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The media relations staff at Focus on the Family may soon have to create a form letter for requesting corrections from Newsweek (which, as tmatt noted earlier this month, published one of the funnier corrections in recent Godbeat history).
Much has been made of the Republican Party’s relationship with evangelical Christians. Who is truly in control of that relationship? Is it people like James Dobson, or is the White House (Karl Rove) playing evangelical religious leaders in order to gain access to their followers for votes? Of course, then you get bogged down into the debate over exactly who is an evangelical. Go figure.
During that dizzying rush of recent Pat Robertson headlines, more than a few GetReligion readers protested that I was wrong to say the MSM should “excommunicate” him as a mainstream Christian, or even “evangelical,” news source. After all, said these readers, the czar of The 700 Club was still the czar of The 700 Club.
The scandals and corruption charges surrounding Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi make the GOP’s problems in Washington seem minor league. Berlusconi is one of the 25 richest people in the world. His businesses create a number of legal problems for him politically, and he is facing charges of bribing judges in a trial involving one of his businesses. He’s also compared himself to Jesus Christ in a speech to political supporters:
I’m waiting for some smart person out there to dissect Bono’s sermon Thursday morning at the National Prayer Breakfast for its theological implications and political ramifications.
Canada made some news earlier this week by electing a conservative government for the first time in about a dozen years. The conventional wisdom says that it all came down to a well-run campaign and a corrupted liberal party government as the new prime minister Stephen Harper moved to the center by avoiding issues like abortion and gay marriage.
Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a profile of Kate Michelman. I’m not sure if they were trying to push her new book or push her appearance before the Alito hearings today, but they were pushing something. If NARAL Pro-Choice America itself had written the piece, it probably would have had more perspective.
This is slightly outside of the normal media coverage we follow, but I couldn’t help but notice that ghosts and religious terminology abound in recent stories about author James Frey. This is the man who wrote an exaggerated or possibly even fictional account of a drug- and alcohol-addled life of crime and successfully passed it off as his factual memoir A Million Little Pieces, which sold a gazillion copies and recently was selected for Oprah’s Book Club.
Honest, I had nothing to do with this! Besides, this “Christians Against Pat Speaking” petition isn’t much of a story at the moment, seeing as how it has only 25 online signatures. The opening sentence is a grabber, however:
