Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A report about Delta airlines refusing to fly Jews to Saudi Arabia lit up the internet yesterday. But within hours, some of the stories were altered or pulled and I’m still trying to sort out not just what happened but what it all means. I’m going to try to reconstruct things as best I can and then ask some questions at the end. You may not need all this reconstruction, so feel free to skip to the end.
I freely confess that I am, as a rule, not a big Wikipedia fan. However, I must reluctantly tip my hat to the brave souls who attempted the all-but-impossible task of writing a brief summary of the history and contents of the “New Age” movement.
Last week, I woke up to news reports that someone was taken into custody near the Pentagon after a suspicious device was found in his car. Three major thoroughfares were shut down as police investigated. The initial reports included plenty of errors. For instance, no suspicious device was found in a car! Reports that others fled the scene also washed out. The device that “looks like a bomb”? Who knows. The “controlled explosion” they were going to do with the car? It didn’t happen.
The other day, I posted a few comments about the lengthy Deseret News feature about the fact that many mainstream journalists are still struggling to grasp that religion plays a major role in news at the local, regional, national and global levels. You could see how that kind of a story might interest your GetReligionistas.
When it comes to Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his views on religion in the public square, I’ve had my own harsh words but I really had trouble with a news article I read earlier this week from the Houston Chronicle.
Well, it’s been about a year and a half since that first meeting in a Thai restaurant in Union Station in which I met with a GetReligion reader named Eric Marrapodi to talk about what seemed, at first, to be a logical, yet still audacious concept. Marrapodi is a CNN pro and he wanted to create a serious religion news and commentary weblog at CNN. Thus, he wanted to pick my brain a bit.
The Burlington Free Press has an interesting story with “Fair Haven’s censorship of valedictorian’s speech on God reflects church-state tensions.” But I’m not sure that headline is accurate of the situation. It is an accurate summary of the story, however. It begins:
Back in my days as a full-time reporter on the religion beat, I had my share of arguments with editors in which I attempted to convince them that (a) worship attendance is much higher among their readers (and former readers) than among newsroom personnel and (b) that religious people care deeply about seemingly ordinary issues linked to life in their congregations.
