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I have mixed feelings about ombudsmen, but the latest effort by The Washington Post‘s Deborah Howell makes me think again about their usefulness. Howell dealt with the story the Post did a couple of weeks ago about the baseless rumors surrounding the Barack Obama presidential campaign that he is a closet Muslim. Even Post opinion cartoonist Tom Toles had a useful opinion on the piece.
Readers of GetReligion are familiar with that mainstream media holiday tradition of releasing news stories that are supposed to shake the foundations of Christianity. Easters over the last few years have featured stories that Jesus walked on an ice floe (not water), that he wasn’t crucified in the manner in which people think, that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier named Pantera, not Joseph, and that Jesus didn’t die on the cross so much as pass out after being doped up.
What accounts for Mike Huckabee’s surge in the polls? The Washington Post thinks it knows: he’s winning over evangelicals. This is, of course, what everyone is saying right now.
A brief unscientific survey of Utah newspapers’ coverage of Mitt Romney’s speech on Thursday shows that reporters were quite aware that Romney hardly delved into his church’s teachings.
The day that Redskins safety Sean Taylor was declared dead, Leonard Shapiro of The Washington Post wrote a column exploring the reasons for Taylor’s murder. Shapiro wrote that he could not say ultimately why Taylor was killed.
Are the makers of Bella trimming their sails? I can’t tell. They might be telling one thing to the religious press and another to the secular press. Or mainstream reporters might be blind to the religious angle.
So even though I’m normally complaining about how journalists only notice religion when it involves politics, I’m giving myself up to the political machine this week and discussing more stories about Romney and his Mormonism. Coverage has been all over the map. Contrast, for instance, this headline from The Boston Globe:
After the embarrassment of last week’s CNN-YouTube debate, you might think other media outlets wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Ordinary voters were given the chance to ask candidates questions via video. But many of the questioners weren’t so ordinary, including one man who served on two of Hillary Clinton’s committees.
