Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Every now and then, I read one story in Column A and that reminds me of another in Column B and they collide in my mind and they become a scary story in Column C. So, click here and then click here.
OK, I will ask. If the police are paying informers — one Osama Eldawoody, to be specific — to attend services at two New York mosques, why have the authorities focused on those two sites?
Alan Cooperman at the Washington Post has an interesting story about a federal faith-based initiative to prepare inmates for release. I think it’s a very important story and I could not agree more with Americans United for Separation of Church and State in raising concerns. Having said that, let’s look at how Cooperman frames and discusses the story:
First let me praise Jeffrey Fleishman of the Los Angeles Times for taking a religion-haunted story — the debates over immigration in Europe — and letting the ghost dance right out in the open. Besides, it’s hard not to read a story with a face-slap lead like this one: “Europe is buying more coffins than cribs.”
It is one of the most controversial events in the history of the 20th century and hardly anyone in America knows about it.
Salman Rushdie is not, of course, a conventionally religious man. During the recent Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing he went out of his way to call himself a “dreadful old atheist.”
Ever since Sept. 11, there have been several consistent themes in the mainstream media’s coverage of Islam. There have also been some interesting holes, as GetReligion keeps pointing out, and there have been some interesting contradictions.
I am sorry to keep returning to this subject so often, but the reporting coming out of the Zacarias Moussaoui trial is so gripping, unnerving and frustrating that I can’t stop reading it.
It’s time for me to offer an apology to Richard A. Serrano of the Los Angeles Times. The other day I wondered if he had avoided, on purpose, the religious actions and statements in the testimony and evidence at the Alexandria, Va., trial of the smiling terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. I mentioned this while discussing the emotional landmines facing the creators of the new movie United 93.
