Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
This week the New York Times ran a fascinating profile of a Texas Associated Press journalist whose beat has led him to witness more executions than anyone else on record. As in, more than 300. I really enjoyed the article although I enjoyed it less after I realized it was a bit of a rewrite of a CNN piece from July.
So I finished the 5-part (plus epilogue!) New York Times series about the hostage-taking, captivity and escape of reporter David Rhode. I enjoyed the series, and it reminded me of the one about a similar situation involving the Christian Science Monitor‘s Jill Carroll.
Quite a few newspapers and television stations across America have posted various versions of the following short Associated Press story on their websites. For the sake of clarity, here’s the whole report:
If you’re looking to hit the movies after sundown Saturday, there is a really good, really Jewy option out there. It’s the Coen brothers’ latest film, “A Serious Man,” which Steve Rabey mentioned last month. Until sometime in the past few weeks, you also could have gotten a Jewish perspective on Nazis from “Inglourious Basterds,” though I wouldn’t have recommended taking the kids to that one. In fact, there have been a handful of good, Jewish-themed films in theaters in the past year: “Defiance” immediately comes to mind.
Slate has an awesome annual feature called 80 over 80. It ranks the country’s most powerful politicians, businessmen, and cultural leaders who are in their ninth decade. Ranked according to their power and importance, look who comes in at #1:
Cartoonist Robert Crumb went to San Francisco in 1967 and published his first issue of Zap Comix in 1968, introducing underground comic fans to Mr. Natural, an unstable holy man whose motto was: “Keep on Truckin.’”
There’s something curious about the way the media have been handling the difficult and complicated story of Rifqa Bary. She’s the Ohio teenager (pictured here) who fled to Florida after she converted to Christianity over concerns her Muslim father might kill her. We last looked at this story when CNN inexplicably referred to the girl as “Muslim” even though the whole point of this saga is that she’s not.
A couple of years ago, there was a flurry of stories about a study on abortion rates worldwide. Published in the Lancet based on research by the Guttmacher Institute, the stories said that abortion rates were the same throughout the world, regardless of legality.
The facts of the case are clear and brutal, according to a number of reports in New York media. Here’s an online New York Times report, as a starter.
