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Chris Hedges is the the former New York Times bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans. He has covered many wars. And he just wrote a book about evangelical Christians. He used to be Presbyterian and is the son of a pastor. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School, planning to become a member of the clergy. However, I gather he is no longer Christian.
I am preparing to leave beautiful Colorado, where I spent the last few days of Christmas and the beginning of Epiphany with my family.
A few days ago we looked at New York Times public editor Byron Calame’s expose of reporting and editing gone bad at the paper. He found problems in an April cover story from the Sunday magazine that claimed women were sentenced to 30 years in prison for nothing more than having abortions.
New York Times public editor Byron Calame has quite the challenging job. The Times is one of the most scrutinized papers in the world and Calame has to separate legitimate and illegitimate gripes over its reportage, story selection and headlines.
I usually spend New Year’s Eve in New York City out and about until the wee hours. This year I went to church for a special concert by the Concordia Theological Seminary’s fantastic Kantorei.
Merry sixth day of Christmas to all. We have commented previously on some of the downtick in War on Christmas media hype. I noticed there were also fewer stories claiming that Christmas was created by Christians to replace pagan holidays. And then in a really interesting and important piece by The Washington Post‘s Shankar Vedantam, the allegation rose again:
There is so much that could be said about mainstream media coverage of Christmas this year. Religion reporter Frank Lockwood — who is moving to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette — had a post on his blog about a trend he’s witnessed. He looks at a few examples of mainstream media ridiculing Christianity during the Christmas season.
Peter Kann, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and chairman of Dow Jones, had a wonderful piece in The Wall Street Journal that I encourage you to read. Noting that CNN’s pre-election programming had names like “Broken Borders,” “Broken Government,” “Broken Politics,” he says the media, too, are in need of some mending.
