Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
There was a sobering angle on the Iraq-prison abuse story today, hidden down in the body of the latest Howard Kurtz media column in the Washington Post. Find that headline, “A Kerry-Worrying Trend” and then dig down past the layers of inside-the-Beltway paranoia and score keeping.
While this may seem out of place on a God-beat blog, let me call attention to a new study released by the human-rights think tank Freedom House. It’s called “Freedom of the Press 2004: A Global Survey of Media Independence” and was released to mark the upcoming World Press Freedom Day on May 3.
The Chicago Tribune reports on a trend of questionable size and gravity: Christians pressuring other Christians to see The Passion of the Christ against their will, and — wait for it — implying that Passion patrons are more holy than those not inclined to add to Mel Gibson’s record-setting box-office numbers.
It’s difficult to decide who is more insufferable when Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine interviews former nun Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God and, most recently, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness.
A friend of this blog, columnist Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, has quietly raised an important issue over at the paper’s editorial page blog.
The political and journalistic implications of that article by Jack Beatty are somewhat stunning, if you stop and think about it.
That was the headline that greeted me this morning in the Palm Beach Post as I headed to the airport to fly to New York City. At least, that’s the headline that’s up in the online edition.
