Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the things that annoys me about reporting is how we spend so much time looking for and writing about dramatic news hooks that we miss the day-to-day drama of real life. I almost never see my religious life reflected in a given news story. My congregation is not driven by trends. We worship in largely the same way Lutherans have always worshiped. This does not make for exciting news coverage, as you might imagine.
You can oppose something and still think it shouldn’t be opposed by the government. Many people seem to have trouble with this distinction and its corollaries. The media tend to have trouble with this distinction because many journalists consider the provoking of government action as a good metric of success for their rabblerousing or reporting. But it’s true — you can oppose things and still think they should be legal.
This Time cover has led to much consternation on the internet. Most of the outrage isn’t over the image but, rather, the headline. Still, the image itself is shocking. It depicts Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by the Taliban to have her nose and ears cut off after she fled her abusive in-laws. Time managing editor Richard Stengel explained his decision to run the image:
We’ve looked at the Daily Caller stories about the Journolist list-serv. Most of them have little to do with religion news but some of them might be of interest to GetReligion readers.
The Washington Post had a story about a Virginia native son charged with joining a terrorist group that was well-written and filled with lots of details. But came up short nonetheless.
A billboard campaign orchestrated by a right-to-die group remains alive and well, but it already has gone straight to heaven.
There is no question that the following story from Canada.com and the Calgary Herald is, when push comes to shove, a crime story. Yet the lede signals that something else is going on, something that readers have to wait a long, long time to find out when reading this report.
A few months ago, we covered the free speech campaign called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” This was the campaign launched by a Seattle cartoonist who was disappointed in Comedy Central’s censorship of a South Park cartoon that, well, didn’t depict Muhammad. But it came too close for comfort and the media network engaged in censorship. Reason Magazine ended up picking up the ball and running with it and you can see the winners of the contest there, as well as some great discussion of the back story.
In the mythology of journalism, there is this story about a chart that is — or so it is said — hanging on the wall of a generic Associated Press bureau. The chart is supposed to help editors figure out the news value of disasters that take place around the world, when it comes time to decide which stories end up on page one and which ones are buried inside.
