Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Last week we looked at veteran Time religion writer David Van Biema‘s fun piece “Is It OK to Pray for Your 401(k)? A Theological Primer.” We’ve been calling for good religion coverage, when possible, of the current economic situation. Van Biema followed up that great piece with a really fun and interesting look at how different religions understand appropriate investment.
A few days ago a reader sent in a really bad BBC article about French President Nicolas Sarkozy threatening to sue a company for selling a “voodoo doll” using his image. The piece was mostly a snarky take-down of Sarkozy and his other attempts at litigation and included this sort of laughable throwaway paragraph at the end:
As soon as I heard Sen. Barack Obama’s speech to Northern Virginians this week, I was sure we would have to do a post criticizing media coverage of it. The speech had some strong religious imagery, and in the past, religious references from politicians have been scrutinized and picked over. Here’s how the Washington Post covered the rhetoric:
Okay, everybody. Hang in there. We have just a couple weeks left for election coverage. Add an extra couple of days for mainstream media freak outs or rejoicing and then, hopefully, we’ll have a bit of a respite.
The Los Angeles Times ran two stories about the California marriage proposition that deal heavily with religion. The first is a puff piece — a pro-same-sex marriage press release, really — about the gay weddings a rabbi has performed:
I suppose there’s no reason that the Atlanta Journal Constitution should have better religion reporting than the average newspaper. But I rarely read anything noteworthy from the paper and sometimes the stories are really lacking.
The big religion story with voters this year has been white evangelicals. Will they remain supporters of pro-life Republican candidates or will they drift leftward? Despite the thousands of column inches devoted to the topic, it looks like they’ve remained largely in the GOP camp — although anything could happen.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen stories about Muslim rules prohibiting interest payments. Usually these stories are in a non-US context and deal with Muslim banking in general. But this wonderful Associated Press story looked at the issue in a distinctly American context:
Indispensable Pagan blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters brought an interesting story to our attention. It begins with a fire at a San Diego store. Here’s how the San Diego Union-Tribune described the situation:
