Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
What we have here, in this short New York Times wedding announcement, is a dangerously vague and terribly loaded word — “assisting” — being used in a liturgical context of some kind. It’s crucial that the word “assisting” is being used in a way that directly connects it with another controversial word in this day and age — “married.”
When a story uses extra adjectives or adverbs to pretty up a story, you know something might be fishy. If the information, data and narrative can’t speak for themselves, it’s worth reexamining the piece more closely.
Over the weekend, I complained about the holy ghosts in a New York Times story about disputed oil drilling on a Montana Indian reservation.
In this weekâs podcast Issues Etc. host Todd Wilkin and I discussed three recent GetReligion stories: Doggie Masses offered by Inclusive Catholics in Australia, one-sided reporting on Missouri’s Amendment 2, and the parole of Michelle Martin.
Take a moment and peruse this fascinating New York Times report about disputed oil drilling on a Montana Indian reservation. Tell me what kind of story it is:
In his 2008 Atlantic review of Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Christopher Hitchens retells a “sour old joke” from the Nazi era.
Long ago, before the cooling of the earth’s crust, I took my first news copy-editing class as a young journalism student at Baylor University. Anyone who has worked as a copy editor know that one of the first things you learn is how to keep bad stuff out of print.
One of the most powerful ways we receive and process information is visually. And we don’t get too much of a chance to discuss how coverage of religion news is shaped by visual images that accompany copy. But someone sent me a link to a story and told me I had to check out the picture that accompanied it. It got me thinking.
One of the most famous passages in all of Christian Scriptures is the beginning to the Gospel of John. It is beautifully written and fundamental to our understanding of Jesus Christ:
