freedom and tolerance. The themes of the stories are filled with religious values and terminology, but some news articles are not quite as precise or as informative as they could be.
There’s a lot of ink spilled over how politics and religion intersect, but I wish we could see more stories about religion and commerce. It’s somewhat rare to find any religion stories on the business pages.
It appears that a major, mainstream American newspaper in a powerful American city has published an article about a Pentecostal or conservative African-American minister reacting to the controversy about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and all of those sermons that have done so much to make Sen. Barack Obama’s media life interesting in recent weeks.
