Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
While the Los Angeles Times and other papers go for quantity over quality with their stories about the California Supreme Court ruling redefining marriage to include same-sex partnerships, there are a ton of interesting issues left barely touched about how same-sex marriage changes the lives of people who oppose it.
By most any measure, the late Sir John Templeton was a remarkable man. He was a pioneer in not one but two fields: investing in stocks and donating money to explore the intersection of science and religion.
Sir John Templeton, the wildly-successful mutual-fund manager who pioneered international investing died Tuesday at the age of 95. He was also well-known for giving away much of his fortune to scientific and religious causes.
We are into the second wave of media coverage of the death of NBC’s Tim Russert, featuring stories that are one step away from the actual memorial service and the mainstream press memorials. Some of these events are going to be linked to more complex, personal aspects of Russert’s career — such as his faith.
It seems that if reporters don’t know much else about Roman Catholics, they should know something of what they believe about the Eucharist. Catholic belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist has various supporting dogmas, including Transubstantiation and the Permanence of Presence and the Adorableness of the Eucharist.
One of the reasons why I wish reporters would focus more on religion news that’s apolitical is because when they do, the stories turn out so much better. Take this great piece from Gabe Oppenheim of the Washington Post. The news angle for the story is that a local woman won the top documentary prize at the Student Academy Awards in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. But that’s about the least interesting aspect to the whole story.
Marie Antoinette had nothing on the late Leona Helmsley. Antoinette, the Queen of France, famously said that the hungry masses should eat cake. Hemsley, the self-styled queen of hotels and real estate, in her will declined to say that people should get that much.
Remember that CDC statistic alleging that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease? Before we even knew that the statistic was completely unreliable (its relative standard error was greater than 30 percent), we criticized the media coverage for uncritically parroting the Planned Parenthood talking points about what the study meant.
