Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the hardest things that journalists have to do, from time to time, is cover controversial stories when they can only get voices on one side of the fight to talk on the record. Normally, one camp is seeking coverage and the other is trying to avoid it.
As a rule, your GetReligionistas focus our attention on the mistakes that mainstream journalists make, or the holy holes that they leave in stories, when they fail to “get religion.” We also like to praise news organizations when they get it right, but whenever we do that readers don’t leave many comments. So, you know, we have to focus on the negative.
One of concepts that causes my journalism students the most grief is finding the line between making statements of personal opinion and making statements that draw logical conclusions from facts that have been stated on the record or verified in a document. It’s the line between editorial writing and news, when you get right down to it.
If you run a Google News search for “Michael Jackson” and “idol,” you’ll get tens of thousands of hits. If you watched any news coverage of the death of MJ, “icon” was the go-to word for describing the King of Pop. Here’s Agence France-Presse, for instance:
First things first: His name is not St. George the Dragon Slayer. Most of the time, you will hear him called the Great Martyr St. George the Trophy-bearer, or a variation on that title. The key is that he died as a witness to his faith.
In his attempts to build bridges on abortion, President Barack Obama has been able to draw favorable coverage by changing the words he uses to talk about the issue, while only hinting at minor policy changes that do not address core issues linked to any restrictions on abortion. Now, many mainstream journalists are now drawing parallels between the president’s approach on abortion with his historic Cairo University speech on tensions between America, Israel and the Arab world.
Last week, I went to Kiev to speak to a group of Ukrainian journalists — both secular and religious — about the challenges of covering religion news in mainstream press. My chapter in the Oxford Centre book, “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion,” had been translated into Ukrainian and it was a great chance to get some feedback from scribes in a very different context — a post-Soviet culture.
