Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
You know a story is going to be bad when the headline is “National Organization for Marriage crusading against gay nuptials in NY.” Crusading! Hide your kids! Hide your wife!
Katherine Stewart is the author of an upcoming book with one of those calm, reasoned, fair-minded titles that have become so common in the American marketplace in the past few decades — âThe Good News Club: The Christian Rightâs Stealth Assault on Americaâs Children.â
Just for the fun of it, pretend that you’re a line editor at a 100,000-circulation newspaper in the Southwest — say, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.
I love being a reporter and I think it’s a great profession and that many reporters do invaluable work. I don’t think anyone’s going to say our proudest moments are involved with the bizarre and bizarrely thorough investigation into former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s email correspondence. But the Washington Post and New York Times — along with more overtly partisan outfits such as Mother Jones, ProPublica and msnbc.com — have teams of reporters digging through each and every one of the 13,000 emails that were released late last week.
I’m always yammering on about how much I wish the mainstream media would cover stories dealing with the day-to-day lives of religious adherents. The problem with these stories, of course, is that it can be difficult to find stories that are newsy or terribly exciting.
Back in March, we did a couple of posts — here and here — on news coverage of a Catholic high school in New Orleans embroiled in controversy over corporal punishment and deeper issues.
CNN.com features a story about popular phrases that are wrongly attributed to the Bible. At the time I’m writing this, it has 111 pages of comments. That’s like 6,200 comments. And to think that editors sometimes wonder if religion stories have enough appeal.
We at GetReligion have had a few stories about the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of problems at the famed Crystal Cathedral since the church filed for bankruptcy.
