Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
You would think that, since my alma mater is the University of Colorado, I would know a lot about Rastafarianism. But I don’t. And mainstream media articles such as the ones below, dealing with a lawsuit brought by a Rastafarian against his employer, aren’t likely to cure that problem.
I receive Communion at my church at least once a week and yet I have never contemplated where my congregation gets our bread and wine. So I was fascinated by a light feature in the Boston Globe about a local company that makes Communion wafers.
My educational background is in economics, not journalism or religion. Which means I had to sit through approximately eleventy billion hours of math and statistics coursework in college. I think reporters and editors could use a dose of math themselves — if only to avoid their ever present confusion about percentages.
Martin Luther said the meaning of the eighth commandment (Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor) is that we “should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, or defame our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything.”
The cover story on this week’s Washington Post Sunday magazine was a 7,000-word treatise on a medical student deciding whether to become an abortion doctor.
For public schools in Washington, despite their spending an average of $25,000 per year on each student, the educational results are abysmal. Some people have high hopes for the new chancellor Michelle Rhee but there’s a long way to go.
I am so sick of looking at the shoddy coverage of non-Roman Catholic priests who are female. But since it’s our job here to root out shoddy coverage, let’s look at this piece and then pray that the coverage improves. The latest one is from KSDK in St. Louis. The headline is: “St. Louis woman becomes world’s first Catholic priest to give birth.”
For the second week in a row, the Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell has devoted her column to the problem of media bias. I always get a kick out of how the media treats problems in the media industry relative to problems in other industries. All of that investigative journalism, take-no-prisoners attitude and hard-hitting reporting suddenly disappears and we get limp and timid copy.
Remember the media narrative from the 2004 election? To explain how the country could have possibly elected George W. Bush for a second term, we were told that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls. Never mind that it wasn’t true. Bush got more evangelical voters than Republicans traditionally had, but he got more of all sorts of groups.
