Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Sometimes I get the feeling that reporters struggle to cover annual events. This leads to less coverage of the liturgical calendar and its festive celebrations and penitential seasons than to events marked by trend-driven church bodies. You don’t see much coverage of Pentecost, marked annually by millions of American Christians, compared to, say, the sex sermon series being pushed by some pastor in Michigan.
Sometimes the religious angles in a football story just jump out and grab the sports writer and force them to dig into the topic. For example, see here this excellent profile piece by ESPN.com’s Wayne Drehs on Kurt Warner. This is one of those athletes you simply cannot write about without mentioning his faith:
How often do you see scripture appropriately quoted in a front-page news article? I was hoping I would see something like this in one of the mid-sized American newspapers before the Christmas season was over. To my pleasant surprise, my own local paper, The Indianapolis Star, on Christmas Day gave its readers an informative, meaningful and insightful news article on how the Christmas holiday season and the current economic downturn is affecting people spiritually.
During the past 25 years or so, I have written more than my share of mainstream news stories and columns about religious seasons.
For one angle in the brouhaha surrounding Rick Warren’s slated Inauguration prayer, blogs did most of the heavy lifting. Thanks to Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News & World Report, Christina Hoag of The Associated Press and Alex Koppelman of Salon for mentioning, in varying levels of detail, that Warren and rock singer Melissa Etheridge met each other at an event sponsored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
Sometimes it’s more difficult to praise a fantastic piece of journalism than it is to critique a weak article. With a bad article, you can point out the errors and missteps. But what exactly makes a great piece great? Sometimes it’s difficult to pin down.
New York City does not seem to be a very welcoming city. Certain people belong there, while the presence of others that fail to fit a certain stereotype are considered by a major media institution in the city as “jarringly out of place.”
Last week, the Drudge Report linked to some stories about a Florida woman who said that her former church had threatened to ‘go public with her sins’ by telling the congregation about her sexual relationship with a man who is not her husband. Here’s the WJXT report:
Nothing stirs up as much GetReligion guilt in my heart as the arrival of a new issue of The Atlantic Monthly in my mailbox at work. Month after month, it seems that there is some giant story that I want to write about on the blog — immediately, post haste — yet it is so long and involved that it just keeps slipping and slipping and, well, then that new issue arrives and stirs up my guilt.
