Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I keep forgetting that this evening’s alleged national college football championship game is something in which sports fans are expected to be interested. The lack of a proper method for determining a national champion in college football really puts a downer in my interest in the game. Or maybe I’m still just sore about the Colts and the fact that Tony Dungy likely coached his last game in Indianapolis.
Sometimes the religious angles in a football story just jump out and grab the sports writer and force them to dig into the topic. For example, see here this excellent profile piece by ESPN.com’s Wayne Drehs on Kurt Warner. This is one of those athletes you simply cannot write about without mentioning his faith:
New York City does not seem to be a very welcoming city. Certain people belong there, while the presence of others that fail to fit a certain stereotype are considered by a major media institution in the city as “jarringly out of place.”
I hope that reporter Jeff Darlington of the Miami Herald was mad this morning when he read his own story in the newspaper. Here’s the headline:
From a basketball and sports perspective, this lengthy profile in The Los Angeles Times headlined “Jewish coach, black players forged lasting bond” is a model for excellence in sports journalism. Unfortunately, the obvious religious element of the story — which the editors decided for one reason or another deserved top billing — gets little more than a few mentions in the article which runs close to 2,400 words.
Should journalists clean up the language of the people they’re quoting? No, I don’t mean “clean up” like Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich might need his language cleaned up.
As far as I can tell, there is no faith, no religion, no hope and no positive sense of morality in the following story.
Some of this blog’s readers regurarly object to sports stories that deal with religion, particularly when they deal with professional athletes who are paid millions of dollars to play a game. I generally hold that regardless of salaries, the religious angles in athletes’ lives are generally relevant since they are part of the make-up of a person who has a faith.
A few weeks into Major League Baseball’s off-season, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had a short story on long-time major league pitcher Salomon Torres and his announcement of his second retirement. The article focuses almost 100 percent on baseball but contained one of those classic paragraphs that briefly mentions religion and then runs away from it like it was some sort of third rail.
