Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Many of us were born to teenage mothers or had children as teenagers. My dear father and President-elect Barack Obama were both born to teenage mothers. At this point in history, however, the general social outlook on teen pregnancy is that it is a net negative. Perhaps this is in part because teen marriage has declined significantly.
This past week saw two excellent examples of the American media’s efforts at finding and portraying in the most positive light possible Muslims that make claims of being moderate. These two examples, one in The Los Angeles Times and the other in The New York Times, both portray Islamic preachers. Both reach their audiences primarily via the television. And both articles keep the basic beliefs of both preachers fairly obscure.
There’s an episode of 30 Rock where the main character, played by Tina Fey, turns her Arab neighbor into Homeland Security because she thinks he’s training for an act of terrorism. As she’s contemplating whether to turn him in, she walks by a public service announcement that says “If you suspect ANYTHING, do EVERYTHING.” She finds out, after he’s taken away, that the neighbor was auditioning to compete on The Amazing Race.
We normally focus on covering news in our posts, rather than commentary about news. After all, everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
One of the best quirks about journalists, at least on the print side of things, is our general obsession with words.
All kinds of people do all kinds of Top 10 lists at the end of the year. Some people like ‘em, some people don’t.
Time magazine’s Person of the Year feature rightly focused on President-elect Barack Obama. Unfortunately, while the magazine managed to slip in an unremarkable (but first-person) look at Obama’s basketball skills and its influence on his life, none of the magazine’s four articles on the Person of the Year Obama touched on the influence of religion on the campaign of the influence faith has had on Obama’s life.
It’s always interesting to see which data analysis or surveys get covered by mainstream media outlets and which don’t. A bunch of media outlets chose to highlight a study this week comparing 289 teens (average age of 17 in 1996) who took abstinence pledges at that time with 645 teens who were otherwise similar but didn’t take abstinence pledges. That is, the two groups shared, among other things, similar religious, sexual and political views. The study did not in any way compare either of these groups with the 11,000 or so teens from the same data set who didn’t take pledges and weren’t similar in their political views or religious views.
Following in the footsteps of Brother LeBlanc (or at a respectful distance behind him), here are a few semi-serious, and semi-safe, predictions for the New Year.
