Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Normally we look at mainstream media, but I came across an essay in my church body’s monthly newspaper that is worth sharing. In The Reporter, veteran foreign correspondent and former religion editor at UPI (and my friend and fellow Lutheran) Uwe Siemon-Netto looks at how the mainstream media treat Christians and, conversely, atheists. He notes Christopher Hitchens’ fawning reception by CNN’s Lou Dobbs, among other examples.
It’s almost the Gregorian chant of liberal religion, and you don’t need to attend many inquirer’s classes before hearing it: “We take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.” Yet it’s usually the same people who talk the most about biblical literalism, as if it were a metastasizing cancer in American culture. By percentage, very few Americans engage in the sort of biblical interpretation that will deprive them of coffee in the morning or a blood transfusion in the emergency room.
In the discussion of a previous post about coverage of the Kathy Griffin brouhaha, Religion News Service reporter Kevin Eckstrom says the following about his piece:
Few stories will change a journalist’s life. Even fewer stories change a journalist’s life for the better, but that’s exactly what happened to Seattle Times sports columnist Jerry Brewer since he started writing about Gloria Strauss, the 11-year-old daughter of a local high school basketball coach, who endured a four-year fight with cancer before passing away last week.
Kudos to the Associated Press for highlighting one of the most significant issues in the Indianapolis Colts-Houston Texans game Sunday afternoon.
USA Today‘s op-ed page on Monday had a nearly full-page opinion piece on a degree offered at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that could include a concentration in homemaking. The catch is that it’s offered exclusively to women.
What is it with my fellow GetReligionistas? It’s as if they’re completely disinterested in celebrity news. I just searched to see how we handled media coverage of the Kathy-Griffin-at-the-Emmys debacle (I was attending to other matters at the time) and see that we didn’t discuss it at all. For those who have more interesting lives, Griffin is a comedienne — and host of the 2007 gay porn awards! — who made scandalous remarks about Jesus when she accepted her Emmy for her Bravo reality series. There was so little substantive coverage of what she said that religion reporter Gary Stern hadn’t even heard about it last week:
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this interesting religion news from the Associated Press out of Malaysia: Malaysian cosmonaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor will be part of a Russian crew heading to the International Space Station next month.
I wasn’t keeping tally before last year, but it seems there has been a noticeable uptick in mainstream media coverage of confession in Christian churches. The New York Times‘ Neela Banerjee got the ball rolling a year ago with her coverage of evangelicals launching online confessional booths for virtual confessions. The Miami Herald‘s Jennifer Lebovich had a very interesting article on the same — taking a local angle on the Florida megachurches that run some of the sites.
