Long before Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on Fort Hood, killing at least 13, there was a well-established formula for covering this story.
Washington Post delivers on deadline
I am always amazed (and I must confess, intimidated) by the quality of journalistic work that true professionals are able to do on deadline.
Fort Hood: Speculation vs. facts
Yesterday a U.S. Army major opened fire on a military processing center at Fort Hood in Texas, killing 12 people and wounding 30, according to various media reports. Whenever major news breaks, information flies around fast and much of it turns out to be inaccurate.
Noor Faleh Almaleki is dead
Noor Faleh Almaleki has died in Phoenix. Thus, we have another development in the case of her father, 48-year-old Faleh Hassan Almaleki, who fled the United States after it is alleged that he hit the 20-year-old Noor and the mother of her boyfriend with his car.
Killing in the name of ...
Did you hear about the attempted honor killing a couple of weeks ago in Arizona? I haven’t seen many stories about it. Tmatt looked at the ghosts in some of the coverage a week or so ago but It’s clearly not major news, although national media outlets have begun running their traditional one (or fewer!) stories on the matter. For the life of me, I can’t understand why stories about honor killings or attempted honor killings aren’t major news. This is a concept so very foreign and horrifying to most readers of American media and yet these stories are routinely underplayed. Now maybe the mainstream media doesn’t need advice on how to get more readers/viewers/listeners, but I think that when a father runs down his daughter with two tons of steel over some perceived slight to his honor, that’s newsworthy.
Piety + punk = Muslim “taqwacore”
If you like articles that take readers on journeys to places where faith and culture intersect in new and unexpected ways, then you’ll enjoy reading Kate Shellnutt’s Chicago Sun-Times story, “Young Muslims use punk to loosen their religion.”
Secret symbol of Christianity?
So I finished the 5-part (plus epilogue!) New York Times series about the hostage-taking, captivity and escape of reporter David Rhode. I enjoyed the series, and it reminded me of the one about a similar situation involving the Christian Science Monitor‘s Jill Carroll.
'Traditional Iraqi values' in the news
Quite a few newspapers and television stations across America have posted various versions of the following short Associated Press story on their websites. For the sake of clarity, here’s the whole report:
Got news? A cry for liberal rights
Your GetReligionistas, as a rule, do not focus on op-ed page pieces very often. When we do so we try to focus on topics that will be of interest to mainstream journalists who cover religion news and news that veers into religion.
