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Fareed Zakaria has written a thoughtful and creative cover essay for the latest Newsweek. He argues for making distinctions between Islamists who are terrorists and Islamists who wish for Sharia law in their own nations but have not supported terrorism.
The other day, I wrote the following about one of the major news reports on the events unfolding in Pakistan’s Swat valley, where government leaders are trying to work out a compromise with the Taliban. News reports have been telling us that:
It has been a long time since I have voiced the following complaint about coverage of Islam in the mainstream media. However, I have been frustrated all week by the coverage — just about everywhere — about the Pakistani pact that is supposed to bring some kind of peace in the Swat Valley.
As a rule, people on the academic left tend to become angry or disturbed when books get shredded. Throw in questions about academic freedom and religion and you have a combination that can inspire the spilling of seas of ink.
Okay, not a real beat farmer — but Rainn Wilson, the actor who plays the wonderful Dwight Schrute on “The Office,” had an interesting op-ed on CNN.com. It begins with Wilson explaining that he’s not joking, and then he provides an introduction to Baha’i. He says that Baha’i began in Iran in the mid-19th century and that Baha’is believe there is only one God and one religion. All the world’s divine teachers bring the same message and Baha’u'llah refreshed it for the current day and age, he says. He talks about the historic persecution of Baha’is by Muslim authorities in Iran. And then he gets to the newsier part:
I wondered whether we’d end up looking at any Valentine’s Day stories here at GetReligion. While rooted in Christian history, the day is not featured on the actual liturgical calendar. But the most interesting mention of Valentine’s Day came in a story about how the king of Saudi Arabia shook up the religious establishment there.
News coverage in this country tends to focus almost exclusively on American happenings. A review of the Religion Newswriters Association’s top 10 stories from 2008 confirms this.
It has taken me some time to get a handle on that recent New York Times feature that ran with the headline, “Uncovering Lost Path of the Most Wanted Nazi” by Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish.
In 1989 ABC became the first major American TV network to hire a full-time religion correspondent, and that worthy experiment did not spread far — except for CNN’s hiring of Delia Gallagher and then John Allen Jr. as Vatican correspondents. Even so, religion makes cameo appearances in certain corners of network TV, such as ABC’s Nightline, which runs a regular feature called Faith Matters.
