Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Tragically, the top news story on this Christmas Day is another outbreak of violence against Christian believers, this time a wave of bombings and terrorism in the highly divided nation of Nigeria.
It’s rare to find a major story that makes liberals as well as conservatives nervous to the point that they hesitate to talk about it. Stories of this kind often fail to find their way into digital or analog ink.
The New York Times has an extraordinary article that extols the virtues of lying and doublespeak in a recent “Memo from Jerusalem.” Well, you might ask, what of it? How does a dodgy story on the Arab-Israeli conflict fall within the ambit of GetReligion? What is the religion/journalism hook you ask?
A GetReligion reader wrote in with a special request for a look at the media coverage of Vaclav Havel. Havel is a hero of mine and I’d been intending to write something on the media coverage, sort of waiting for that perfect article. Which is never coming.
What a week in deaths. We already talked about Christopher Hitchens. On Sunday, we learned that the great Czech playwright, revolutionary and president Vaclav Havel died.
Is there some kind of “enthusiasm meter” that journalists consult to judge the popularity of a pope? That’s what one reader asked, sending along this Associated Press story. Here’s the headline:
There are times when the BBC is beyond parody. It is so relentlessly awful, biased and reflexively p.c. that many viewers become inured to its excesses. Yet Orla Guerin’s report from Pakistan is quite extraordinary — even for the BBC.
It has been almost ten years since the Dutch parliament voted to legalize euthanasia. While the Netherlands became the first country to grant state sanction to a mercy killing, doctors the world over have long quietly colluded in the “good death” of the terminally ill or those in extreme suffering. The BBC reported that the 1 April 2002 — April Fool’s Day — law set the following parameters for Dutch mercy killings:
Sometimes we come across a story that could be called “The Onion, GetReligion style.” It’s so strange that you’re not even sure where to begin. We have a story like this from AFP, and it appears the media outlet released two versions of the same story yesterday.
