Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
During the 25 years or so I have been studying the religion beat, I have read more than my share of stories and statistics about media bias. It is still a subject that makes headlines several times a year, with roots running deep into the world of politics as well as religion.
Here’s a roundup of how various media outlets have handled a study on teenagers’ redefinitions of the words abstinence and virginity. It’s amazing how much of a worldview can be packed into a simple headline.
If you oppose Terri Schiavo’s death by starvation and dehydration, you may be a fundamentalist — at least according to an opinion-laden report this morning by Megan O’Matz of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
I have been on the road again, doing a seminar or two at the National College Media Convention in New York City (home of Brendan’s Bar & Grill). As usual, I munched my way through a stack of newspapers and magazines while stalled in airports, etc.
GetReligion tweaked Keith Olbermann when he turned an e-mail campaign by Focus on the Family into national news on his weeknight MSNBC newscast. Liz Halloran of the Hartford Courant revisits the Olbermann-Focus battle of darkness and light in an email Q&A.
Urban Dictionary defines glurge as “syrupy sweet e-mails that are mass-mailed to unwilling participants” that usually involve “puppies, kitties, children with disabilities, puppies and kitties with disabilities, and Jesus.” Glurge also is a category at Snopes.com.
One of the most damning film portrayals of media hordes came years ago in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, which repeatedly made the sound of whirring cameras sound like so many locusts. Those scenes came to mind when I saw this detail in the Los Angeles Times‘ coverage of the scene at Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita, which Dennis Rader, the accused BTK serial killer, has attended for more than 30 years:
To experience today’s Peggy Noonan column, one really needs to call it up on the Web. It is, in effect, the first Noonan blog — only printed in a newspaper. What should we call that? Religion news and trends run all the way through it, right down to the last bite (the pope’s email address). Here she is on the Harvard holy wars about President Larry Summers: “What the Summers story most illustrates is that American universities now seem like Medieval cloisters. They’re like a cloister without the messy God part. Old monks of leftism walk their hallowed halls in hooded robes, chanting to themselves. Young nuns of leftist deconstructionism, pale as orchids, walk along wringing their hands, listening to their gloomy music. They become hysterical at the antichrist of a new idea, the instrusion of the reconsideration of settled matter. Get thee behind me, Summers.”
The 80th anniversary issue of The New Yorker includes a report by Nicholas Lemann on how some editors of the nation’s most prestigious daily newspapers are feeling beleaguered by criticisms by both liberals and conservatives — but especially by conservatives. The essay opens with Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, talking at length about how President Bush’s adviser Karl Rove “pounded on us for two cocktails’ worth of conversation.” (Keller had made the mistake of asking Rove what he thought of the Times‘ political coverage.)
