Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Every year we read about the War on Christmas. The mainstream media love to cover stories about those Scrooges who ban the use of any specific greetings related to Christmas and the old curmudgeons who complain about the same.
<a href=It’s odd to see some of your former classmates quoted in The New York Times as if they are newsworthy. Don’t get me wrong–many of them are doing cool and interesting things. Samuel G. Freedman profiles one of these classmates in a nice, upbeat story to show how young evangelicals are taking up interests in climate change, AIDS and poverty in his On Religion column for the Times.
I suppose if there’s a dark underside to being a sports fan it’s that it allows us to indulge our capacity for irrational hatred. It’s a really disconcerting thing when you stop to think about it.
It’s Thanksgiving, of course. So I would like to give thanks that I was not in Laurie Goodstein’s shoes the other day when she heard about the upcoming “Manhattan Declaration” announcement — click here for details — and then got the news that she could only write 570 words about this very complex ecumenical statement.
It’s not every day you read a story where the reporter describes the same person as a Jehovah’s Witness, a fundamentalist and an evangelical.
Last week I wrote a news story about the recent passage of the amendment restricting abortion funding and subsidies in the House health care legislation. I was interviewing various activists and one of them told me that they’d had to work solely through alternate media for the last 10 months because the mainstream media wasn’t doing a very good job of looking at the abortion issue as it related to the health care bill. Until, that is, about 48 hours prior to the vote on Rep. Bart Stupak’s amendment to the House legislation.
The Washington Post has a story alleging that Major Nidal Hasan had stepped up his communications with a radical, American-born Muslim cleric in Yemen in the months before he killed 13 people at Ft. Hood. An FBI-led task force had obtained the emails between late 2008 and June 2009 but they were not forwarded to the military, for some reason. Some were sent to the FBI’s headquarters but they apparently weren’t considered terribly worrisome:
I know from personal experience that Terre Haute, Indiana, is not the most happening place. But is “Church sign raises objection” really one of the most newsworthy items of the day?
