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Al Jazeera was the only outlet heavily covering the growing protests in Tunisia over the last month. But the news that its president had fled the country on Friday night has been widely reported. If your knowledge of Tunisia doesn’t extend past something related to Carthage or Star Wars, there’s a lot of catching up.
It was a short story from the Glendale News-Press, a community paper of Los Angeles Times. About 300 words dedicated to a report on repeated petty theft at a Glendale Catholic church. And the amount of space devoted to this news was to be expected. The LAT has an ever-shrinking newshole, and even in fatter times murders have been briefed.
Some of the journalism being produced in the wake of the Tucson tragedy had been terrific. Much, of course, has been abysmal. I’m still trying to wrap my head about just what went wrong and why it continues. To that end, a few thoughts on how the media choose to frame different issues.
In the latest Crossroads podcast I talk about how the media invented a papal war on celebrity names out of whole cloth. That led into a broader discussion of how the media lost a bit of credibility this week with some poor decisions about how to cover the tragedy in Arizona.
Every now and then, elite organizations such as the New York Times run strange, colorful stories about those strange people who live out there in flyover country, by which I mean the Bible Belt and other locations between the Hollywood sign and the Hudson River.
I wrote yesterday about Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to the diplomatic corps, in which he called for a focus on religious liberty. That didn’t get much news coverage, but guess what is! That’s right, remarks that Pope Benedict XVI didn’t even make. And such is the state of affairs in reporting on the pontiff.
Christians are by no means the only ones targeted by Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Agence France-Presse informs readers that an imam and his son were recently convicted under the law:
Don’t you just love it when Congress holds hearings on a complex topic — think the state of family farming — and the powers that be call a famous actress as a witness because, in a movie, she played a woman whose farm is in trouble?
When Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province, was assassinated by one of his body guards, we looked at some of the coverage. The big problem seemed to be the overuse of the term “moderate” without any explanation of what that meant. The problem was further compounded when “moderates” were praising the assassination. There was a story last week on NYTimes.com that did provide some additional details (and provoke some additional questions). “The Islam That Hard-Liners Hate,” by Huma Imtiaz and Charlotte Buchen looks at the political significant of 2010′s attacks on Sufi shrines.
