Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The following is not taken from a news story. It’s part of a column from (wait for it) the San Francisco Chronicle. And, yes, we have crossed paths with this man’s work before.
I took a couple of weeks off from writing about the mainstream media’s overt advocacy for same-sex marriage in California. I was hoping that we’d see a bit more balance in the coverage. Alas, no. I don’t think journalists are even trying. Take, for instance, this Washington Post story from Ashley Surdin. Here’s her angle:
When Texas judge issued an order Monday allowing the parents in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to begin picking up their children, I noticed that the CNN headline was:
There are few things that journalists in Washington, D.C., like to talk about more than this subject — journalists in Washington. I am sure that this surprises GetReligion readers, especially those inclined to belief in the utter depravity of man.
Being in the media criticism game, I like to read the various ombudsmen and press critics out there. I’m pretty sure Jack Shafer at Slate is my favorite. His criticism is unconventional and thought-provoking. His latest column looks back at novelist Michael Crichton’s 1993 prediction that mass media would die within a decade. When the decade came and passed and media remained strong, people thought Crichton misguided. But now that the media giants are faltering, Shafer revisits the issue with Crichton.
Conflicts between the various streams of American Judaism have always fascinated me, all the way back to my graduate school days at the University of Illinois in Urbana. There are so many parallels with similar conflicts between traditional and liberal Christians, between pre-modern doctrines and the believers who are rooted in the modern and, I guess, the postmodern.
From time to time, I have been known to use a strange adjective in my posts about conflicts inside the wide, wide world of Roman Catholicism.
What do you think of the media coverage of the latest religious news being made by and around Sen. Barack Obama?
Readers of GetReligion are familiar with that mainstream media holiday tradition of releasing news stories that are supposed to shake the foundations of Christianity. Easters over the last few years have featured stories that Jesus walked on an ice floe (not water), that he wasn’t crucified in the manner in which people think, that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier named Pantera, not Joseph, and that Jesus didn’t die on the cross so much as pass out after being doped up.
