Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
More than two decades ago, my graduate advisers at the University of Illinois gave early approval to the idea of me writing my final project about the state of religion coverage in mainstream American newsrooms, which I also condensed for The Quill. One professor was skeptical, until I brought him a copy of the Associated Press’ top 10 stories for the previous year. At least six of the stories were linked to religion.
Allen Salkin brings a playful spirit to his New York Times report about how Festivus is becoming a countercultural tradition in the more ironic circles of American culture. If Festivus sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it had an unusually powerful forum for its birth: An episode of Seinfeld, broadcast in the week before Christmas in 1997.
Salon offers religion coverage only occasionally, but sometimes its quality compensates for the lack of quantity. Kimberley Sevcik’s 5,500-word report on Christian party animals is a fine example of what Salon does best: Treating evangelical believers as an exotic species, much like a shrieking peacock.
The New Yorker has published an engaging and sympathetic profile of Ole Anthony, leader of the Trinity Foundation, the Dallas-based scourge of TV evangelists. Anthony’s appearances on network television, and the changes he brought to The Door magazine, can leave the impression of a man obsessed with televangelists.
Pundits belittled Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop in the 1980s, when their book and film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race? predicted that euthanasia and infanticide were the logical companions of unrestricted abortion.
Salon has published a nearly 6,000-word essay today on the complicated relationship between Sylvia Plath and her longtime therapist, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse. Writer Karen Maroda offers a sympathetic but critical portrait of Barnhouse, who died in 1999, and refers to an undercurrent of love between the therapist and her famous patient.
The headline and deck in the Dec. 6 BusinessWeek (Economists Are Getting Religion: Can organized faith be explained by supply and demand? They think so) might create dread among believers. Are some pointy-headed intellectuals going to reduce the complexity, mystery and wonder of faith to something so mundane as commerce and “product”?
It looks like the Washington Post has found the ghost in the story, or maybe it’s the elephant under the bed. The topic is billionaire Philip Anschutz’s business dealings in sports and media. Doug LeBlanc took a look at the coverage earlier this year when Anschutz bought the San Francisco Examiner and found it to be remarkably light on religion.
Longtime New York Times television writer Bill Carroll has applied the blue America vs. red America motif to TV programming, finding that “choices of viewers, whether in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, New York or Birmingham, Ala., are remarkably similar.”
