Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
GetReligion readers likely are familiar with John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter‘s ace Vatican reporter. His latest column analyzes the biggest Vatican stories of the last 10 years. An aside: is anyone else annoyed at all of these “best of decade” lists coming a year prior to the end of the actual decade?
If, from the very beginning, your GetReligionistas have been complaining that the press does not “get religion,” we have also been complaining about the fact that the press does not devote enough attention to the religious left.
Earlier this year, former President Clinton helped negotiate the release of two American journalists who were held in North Korea for five months after crossing the border illegally.
Times continue to be tough for Christians who live and who attempt to worship in Iraq. As you would expect, several mainstream news outlets used Christmas as a hook for updated reports about this issue, which touches at the heart of human-rights concerns about the plight of religious minorities in Iraq.
How do you sum up how billions of Christians across the world observe the birth of Christ? It’s difficult to do. This Associated Press round-up begins with a completely unfazed Pope Benedict being knocked down by a deranged woman and ends with 47,000 Filipinos, displaced by an erupting volcano, eating Christmas dinner at shelters. It includes the sad news that some Christians in Pakistan fear marking the day, still scared by the Muslim riots targeting them from earlier this year.
A new Pew report entitled “How religious is your state?” is giving reporters an opportunity to spell out local angles of national statistics. Meanwhile, a recent Pew study on worldwide religion freedom has generated less coverage.
I know that I do, especially when I am trying to read about a subject that (a) the mainstream press doesn’t care that much about and (b) hot-headed partisans in the media care too much about. Thus, you get these short incomplete reports about subjects that “aren’t really news,” only that to some people the events are symbolic and, thus, transcend news (so they tend to scream about them at advocacy sites online).
After publishing a one-sided A1 attack on African orphanages on December 6, The New York Times has now partly corrected its reporting with a shorter A14 story on December 17 that says orphanages may not be so bad after all.
There is much to praised in the “60 Minutes” profile of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and his tiny, yet historically significant, flock of persecuted Orthodox Christians in Istanbul. It’s worth watching, if only for the remarkable videos taken at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai in Egypt and the remarkable city of churches and monastic cells carved into the mountain cliffs in Cappadocia (video link here) in Eastern Turkey.
