Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
This past week saw two excellent examples of the American media’s efforts at finding and portraying in the most positive light possible Muslims that make claims of being moderate. These two examples, one in The Los Angeles Times and the other in The New York Times, both portray Islamic preachers. Both reach their audiences primarily via the television. And both articles keep the basic beliefs of both preachers fairly obscure.
It’s always interesting to see which data analysis or surveys get covered by mainstream media outlets and which don’t. A bunch of media outlets chose to highlight a study this week comparing 289 teens (average age of 17 in 1996) who took abstinence pledges at that time with 645 teens who were otherwise similar but didn’t take abstinence pledges. That is, the two groups shared, among other things, similar religious, sexual and political views. The study did not in any way compare either of these groups with the 11,000 or so teens from the same data set who didn’t take pledges and weren’t similar in their political views or religious views.
Charles Blow fills a niche so precise that The New York Times is one of the few daily papers that could maintain it in these lean times. He is the Times‘ “visual Op-Ed columnist,” which means that Blow, drawing on his long experience as graphics editor and then graphics director for the Times, supplements his concise remarks with graphics.
For one angle in the brouhaha surrounding Rick Warren’s slated Inauguration prayer, blogs did most of the heavy lifting. Thanks to Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News & World Report, Christina Hoag of The Associated Press and Alex Koppelman of Salon for mentioning, in varying levels of detail, that Warren and rock singer Melissa Etheridge met each other at an event sponsored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
Of all the seasons of the church year, the first — Advent — is definitely the one that leaves me feeling most out of touch with my fellow Americans.
Last week, the Drudge Report linked to some stories about a Florida woman who said that her former church had threatened to ‘go public with her sins’ by telling the congregation about her sexual relationship with a man who is not her husband. Here’s the WJXT report:
The most important thing to remember about the late Paul M. Weyrich is that he was a moral and cultural conservative, first, and a Republican, way, way second. In fact, there were plenty of people who decided that he wasn’t — when push came to shove — a Republican loyalist at all.
I have been haunted by this story every single day since it came out in the Los Angeles Times. Yes, haunted, as in by a ghost.
Last week the Vatican issued a document on bioethics called “The Dignity of a Person” that was covered fairly extensively by the mainstream media. Considering what coverage of Vatican statements and documents is normally like, the coverage was actually not bad. But it wasn’t perfect.
