Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Join me, please, in meditating on our journalism question of the day: When publications make an error of fact and correct it, should they (a) change it quickly and move on or (b) change it and run a correction notice? Some of you may want to add a qualifying clause that says something like, “It depends on how important the error is, yada yada.”
Americans received a nice little history lesson this week, thanks to Sarah Palin’s video reaction to the shooting in Arizona. We were quickly informed by just about every national news outlet that the “blood libel” is generally used to historically mean the accusations that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals.
I have a bit of an embarrassing confession to make: Before she died Sunday, I’d never heard the name Debbie Friedman.
New York Times religion columnist Mark Oppenheimer has another fascinating piece about how a religious divorce dispute has led to a protest. Here’s how he frames the story, which was running prominently in the online version of the paper:
NPR’s Morning Edition had a story this week about how Israel responds to African migrants. “In Israel, No Welcome Mat For African Migrants” was interesting, but I thought it had some flaws. You could begin with the headline, which in addition to stating that Israel is not friendly to African migrants, also seems to suggest that a welcome mat is the standard by which Israel’s immigration policy should be judged.
For better or worse, I’m as Jewish as any of your GetReligionistas. (In a Jewish sense I fall well short of my predecessor here, Ari L. Goldman; I also fall short as a journalist.) Thus, I’m often the guy who gets called upon when there is a bit of Jew news that needs some scrutiny.
Were you enjoying the fact that the media had more or less dropped any coverage of the proposed Islamic Center near ground zero? Well, it’s back in the news with a couple of updates. There’s the rumor that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia might want to buy shuttered St. Vincent’s Medical Center and move the Park 51 mosque to a new Islamic cultural center he would build on the site (story in the New York Post).
There is a religion story that has haunted me for years. It was based on an idea I picked up during a weeklong Gralla Fellowship at Brandeis University. A story I started working on when I was at the LA Daily News, one that I pitched soon after I joined The Jewish Journal, and one that in the end I was never really able to execute.
