Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
While visiting the blog of Episcopal priest Joseph Howard I came across a link to a new journalism and religion site. Funded by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, the site has blogs, links to a Second Life community, and other features. Here’s how it’s described:
A significant news morsel buried in the middle of a ho-hum article about a meeting with President Bush in the Savannah Morning News deserves attention. In an interview with author Bruce Feiler, Larry Peterson went with the metro news headline stating that local boy makes good and meets with leader of the free world.
ABC News’ 20/20 messed up big time. In a March episode the show showed a video clip of the Rev. Frederick K.C. Price, founder of the Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles, saying that he lives in a 25-room mansion and owns a $6 million yacht, a private jet, a helicopter and seven luxury cars. The problem for ABC News is that Price wasn’t stating facts about himself. It was a hypothetical.
The newspaper that lands in my front yard — that would be the Baltimore Sun — has just completed a major overhaul of its online edition. Click here if you want to see its guide to this project.
An Associated Press story on Muslims worldwide rejecting violence against civilians provides a great lead-in to the latest Newsweek cover story on Islam in America. Based on a survey by the Pew Research Center, the AP article tells us that Muslims are “increasingly” rejecting suicide bombings, and support for Osama bin Laden is collapsing.
I’ve been gone for nearly a week to the rain-drenched Texas Hill Country and, during that time, I received all kinds of email about that remarkable page-one essay by William Lobdell of the Los Angeles Times about how his work on the religion beat knocked the foundations out from under his Christian faith. Click here for the quick post I wrote about that essay during my travels.
Reporters have not surprisingly played up the religious aspect of Turkey’s elections this past weekend. While religion has no doubt played a significant part in bringing the country to early elections and will be a big factor in voters’ decision-making, there are other aspects of the story that reporters risk missing if religion is all they focus on.
