Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Here’s the perfect Christmas and holiday season gift for that local editor that you’ve been meaning to call about the quality — good or bad — of the religion-news coverage in the newspaper that lands in your front yard each morning.
New York City does not seem to be a very welcoming city. Certain people belong there, while the presence of others that fail to fit a certain stereotype are considered by a major media institution in the city as “jarringly out of place.”
News of a second video showing a Planned Parenthood of Indiana counselor providing advice that could violate state criminal statutes was enough to prompt The Indianapolis Star to provide front-page coverage Wednesday. The second video, released Tuesday, shows an individual posing as a 13-year-old telling Planned Parenthood staffers that she was pregnant by her 31-year-old boyfriend.
So much for any significant coverage of the country’s first Muslim member of Congress and one of the more significant acts he’ll perform relating to his religion. Granted, Congressman Keith Ellison’s trip to Mecca for this year’s Hajj is not a public act in the sense that he traveled on his own dime and it relates to his personal spiritual life. But the act is public in the sense that it is a, well, public act of traveling.
Considering that the religion beat seems to be suffering with the rest of the media industry, it’s always nice to see a paper take steps to improve its religion coverage and marketing of same.
The Newsweek feedback blog notes the Human Rights Campaign has launched an email campaign to thank editor John Meacham for his overall coverage of the same-sex marriage issue:
Should journalists clean up the language of the people they’re quoting? No, I don’t mean “clean up” like Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich might need his language cleaned up.
The ancient and formerly sizable religion of Zoroastrianism is facing dwindling numbers. Followers of the prophet Zarathustra — and devotees of the divine being Ahura Mazda — are worried about the survival of their Persian religion.
