Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A columnist at the Wall Street Journal used to regularly feature snippets from sports columnists who fancied themselves political pundits. You’d be expecting a nice piece on the last golf tournament but you’d instead get some tirade about the Iraq War or how awful President Bush is.
Actually, the headline on the top of this post should say, “Why so many mainstream journalists are biting their lips and showing reluctant support for the fundamentalists — self proclaimed, fitting Associated Press style — from Westboro Baptist Church.” But that wouldn’t fit very well in our format.
I’ve been meaning to cover the story of the four Christian evangelists who were arrested at the Dearborn Arab International Festival in June. It is fascinating to me how much coverage the media devoted to the non-burn of the Koran in Florida compared to the actual “going ghost” of Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris or the actual arrest of four street evangelists in Dearborn. I would just love for someone who was involved in the coverage of the Koran burn threat to explain why they wrote eleventy billion stories on the Florida pastor and none on these other situations.
Week after week, your GetReligionistas receive mail from people who genuinely distrust or dislike America’s mainstream media.
Let’s face it, the mainstream press did everything but cue the theme from “Jaws” this weekend, during the initial coverage of the strange news out of Palmdale, Calif. Consider the top of this early New York Times report, which ran under a rather ordinary headline about a “religious group.”
There was an interesting Associated Press story out of London the other day about end-of-life issues that has really been making the rounds — for perfectly valid reasons.
