Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Two decades ago, while I was serving as the religion writer for The Charlotte News (the afternoon newspaper that later merged with The Charlotte Observer) I heard about a fascinating event in a major local parish.
Let me state, right up front, that I would be the first news-media critic to argue that mainstream press folks are too quick to take a single statement by a single, often obscure, conservative preacher and then turn it into a national story about how all Fundamentalist or even evangelical Christians think about a given topic. In fact, I once went so far as to argue, at Poynter.org, that it was time for journalists to pay less attention to the Rev. Pat Robertson for precisely this reason.
Here in my home own state of Oklahoma, that’s the basis for a religion story in today’s Tulsa World. The headline grabs readers’ attention this way:
First things first: I would like to stress that, while I am a member of an Orthodox Christian parish with historic ties to Arab Christianity, I do not speak Arabic.
It’s a question that I always know I will hear after a lecture on the American model of the press and its emphasis on balance, fairness and the need to cover both sides of controversial stories — which requires journalists to find solid, articulate representatives of the arguments on both sides.
A week or so ago, I wrote a Scripps Howard News Service column about the survey research indicating that secular and self-proclaimed liberal Americans are much more likely to be prejudiced against Mormon political candidates than are evangelical Protestants, the very folks that everyone has been worried about during the Mitt Romney campaign. That column opened like this:
It’s time for another season in the National Basketball Association, which is another one of those giant sports stories that GetReligion readers seem to care little or nothing about.
A long time ago (in digital terms), back at the beginning of this here weblog, I sat at my desk in West Palm Beach, Fla., listening to the sound of an oncoming hurricane and thinking about a very practical issue: How does one blog about religion news on a daily basis if the power goes out for, let’s say, a week?
