Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Sometimes the biggest news stories are sitting right out there in the open where everyone can see them. But that’s the problem. There are trends that are so big that we can’t see them. This makes the big story hard to write because it is hard to pick one piece of it and get it into a newspaper.
Like the Divine Ms. MZ, I spent much of the week mulling over that Media Matters report titled “Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media.” I received quite a bit of email suggesting that GetReligion was ignoring the report, which would be really strange since this blog has, ever since opening its cyberdoors, been arguing for more coverage of the activities and the beliefs of the Religious Left.
One of the rare subjects on which conservative and liberal Catholics agree is this one — the work of John L. Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter is must reading about 99 percent of the time. This is especially true, in my opinion, when he tackles complex subjects that require blending an inside-the-Vatican perspective with some understanding of Catholicism in the swinging United States.
Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin vented on St. Louis Roman Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke in this diatribe news article published today.
Clearly, the Anglican vs. Episcopal warfare is just getting started at the local level here in the United States, which means that more and more religion reporters are going to have to wade into this journalistic swamp in the weeks, months and years ahead.
For the past few days I have been on the road and away from a steady Internet link. However, even during a drive from Boston to Baltimore, I was plugged in enough to the mainstream media (and the Drudge Report) to know that GetReligion’s friend Frank “Bible Belt Blogger” Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had an interesting story on his hands.
One of the things I wish more reporters had the opportunity to do is be interviewed by other reporters. I’ve had my share of experiences being on the other end of the pad and pen. In some cases, the reporter is thorough and takes the time to really understand what you are saying. I’ve also been misquoted, which is an absolutely horrifying experience. In one case, I was misquoted to say the opposite of what I was actually saying. I called the reporter to complain and she yelled at me. I mean, really!
Ever since the so-called New Age era, I have been interested in the rise of Wicca and the whole neopagan scene. This trend raises all kinds of interesting issues of coven and state (Do conservative Christians really want equal access laws?), and you really can’t talk about faith in popular culture, especially Hollywood, without dealing with the new consumer-friendly forms of paganism.
Anthony Gottlieb’s New Yorker essay on contemporary atheists came to my attention earlier this week through that magazine’s much-improved website. I did not want to write about Gottlieb’s essay before receiving the issue in the mail, largely because I wanted to be sure of his current connections. Internet searches turned up articles that placed him with The Economist, but those were all a few years old.
