Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
When the experts start talking about elite private universities — non-Atlantic Coast division — Vanderbilt is always near the top of the list. The school is so prominent, especially as a member of a major sports conference, that people often forget that it is, in fact, a private school.
Nearly every week during the last NFL season, I thought the Tim Tebow news would go away. Tebow is not the first athlete to offer public expressions of faith, nor will he be the last. But almost every week offered some new media approach on Tebow where someone would express frustration over the attention he was getting while others would rush to defend him.
If you are going to read the latest New York Times piece on candidate Rick Santorum and the “Catholic vote,” your first task is to keep reading — past the headline, the one that simply says: “Santorum Fails to Capture Catholic Vote.”
It didn’t take me very long, after I arrived in Charlotte, N.C., to get a bit frustrated with the leaders of that city’s powerful African-American churches.
Anyone who has followed American politics since, oh, roughly 1973, knows that one of most consistent patterns, election after election, is this: The more people attend worship services, the more likely they are to vote for candidates who are moral and cultural conservatives. This is a clear pattern among white voters and if you are looking for conservative voters among African-American and Latino voters, you are most likely to find them — as a vocal minority — in their churches.
I guess it was only a month or so ago that I had the weird experience of watching a nightly newscast and screaming. What sent me over the edge was an ABC News piece that was so riddled with errors and bias it enraged me.
So we’ve been chronicling a few of the problems with the media coverage of President Obama’s mandate that requires employers, including religious organizations, to purchase insurance that covers contraception, abortifacients and sterilization, even if one or more of those things violate their religious beliefs. Our January posts on the matter are here and here. Our February posts are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The March posts are here, here, here and here.
Once again, we the people who care about religion news are seeing another sad round of thin mainstream press stories about the decline and fall of the Rev. Robert H. Schuller and his family’s megachurch monument — the Crystal Cathedral.
