Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
If there is anything that unites most professional journalists, it is a love affair with what most of us call the “killer quote.” This is not a quotation that literally kills someone, although I have seen a quotations that all but killed someone’s career.
When a story’s headline is as ambitious as “Why Newt Gingrich Converted to Catholicism,” a reader might hope for a meaty report that addresses the question with insights from friends rather than with speculation. Amy Sullivan’s report for Time mostly does not deliver, except for a few good quotations from the convert himself and from his third wife, Callista.
Let’s make one thing clear: I am a smidgen too young to be into this whole, “Hey man, did you make it to Woodstock or not?” thing that’s going on in the mainstream media right now. My priest, however, is another matter, since he was there and I still think he looks like Jerry Garcia.
The big story of the day in the National Football League is Michael Vick and his shot at gridiron redemption with the Philadelphia Eagles.
I continue to be amazed at the degree to which the debates about health-care reform keep cycling back to issues of money and, let’s face it, religion.
Typically when a news story about drugs begins with a priest, the focus is going be on how a community deals with the devastation those drugs have caused. And this story from Tuesday’s Washington Post is no different — except when it comes to scale. Here we aren’t talking about a life lost and a city under siege, but about a whole country under the influence.
At the beginning of the month we looked at the various and sundry ways the mainstream media reported on the stabbing of an 8-months-pregnant woman and the kidnapping of her baby. Some people called the child, who was taken from the mother’s womb, a “fetus” while others called it a “baby.”
The August cover story for Christianity Today, a magazine I write a column for (here’s the latest) has been making a bit of a splash. Mark Regnerus’ “The Case for Early Marriage” discusses how the chastity advocates forgot to mention that waiting until you’re old to get married might not be the most effective strategy for abstaining from sex until you’re married.
