Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A long, long time ago — pre-Internet, for heaven’s sake — I had a long conversation with Bill Moyers, then of CBS, about why the mainstream press has so much trouble covering religion. This was one of those occasions in which he used a striking image to describe this problem — that far too many reporters and editors are “tone deaf” to the music of religion.
It probably will not surprise you that I’m about to highlight a story about funerals. As the child of a pastor and an active member of my current congregation, I love such stories. I know that funerals are a huge deal in the life of the church. Funerals get covered in the mainstream media fairly frequently. The deceased has to be unbelievably famous in order to get that coverage, but they are covered. But the typical funeral, the typical gathering of family and friends, is less likely to receive coverage — particularly from the perspective of the survivors.
Hopefully, after more than a year of writing for GetReligion, I have won the respect of you, kind reader.
Via Rocco Palmo’s Twitter feed, I came across this Miami CBS affiliate story about the Roman Catholic archdiocese there launching a television campaign about the sacrament of penance:
Yesterday I had a mini-meltdown when the BBC site was offline for an hour or so. I must be more reliant on them than I had realized! One of the stories I was trying to read was written by BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott, headlined “Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relics“:
As always, the goal here in GetReligion land is to dig into the nuts and bolts of religion-news coverage in the mainstream press. Truth is, this is easier to do when the coverage is bad than when it is good. Besides, when we praise coverage almost no one writes comments and these good-coverage posts do not affect the trolls who say that we hate the mainstream press.
One of my favorite teachers in high school — all the kids loved him — was Mr. Richard Bonacquista. He was our Colorado History teacher — no one could make Colorado history more entertaining — and our baseball coach. In any case, one of the things he showed us from early first teaching days — over in mining country in the southwest part of the state — was a wooden paddle.
Did you hear the story from, of course, Florida about a judge ordering the use of sharia in a lawsuit over mosque leadership? The St. Petersburg Times had a write-up with an intriguing lede:
