Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Through the years I have attended my share of conferences and seminars about the status of religion coverage in the mainstream press. This is what I do.
One of the challenges that veteran God-beat reporters face is finding a way to send something new and fresh to their editors during the annual holiday seasons. Now, you could get away with quirky and strange stories during the Christmas season because, you know, that’s a cultural thing. But journalists have tended to play it straight during Holy Week and Easter, along with the heavy seasons in the other world religions. Seen any funny Yom Kippur or Ramadan stories?
Time and Newsweek devote stories this week to Prince, and both note in passing that his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness has dialed back his earlier obsessions with sex.
Well, my column is out for the week and my classes are done for the day. This is Holy Week, of course, and for the Orthodox that basically means we live at church. It’s a beautiful time, though hectic. There are so many stories that I want to point out and comment on from the past few days that I don’t even know where to start. I’ll try to catch up.
The God-beat professionals at www.religionwriters.com have a biweekly listserv feature called ReligionLink that floats story ideas and resources for reporters who are looking for feature stories that spin off current events in the news.
It may seem strange to blog the “competition” on the God-beat beat, but so be it. Jeff Sharlet over at New York University and TheRevealer has spotted a major ghost in the mainstream press coverage of the death of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Everyone is talking about the fall of the “spiritual leader” of Hamas and the militant Palestinians, yet no one seems to be putting any content behind that loaded word “spiritual.”
On Sunday the Boston Herald published a sobering report about Feroze Golwalla and his small Parsee Ministry Team, also called Baruch Ha Shem International. Golwalla, 36 and a native of Pakistan, describes Baruch Ha Shem as an effort to take the message of Christ to Parsee Zoroastrians (who live in India and Pakistan). But some students who became associated with Golwalla while they studied at Wheaton College in Illinois describe him as a cult leader who used frequent violence to control them.
In a quick glance through some of the coverage of the United Methodist trial of the Rev. Karen Dammann (shown at right in a United Methodist News Service photo) I found something interesting — a newspaper bravely steering to the left of the New York Times in coverage of a moral and religious issue.
Newspaper and TV reporters have begun digging into the bizarre world of Marcus Wesson, the man charged with killing nine of his children and grandchildren in Fresno, Calif., during the weekend, and some have latched onto an overly simple explanation: he may be an Adventist. Reports also suggest that he was a polygamist and that he fathered grandchildren with two of his own daughters.
