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A couple of weeks ago, there was quite a bit of coverage regarding the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the most important ancient Christian manuscripts. Nobody flagged any stories as being particularly bad and it was during a pretty busy news cycle — so we didn’t look at coverage here at GetReligion. But a reader pointed me to another critique of the media coverage that is worth considering.
Here we go again, with another post in our ongoing series about why mainstream journalists need to retire the word “devout” or, at the very least, be extremely careful when using this vague and almost meaningless adjective.
This is a strange one and I know that. I wasn’t sure that I was going to post a link to this story — “Who says religion is boring?” — until the link went live at Romenesko’s virtual water cooler and I started hearing from friends, colleagues and even a critic or two.
Which is more newsworthy? Well, the answer very much depends on the lens journalists are using to cover the nomination of Dr. Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. President Barack Obama’s nomination of the renowned geneticist and public Christian hasn’t flooded the news pages — but it is making waves on the opinion pages and the blogosphere.
I’ll admit right up front that my eyebrows arched way up when I saw that my local newspaper — that would be the Baltimore Sun — had published an A1 news feature on efforts by the Southern Baptist Convention to plant a circle of new churches in and around this unique urban environment that some call Charm City.
In the summer of 2006, Father Martyn Minns of Truro Episcopal Church outside Washington, D.C., became Bishop Martyn Minns of the Convocation for Anglicans in North America, a missionary effort of the gigantic Anglican Church of Nigeria. That would be three years ago.
Remember when President George Bush nominated Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court? As readers and viewers were told for months, Alito would become the fifth Catholic on the court — the most ever.
So I was wandering around the internet, as one does, and came across a couple of stories involving curious goings on at a couple of grave sites. Some of the stories were really poorly written.
You know, it really isn’t hard to get the Anglican-wars timeline right or to, at least, craft one or two short, editor-friendly sentences that do not mangle the facts. There’s no need to warp time in this story.
