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Let’s face it, the mainstream press did everything but cue the theme from “Jaws” this weekend, during the initial coverage of the strange news out of Palmdale, Calif. Consider the top of this early New York Times report, which ran under a rather ordinary headline about a “religious group.”
On the final day of his United Kingdom trip, Pope Benedict XVI formally beatified English theologian and apologist Cardinal John Henry Newman. Let’s look at some of the stories about Newman. NPR’s excellent religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty had a piece speculating that Newman was gay. I thought it a completely bizarre approach for the main story the news outlet chose to report on the man.
The news coverage, so far, about the alleged threat of violence against Pope Benedict XVI has been cautious to the max — as it should be.
During my five years in the Chicago suburbs and a summer internship at a Sun-Times-owned paper, I began to understand just how complicated Chicagoland is to cover. Covering religion in the country’s third largest city is no small task, and religion reporter for the Chicago Tribune Manya Brachear tackles it head on.
Did you catch Robert Wright’s “religious literacy test” in The New York Times this week? It’s under the opinion section, and I’m all for people having their own opinions. But, as they say, you can’t have your own facts. And that’s why I bring it up here. Wright is very well respected, a journalist and the author of the bestseller The Evolution of God.
You know how The Screwtape Letters was written from the perspective of a senior demon to his nephew demon? This article on the Pope’s visit to Britain by Washington Post foreign service writer Anthony Faiola reads better — and much funnier — if you imagine it written by someone pretending to be a demon.
The last time Molly Norris was in the news was July. She’s the Seattle cartoonist who responded to censorship of South Park by declaring April 20 to be “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
I have always thought that papal trips — especially to lands that stage regular media circuses — are the Olympics of religion news. The big problem, of course, is that the pope is WAY too important to be covered by mere religion-beat professionals. You have to break out the media superstars and political/cultural reporters and that’s where the real fun begins.
