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One of my all-time favorite editors, the late Ralph Looney of the Rocky Mountain News, used to say that he was never amazed when errors made it into the newspaper. He was amazed that the typical daily newspaper contains as few errors as it does.
My first full-time job in journalism was on the copy desk at a daily in Champaign, Ill., so I have been on the other side the editing process. I would like to make three comments about the Dawn Eden affair, based on what we know so far. I have never met Dawn (the logo is from her blog) and I hope we can discuss this sooner, rather than later.
The New York Observer this week ran a major cover story on l’affaire Eden, the firing of headline gal and copyeditor Dawn Eden by the New York Post for her pro-life edits of a piece on in-vitro fertilization.
Blaine Harden of The Washington Post writes with sympathy for evangelicals who care about the environment — or “creation care,” as one pastor says he calls it because of evangelicals’ purported hang-ups about the word environmentalism.
Keith Olbermann has been on a tear about James Dobson and Focus on the Family for several days now, mostly on his MSNBC blog, but Tuesday night he took his grievances into prime time.
Last February GetReligion mentioned the story of Matthew Bass, who was expelled from Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary who was expelled after administrators heard that he was gay and asked him about it.
Rob Moll is back with another special edition of the CT weblog dedicated to the tsunami and its aftermath. The key is that the story is now developing on hard news fronts, from trafficking of children to terrorist infiltration, to feature stories about the “Where was God?” question and the positions taken by various leaders within various world religions. It’s an educational moment, while heroes and villains continue to work on the front lines. And what are some of the true fundamentalists saying? You don’t want to know.
In one of the most illuminating passages in his autobiography, Here I Stand, retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong recalls the strict environment of his childhood:
In order to deal with the dearth of "hard" news that usually comes at the end of the year, columnists and magazines come up with gimmicks to fill space and keep readers interested. Time has the person of the year, Jeff Jacoby collects a "liberal hate speech" folder and shares the results with readers (favorite bit from this year’s column: "The St. Petersburg, Fla., Democratic Club took out an ad calling for the death of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq, "We have our good days and our bad days . . . We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say, "This is one of our bad days," and pull the trigger.’").
