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Pretty much the moment Elena Kagan was nominated by President Obama to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the questions started swirling. Few online seemed all that concerned with her politics or her understanding of constitutional law. “Elena Kagan husband” became a major Google trend, and it seemed a lot of people just wanted to know why Kagan, at the age of 50, was still single.
In my time as religion editor of The Oklahoman, a pastor of a large Baptist church wrote a book condemning Islam. After I reported on the book, I got a tip that the pastor had plagiarized large sections of the text and faked endorsements from syndicated columnist Cal Thomas and evangelist Franklin Graham. My investigation confirmed that the pastor — who claimed to be a leading expert on Islam — really was not.
We are going to play a little numbers game for a minute, so please hang in there with me. The following is totally fiction, so please do not get hung up on the details.
The Washington Post is known for puffy Style-section profiles of movers and shakers in the Washington area. A few years ago, we looked at the puffiest Washington Post Style profile I can recall. It was about Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL Pro-Choice America. We learned from that piece that she organized sales to benefit Mexican farm workers as a teenager, makes food from scratch, reads a lot (“every word in every paragraph”), and loves to wash dishes. Here was a sample from that hagiography:
Long-time readers of GetReligion know that since the beginning of this blog we’ve been playing whack-a-mole with reporters who misuse the term “fundamentalist.”
The New York Review of Magazines describes itself as “an unabashed celebration of magazines,” so it’s no wonder the annual magazine would eventually turn its attention to “The Most Widely Read Magazine in the World.”
Here at GetReligion, we write about reporters and their journalism. But you wouldn’t have stories without story subjects. And I always find it interesting when subjects discuss what it was like to be written about in an article.
If you are interested in the future of Islam, which means you are interested in the future of world affairs, then you are interested in Indonesia.
The other day, I made a big deal (in a negative way) out of how a single sentence in a Florida newspaper story described Churches of Christ, the fellowship to which I belong. If you missed that post, please go back and read it. Otherwise, this sequel won’t make sense (maybe it still won’t, but familiarity with the previous discourse might help improve the odds).
