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In many ways, a Washington Post story this week titled “We let a wolf in” has the kind of remarkable layers and depth that you’d expect from a 4,300-word piece in that prominent newspaper’s Sunday magazine.
The New York Times‘ marriage announcement page also has a feature called “Vows” where one of the lucky couples has their story told by a reporter. Weddings are rites of passage where ghosts abound. But usually these stories are sappy lovey-dovey accounts of how romance blossomed. Last week’s Vows section is no exception. And boy is it one for the ages. Now, I was absolutely horrified when I read it (linked on Twitter by John Podhoretz with the note “Boy is this going to be discussed at my kids’ Upper West Side School this week, and discussed, and discussed.”). He was right. The story lit up the twitterverse and blogosphere and made it into other media coverage, too.
It is very hard to write about the history of Catholicism in the United States without writing about the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland. Baltimore is, of course, the senior see in the United States and was established as a diocese on April 6, 1789.
In a sea of silly stories during the Advent march to Christmas, I was pleasantly surprised to hear (via the Rev. Dr. R. Albert Mohler) a great piece on NPR. It’s a perfect radio piece — snippets from songs with an expert teaching you things you never knew. In this case, the topic is Christmas carols. Here’s the transcript, here’s the web version of the story, and here’s the link so you can listen. I definitely recommend you choose the last option.
Story selection is one of those media criticism topics I wish we could address more. So often we’re responding to what did get written rather than what didn’t. Arguably the decision about which stories to cover and which to ignore — or which to cover ’round the clock and which to cover once and move on — contributes more to our perception of the world than how those stories or written.
When we look at how the media writes about religion, we focus on news stories. But that’s only one of the ways the mainstream media discuss religion, of course. Even apart from the op-ed page — which we tend to stay away from unless there’s some breaking news there — there are photos, graphs, art reviews, advice columns and so on.
As regular GetReligion readers know, I spent several years early in my career on the copy desk of a daily newspaper and I have remained rather obsessed with issue of Associated Press style ever since — especially questions about (surprise) religion.
When I saw the headline, I got nervous: “Obama, in shadow of worrisome polls, embraces ‘Christian’ label.”
You know how, in the competitions during the summer Olympics, the divers’ scores are often calculated on the basis of the difficult of the dives that they are attempting?
