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On September 28, we noticed a Time magazine story with some glaring errors. The caption alone managed to misspell and misuse the word “diaconate.” As of this writing — October 11 — the spelling and other errors haven’t been fixed. Reader joye commented on a thread a few days ago:
Last night we had some friends over for dinner and they raved about the new Belle and Sebastian album “Write About Love.” One of their new songs came on over the transom XM Radio and our guests stopped the conversation to listen and tell us about how fantastic it is. I’ve just listened to the full album — courtesy of NPRMusic.org — and it is really good.
So we lived through the media circus related to the threat to burn copies of the Koran. I keep thinking back on that with a shudder. A reporter I know was wondering why a few religious groups hadn’t taken to the airwaves to denounce the threat. Because, of course, what the world needed was more people weighing in against the Koran burning. But that was the media environment a few weeks ago — religious and/or political groups sensing an opportunity for favorable coverage by riding the coattails of a media stunt. And reporters having a publication/broadcast-friendly story ripe for the picking.
Oh dear. Just as the rumors about Newsweek are becoming more positive, the news product offered by Time is suffering. Last week we looked at a very poor piece of journalism about female priests in non-Roman Catholic churches. And we looked at the odd defense offered by the reporter.
I’ve been meaning to cover the story of the four Christian evangelists who were arrested at the Dearborn Arab International Festival in June. It is fascinating to me how much coverage the media devoted to the non-burn of the Koran in Florida compared to the actual “going ghost” of Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris or the actual arrest of four street evangelists in Dearborn. I would just love for someone who was involved in the coverage of the Koran burn threat to explain why they wrote eleventy billion stories on the Florida pastor and none on these other situations.
Earlier this year, we looked at the story of Father Mark Gruber, a popular Benedictine monk who was let go from St. Vincent College after porn was found on his computer. When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the story in February, tmatt noted that some of the hardest news stories to cover are personnel disputes inside private colleges and universities, particularly religious ones, due to privacy issues. It turns out he was particularly prescient.
Whatever else might be said of the current political climate, there’s no doubt that it’s interesting. No one quite knows what might happen in the coming election but we do know that we’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift from 2008, when Democrats seemed unstoppable. Most of the excitement right now is happening in the Tea Party.
One of my favorite religion stories this week was this New York Times tale of intrigue and computer coding. I know I’m always calling for more and/or better coverage of the role religion plays in everyday life. But this was just too exciting:
A few days ago, we looked at the really bad story Time put out on female priests. It was just a bad story, no way around it. It had spelling errors, usage errors, inaccuracies and factual errors. It used weasel words. It managed to not find a single proponent of the historic Christian position despite being over 1,200 words long. So we weren’t the only folks who thought the article was problematic.
