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Late one night last week, while I was attending a journalism conference in Kiev, I plunked myself down in the wifi zone in the hotel lobby and pounded out a quick post about at topic that your GetReligionistas have been discussing ever since the cyber-doors opened at this here weblog — the fact that hardly anyone knows what the word “evangelical” means.
I have been out of the country for several days, which means it’s time to back up a bit and look at a Los Angeles Times story that inspired varying opinions from GetReligion readers. This story was especially interesting, since it is rare to get email from conservative Catholics who think that a major newspaper may have gone a bit too easy on a conservative bishop.
If people have long had trouble defining the word “evangelical” — the Rev. Billy Graham once told me he had no idea what the word meant — it only made matters worse when the principalities and powers of Christian publishing started adding the word “emerging” or perhaps “emergent” in front of the already vague “evangelical.”
Here is a craft question for you, GetReligion readers. No, I don’t mean freemasonry but journalism. When should a reporter use his editorial voice to correct or challenge an assertion made by the subject of his story? What if the assertion is not central to the story at hand? What if the assertion is in line with convention wisdom, but is not true?
When a feature story dominates the Sunday front page of The Washington Post, you know that editors there have given the subject quite a bit of thought — to say the least. In our management-intensive era of newspapering, this means that the concept of the story survived several high-level planning meetings and, thus, the editors almost certainly considered its content more than significant — it’s symbolic.
Like many other Baby Boomer believers who grew up in the era of ugly-as-sin church architecture, I am a total sucker for stately, soaring old churches.
So The Washington Post ran a story the other day that made me feel very strange, for strictly journalistic and, yes, political reasons.
I will be the first person to admit that I did a double-take when I saw the short, one-line New York Times front page headline — online and iPad, at this stage — for its obituary for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
The New York Times‘ outgoing public editor — Arthur S. Brisbane — wrote his final column this weekend. Most of it is outside the purview of this blog, which is discussion of media coverage of religion news. He talks a lot about how the Times has streamlined and responded to social media. But part of it was interesting enough to some readers to send it in for discussion. Here it is:
