Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In the past, I have criticized stories for lacking sufficient context and detail about religion. Today I will praise a New York Times story for exhibiting those qualities, as well as making a relevant point.
When Time magazine broke the story about the alleged Gloucester High School pregnancy pact, the entire media world erupted. It’s been covered on all the cable news shows, papers nationwide and has even been covered by international media. It’s kind of odd that this story exploded at the same time J.C. Penney’s debuted their new teen sex ad to middle America.
Some religion stories err because the reporter, instead of diving into the topic’s waters, skims along its surface. As a result, a reader comes away thinking he has not learned much. I certainly did not learn much after reading two recent stories about homosexuality in California.
Reporter Chris Serres of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune had an interesting, if evergreen, topic for a recent story. Using a recent hook, he wrote about the clashes that come from efforts to assimilate immigrants in the work place.
The Columbus Dispatch had one of the most straightforward accounts of a porn try-out session I have ever seen in a mainstream newspaper Thursday. Substitute the subject of pornography, and you could have easily placed the story in the Wednesday afternoon farmer’s market where tomatoes and cabbage are for sale to the general public.
After one brief palate-cleansing look at decent stories on the same-sex marriage issue, we can now return to the mainstream media’s attack on defenders of traditional marriage. At this point, I’m not sure how inadvertent the biased stories are.
Again and again, we need to stress that newspaper reporters rarely, if ever, write the headlines for their stories.
Who would have thought that a relatively new Washington, D.C., insider’s news organization would scoop all the news organizations in a major U.S. city that boasts two major daily newspapers? The Politico, which has quickly established its turf in a town full of media organizations, reported Wednesday morning that Muslims were “barred from picture at Obama event.”
Last month, Mollie criticized reporters for marginalizing opponents of same-sex marriage. Rather than presenting marriage traditionalists in full, journalists portrayed them as fringe types.
