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For starters, as a culturally conservative Democrat who loved his years in Tennessee (and plans to return to the Volunteer state someday), let me be the first to say that reading a Washington Post Style section piece about the anti-U.S. Senate campaign of Mark Clayton was kind of a guilty pleasure. It was like sort of like watching a figure-eight track stock car race in slow motion.
It’s a question that journalists debate from time to time in major newsrooms: To what degree are obituaries news stories?
In the past week of so, I have received a number of requests for a GetReligion news critique of the Newsweek cover story that ran under the grabber headline: “Heaven Is Real: A Doctorâs Experience With the Afterlife.” The problem, of course, is that this cover story by Dr. Eben Alexander is a perfect example of a larger trend, which is the flight of America’s major news magazines away from actual news coverage and into the world of first-person, advocacy, experiential writing.
Few subjects inspire the whole “National Geographic visits the strange natives” school of Godbeat journalism quicker than monasticism.
Anyone who has followed the tensions between gay-rights activists and the Boy Scouts knows that this is a rather tense and highly politicized situation, with obvious freedom-of-association implications for groups on the cultural left and right.
