Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Click here if you want to read the dead-tree-pulp Washington Post story about the final show by Oprah Winfrey. Or don’t. It really doesn’t matter, because this story is about a television event — not a signpost event in the development of pop and/or civic religion in American culture. Ditto for this news report in the New York Times.
If there is a list of GetReligion’s deadly journalism sins that affect religion coverage, one of the top items has to be this one: Don’t play the God card unless you intend to follow through and offer the reader some facts about the actual role that faith played in the story.
Katy Perry’s religious background has piqued journalistic interest for a while. After all, most musicians don’t get their start in Christian music to go on to sing “I kissed a girl and I liked it.” Rolling Stone picked up such themes for its cover story last year, where Perry said she still considers herself a Christian.
So it’s after 6 p.m. and as far as I can tell, most of us are still here. [Insert joke about how funny that is.]
Even on a remote tropical island, it’s been hard for me to escape news of the disintegration of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s marriage. My former governor and the First Lady announced their split last week, and the story has only gotten more sordid since.
During the NCAA tournament, a religion reporter asked me about the faith of Butler University’s basketball coach Brad Stevens. A few of my siblings attended Butler and one of them has a bulldog so surely one of us would know Stevens’ religion, right? We did some Googling and asking around, but it took a while to figure it out. No one had really thought to ask because he didn’t exactly point to the sky after they continued to plow through the tournament.
Clearly, we are in the early stages of a major wave of mainstream and niche-media coverage of the new John Jay College of Criminal Justice report about the half century or so of clergy sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
Remember when people used to take a break between campaigns? There would be an election and then some time off before the next campaign? What happened to that? I miss that. I hope it’s just because I live in Washington, D.C., but it’s hard to get a break from politics. So it’s with a bit of dread that I highlight some of the early religion coverage of the 2012 crop of GOP nominee wannabes.
