Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Mainstream media are showing a commendable restraint in their coverage of decades-long abuse of children in church-run schools in Ireland. The details are soul-crushing and they appear in each report: Thousands of children, from the 1930s and into the 1990s, subjected to humiliation, shaming, beating and rape. The government has paid 12,000 victims an average of $90,000.
An absolutely shocking story this morning about plans to bomb two synagogues and shoot down planes in New York. “Chilling Terror Plot Thwarted,” the New York Post headline screams.
South African President Jacob Zuma knows how to work a political rally, as shown by the video atop this post — in which Zuma sings “Awuleth’ Umshini Wami” (“Bring Me My Machine Gun”). The Weekly Standard sounded a warning about Zuma earlier this month, and retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu has raised concerns about him for years.
A few things about Pope Benedict’s extended viist to the Holy Land were predictable. One, every word the pontiff said would be parsed for meaning like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Two, every place he went would become highly symbolic. Three, some Palestinians and Israelis would be offended when the Pope either addressed or seemed to be slighting the concerns of the other party. And lastly, there would be little journalistic consensus, at least in the immediate aftermath, about the impact of either his words or his actions on the tinderbox called the Middle East.
It’s just three little paragraphs in today’s Independent under the headline “Women May Join Papal Swiss Guard,” but it contains so many mistakes, both when it comes to religion and when it comes to journalism.
Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has done highly acclaimed reporting from the world’s war zones, including Iraq. Both the video topping this post and this interview with Charlie Rose testify to Anderson’s intelligence and grace under pressure.
While the rest of the world seems to understand that swine flu is not really about the swine, Egypt continues its mass slaughter of every pig in sight. It is on a national campaign to rid the country of its estimated 300,000 pigs in the name of public health.
Rather than update my previous Armenian genocide post with a link to Julia Duin’s article on its anniversary in the Washington Times, I wanted to highlight it separately. I noted that most stories about the events of 1915 were solely or almost exclusively political. Very few touched on religion in any meaningful way.
On Friday, President Barack Obama broke a campaign promise to Armenian voters to declare the 1915 massacre of Armenians an act of “genocide.” As Glenn Kessler noted in a March Washington Post story anticipating that this might happen, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Joseph Biden for years have not minced words about labeling as “genocide” the deaths of Armenians. They regularly lambasted President George W. Bush for not using the word “genocide.” And Obama’s promise that he would use the word — compared with Sen. John McCain’s position — got him enthusiastic support among the Armenian community.
