Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
On this week’s Crossroads, host Todd Wilken and I spoke about media coverage of the Chick-Fil-A protests, the misplaced outrage at CNN when the channel was blamed for something an online commenter had written about the shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the Alawite/Alevi confusion displayed by the New York Times.
A few years ago, about 2,500 of my closest friends and I packed into a megachurch auditorium in the Oklahoma City area to hear Randy Travis sing.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the organization that represents leadership of most of the sisters in the United States, is having its big annual meeting in St. Louis this week. And today is the big day where we learn how they’ve decided to proceed in response to the Vatican crackdown on them. In the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of glowing and puffy and rather one-sided coverage of the sisters. In the dispute, the Vatican was more rarely actually quoted than inaccurately summarized.
I write with some disappointment about the report from the Religion News Service (RNS) on Missouri’s Public Prayer Amendment (Amendment 2). Entitled “Missouri prayer amendment passes” in the version printed in USA Today, the article is rather thin. It does not provide quotes from the amendment but seeks to summarize its language.
I think it’s fair to say that while Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy has forced the media to do more and better coverage of Mormonism, the religion is still treated as a cultural and theological oddity. Much of the coverage is still sensational — as I type this, The Daily Beast is hyping an interview with “a direct descendant of Brigham Young, Sue Emmett [who] left the church because of the very values she says would make Romney a frightening president.” I hate to break it to The Daily Beast, but Brigham Young had 55 wives and 57 children. A gathering of his third generation descendents would look like Calcutta on Free Malaria Shot Day. Finding one of them who would disavow Mitt Romney and their great-great grandfather’s legacy is a matter of simple probability, and it’s neither novel or illuminating.
Two weeks ago, I complained about the Denver Post’s account of a “deeply religious” victim of the Aurora, Colo., theater massacre. For some vague, unknown reason (based on the Post story), the victim, Pierce OâFarrill, forgave the man who opened fire on him and dozens of others.
The Associated Press has a story headlined “Pastor on trial in Vt; mom still AWOL with child.” It begins:
