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Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the professionals who run many crucial mainstream newsrooms seem to be throwing up their hands, editorially speaking, when it comes to accurately describing the cracks and divisions inside the complex world of Islam?
Back in 2006 when the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life rolled out its massive “Spirit and Power” survey — a 10-nation survey of modern Pentecostalism — many of the most stunning statistics in its pages were linked to the rising number of Pentecostal Christians who could be found in Catholic pews and the stunningly high numbers of believers who had left the Church of Rome altogether.
In the most recent Crossroads podcast, host Todd Wilken and I discuss media coverage of the Koran burning, changing funeral practices and Confession.
There he is again. In prime news territory in the New York Times, which offered Terry Jones another chance to speak for himself (while also, interestingly enough, stripping him of “the Rev.” in a violation of Associated Press style on clergy titles).
Over a week ago, we discussed the relative lack of coverage of a burning of a Koran some days earlier in Florida. The overwhelming response from readers to that post was that they hadn’t even heard about the burning. It was interesting to compare the non-stop, over-the-top coverage from last fall with the more appropriate and restrained coverage in recent weeks.
A long, long time ago — pre-Internet, for heaven’s sake — I had a long conversation with Bill Moyers, then of CBS, about why the mainstream press has so much trouble covering religion. This was one of those occasions in which he used a striking image to describe this problem — that far too many reporters and editors are “tone deaf” to the music of religion.
Yesterday I had a mini-meltdown when the BBC site was offline for an hour or so. I must be more reliant on them than I had realized! One of the stories I was trying to read was written by BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott, headlined “Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relics“:
If asked to prepare a list of mainstream foreign correspondents who “get religion,” Pamela Constable of the Washington Post would be in my top handful of names. Simple stated, she does not look at conflicts that are packed with religious language, symbolism and actions and then automatically assume that this is the result of “tribalism” and/or vague “sectarian” forces in the culture. In the past, I have also pointed GetReligion readers toward her evocative memoir — “Fragments of Grace: My Search for Meaning in the Strife of South Asia.”
