Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
First of all, my apologies that this Crossroads podcast is arriving several days late. You see, some key members of your GetReligionista team have spend quite a bit of time on airplanes in the past week or so heading hither and yon (seeing snow on the ground as I went through the Denver airport really brought back some high-altitude memories for me).
On Sunday, the head of the International Monetary Fund was arrested in connection with the alleged sexual assault of a maid at the Sofitel hotel in midtown Manhattan. And not just any head of the IMF but the man who was widely expected to become the Socialist candidate for the French presidency, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Time has a very interesting take on what the death of Osama bin Laden means for al Qaeda in the May 20 issue. Written by Peter Bergen, he compares 9/11 to Pearl Harbor saying both events demonstrated “a stunning tactical victory that set in motion events that would end in the defeat of” the respective aggressors. We’re told that bin Laden was full of hubris and how some of his shrewder lieutenants didn’t support the particulars of his campaign to destroy the United States.
It was the little Reuters story that launched 1,000 winking headlines as the week came to an end. Surely you saw some of them, such as the two that caught Mike Allen’s eye for Playbook:
It’s been a while since I’ve contributed regularly around here, and I’ve changed jobs in the last few months so it’s probably best I give a quick update. I’m the online editor at The Weekly Standard where I write online and on dead tree pulp about everything from unions to mercenaries to graveyards. So that’s where I’m coming from, these days.
What we have here is the kind of commentary on the news that GetReligion tries to avoid, since the purpose of this blog is to offer criticism — positive and negative — of actual religion-news coverage in the mainstream press.
Last night a passenger was subdued on Boston-bound Delta flight 1102 after trying to open up an emergency exit door. The same thing happened on Continental Airline flight 546 from Houston to Chicago. In the former case, the man in question was upset because the flight was delayed and, well, he’d had too much to drink. There aren’t many details in the latter case. We just know that he is one Reynel C. Alcaide of Burbank, Illinois, 34.
GetReligion, as we frequently remind readers, is not a religion-news site. It’s a weblog about how the mainstream press struggles — with good and bad results — to cover religion news, including hidden or even obvious religious “ghosts” in stories that are not obviously about religion.
