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Like millions of other Americans, I have read “The Hunger Games” trilogy. I also queued up with much of the world’s population and trekked off to the theater, with a bit of trepidation (violent movies are not my thing), to see the first movie in this new mega-franchise.
First, a disclaimer: I expect that the following post will draw one or more comments that state the following theme, or variations on it: “The problem with this post is that this news story really isn’t an example of journalists failing to ‘get religion.’ This is just a messed up story. Period.”
It’s always interesting to see what journalists zone in on when a new poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life comes out.
In the lead-up to Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Mexico, news reports were oddly obsessed with a sort of popularity contest between the current and preceding pope. We kept joking about the secret “enthusiasm meters” reporters must be consulting to come up with stories such as this one from December:
The Guardian has a really interesting story (“Cross and bed found in Anglo-Saxon grave shed new light on ‘dark ages’“) about how Cambridge archaeologists are thrilled by their recent discovery of a 7th century grave with body of young woman on a bed with an ornate gold cross:
It is impossible to cover sports without, somehow, studying sports. It’s impossible to cover business without — formally or informally — studying business. Ditto for politics, the arts, science, etc., etc.
Words cannot describe how much I pity the journalist who has to try to write — in roughly 18 inches of type — a mainstream news report on the decision by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to step down from his beleaguered throne at the ripe old age of 61.
As we traded messages the other day, your GetReligionistas enjoyed a casual discussion about the heavy load of cyber-traffic that we direct in our endeavors for this media critique weblog. I noted that, in two years of writing for GetReligion, I had accumulated 2,890 e-mail threads in my GR story possibilities folder. (That’s just the ones left undeleted.)
While the late Pope John Paul II — soon to be called St. John Paul the Great — was known as a strong supporter of interfaith dialogues that attempted to build trust, while declining to erase any true boundaries.
