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The flurry of election-related news this past week has kept me from noting an excellent piece in The New York Times last week that is absolutely superb and touching in its handling of a sniper situation in Iraq. Reporter C.J. Chivers, with the help of producer Eric Owles, supplemented the article with an equally poignant photo gallery and voiceover.
The BBC doesn’t like Christians, and there are discussions of ways to change this. As revealed by the British conservative tabloid the Daily Mail, “the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.” To most on the right, this is not shocking news.
My fellow Godbeat scribes, I come to you today to ask a question that has been bothering me for several weeks.
If the leaders of the United States don’t understand the basic differences between Shiites and Sunnis, then what should one expect from the average American?
Attention everyone who cares about MSM coverage of debates in modern Catholicism: Please help us watch, in the next 48 hours or so, how major newspapers cover a big story that is breaking right now. In fact, this story may run through the weekend because the visuals should be interesting, which may even lead to television coverage.
Dang it, that’s what I get for waiting an extra day or two before writing about that sprawling Los Angeles Times series, “The Vanishing Russians.” I was waiting until the last day to see if reporter Kim Murphy elected to dig into the religious questions raised all the way through this fascinating and depressing set of four articles.
Imagine profiling a moderate Muslim in Copenhagen for the expressed purpose of understanding the life and outlook of a secular Muslim and failing to ask a question about religion. Well, Jeffrey Fleishman’s Los Angeles Times piece on Sunday comes close to accomplishing that feat. Issues of religion come up incidentally as if they were minor matters to be brushed aside in a quest to portray the subject as absolutely secular.
A strange thing happened on Sunday as I cruised around the online newspaper world. I ran into a mini-wave of coverage of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Jeff Weiss of The Dallas Morning News, who is one of the nation’s best-known religion-beat specialists, sent me an email this weekend with a subject line that was impossible to ignore. It read: “this one was partly inspired by some of the chat on getreligion.”
