Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The Los Angeles Times has been covering a story about Muslim activists and their Jewish critics on the Irvine campus of the University of California. The story has been brewing for years but let’s look at the recent events.
Major U.S. media outlets are all over a report [PDF] released Tuesday by Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, which found that Saudi Arabian schools are teaching their students things the U.S. government told them not to teach after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Regular readers of this blog may recall previous references to the work of Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor who is the author of that must-read essay called “Journalism Is Itself a Religion.” Click here to check that out.
A GetReligion reader named Matt, commenting on the letter from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to President Bush, raised an insightful point that I wish I had known and mentioned. But this is the Internet and there is plenty of room for follow-up:
The Washington Post headline said it all: “Some Parents Who Shy From Religion Want Their Children to Taste Its Psychological and Spiritual Comforts.” (As a former copy editor, I ask, “What was that? A double decker six- or eight-column headline in 36-point type?)
Here is the New York Times today, adding a few kind words about the late A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal, an elite journalist who in the 1990s became a hero to those of us who are deeply committed to those familiar freedoms of the First Amendment. He was passionate about freedom of the press and freedom of religion, even for unpopular religious minorities.
It was 10 years ago — next week, in fact — that I wrote a column for the Scripps Howard News Service that began like this:
Last Sunday’s 8,000-plus-word takeout in The Washington Post Magazine on military chaplains is a tremendous example of why long-form journalism is so helpful in dealing with complex religious issues. The magazine’s editors gave Kristin Henderson, the wife of a Navy chaplain and author of While They’re at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront, the space needed to tell the story of why chaplains are a necessary part of the U.S. military operations and some of the immense challenges they face:
One of the reasons some editors and reporters shy away from reporting about religious issues is because their ignorance on the topic can cause outrage among readers. You get a businessman’s name wrong and you run a correction. Get a detail wrong about Mennonites and you field angry calls from Pennsylvania for weeks. Connie Coyne, the reader advocate for the Salt Lake Tribune, deals with an example of this in her column this week:
