Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Please be patient with me as I dig through lots of material that built up in my infamous GetReligion guilt folder. Here is a story from a few weeks ago that raises a very, very, very basic journalism question.
Although I lived in the mountains of Tennessee for six years, I am not an expert on the small — but well documented — bands of Christians who choose to handle snakes as part of their worship services. Yes, there was this mainstream Greek newspaper that decided that I was an expert on this subject (one of the most bizarre episodes in my career), but that was the kind of mistake that happens when one writes a singe column that somehow shows up high in a Google search.
A horrible shooting happened yesterday at a small Christian vocational school in Oakland, California. A former student went on a shooting rampage, killing seven people and injuring three.
A Los Angeles Times profile this week of a would-be Kansas abortion doctor follows a pretty straightforward path.
So, this post represents the 7,000th GetReligion offering that is still stashed on our server. That’s a landmark, of some sort or another, especially since this comes so soon after our 8th birthday party the other day.
In recent days, some news has sputtered out of Nigeria about the horrific ongoing attacks perpetrated by Boko Haram. Many journalists have been pooh-poohing claims by the U.S. and Nigerian governments that Boko Haram is tied to al Qaeda. See, for example, this Reuters report headlined “Analysis: Nigeria’s Boko Haram ups game but no Al Qaeda.” Now that we’re learning more about the widespread coordinated attacks on Christians and other targets (the death toll is at least 162 in this Associated Press report), I sure hope to see more in-depth coverage of what’s happening there.
As you know, nothing gets under a GetReligionista’s skin like reading a story about a controversial topic in which it appears that the journalists who produced it made little or no effort to talk to qualified, quality voices on the other side or sides of the debate.
I think that I have made the following point in previous GetReligion posts, but it must be made again. One of the hardest concepts for journalists to explain to non-journalists is the concept of “what a story is.”
As you would imagine, one of the first things I did after returning home last night was cue up the Iowa coverage. For the most part, I surfed back and forth between CNN and Fox most of the night.
