Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It seems like just a few months ago that I was compiling my list of top stories from the previous year. Regardless of how quickly I would like to see time fly by, what follows is my summary from the past year and a celebration of this blog’s five years in existence.
One of the big stories of last year was President Barack Obama’s religious outreach efforts. And yet the rise of politically liberal religious groups was horribly undercovered. Instead we saw a lot of stories about how evangelical Christians were broadening their areas of interest. It’s a weird blind spot considering that the religious groups supporting President George W. Bush and Republicans in general are always well noticed by the media.
It would be hard to write a more angry, snarky headline than the one atop that piece by Ken Shepherd that the Newsbusters crew shot over the bow of the nation’s best known evangelical magazine.
When the President of the United States appoints an official to lead, say, the Department of Health and Human Services, reporters generally tell their readers or viewers what that person believes about issues relating to health. The same is generally true for positions such as Attorney General or any other position that has some level of autonomy from the chief executive.
Newspaper sports columnists around the world jumped on an “incident” between two Texas schools involving a 100-0 blowout as a juicy opportunity to explore the issues surrounding youth athletic competition (see here, here, here, here and here). Aside from this well-reported ESPN.com piece by Jeff Miller on the history of high school blowouts, Barry Horn of The Dallas Morning News has provided much of the reporting muscle in this story that combines youth athletics, competitive values and Christian educational institutions.
I’ve been under the weather for a few days but didn’t want to overlook some news coverage from the end of last week.
CNN is featuring a story headlined “Haggard faces new sex allegations.” While Haggard’s former church disclosed a pattern of immoral behavior at the time it let Haggard go, the specifics are somewhat new.
Newsweek recently published a one-page story about Ted Haggard that showed a remarkable sympathy for the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The story, reported by Tony Dokoupil and drawing heavily from the new HBO documentary The Trials of Ted Haggard, was especially uncritical about Haggard’s claim of being mistreated by New Life Church, the Colorado Springs church he founded and built into an evangelical powerhouse:
This has been a week like no other in Washington. Following the deluge of visitors for the inauguration of President Barack Obama, another deluge of visitors crashed the mall yesterday for the 36th annual March for Life. I was able to attend both events.
