Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The Associated Press ran a religion story about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ restatement and clarification on political neutrality toward candidates and parties. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, is Mormon. So are former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, both candidates for the Republican nomination for president.
A couple weeks ago, I went to the liturgy at a Greek Orthodox church in Brooklyn. One of my best friends goes there and her fiance is taking instruction there at Sts. Constantine and Helen Cathedral. My daughters will be in their wedding and they thought it might be good for them to have a refresher on what Greek services are like before the big wedding day.
I wanted to follow up on two recent GetReligion posts where I cast doubt on media reports. The first was a widely transmitted report about a Jewish court in Israel condemning a dog to death by stoning. I have a pretty good bovine excrement detector and something just smelled with the story. Of course, even people who are much less skeptical and cynical than I am probably could have figured out something was weird about the story. But you never know — crazy things happen all the time that I can’t believe. I’ve lost many a wager with my own husband about whether something actually happened (Reports of Mel Gibson’s initial rant against a police officer is one such example.).
A Godbeat pro who shall remain nameless (unless he chooses to identify himself) posted this news story on his Facebook page with a tongue-in-cheek analysis:
Once upon a time, it appeared that most mainstream journalists had rallied around the use of the word “Islamist” to describe the brand of Islam that has been linked to violence and terror around the world.
Yesterday we looked at the bizarrely-limited-but-not-otherwise-bad coverage of the religion angles in recent debates over whether to change marriage law. I suggested in the comments to that post that some reporters were neither curious nor terribly thoughtful in how they approached the topic.
On Friday night, the New York legislature voted to give same-sex couples the right to marry. This will certainly produce interesting journalism in the days to come, but let’s look at some of the stories that had religion angles.
