Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
No one is surprised when reporters are found to have certain biases. We all have personal opinions. Some of us handle our biases better than others, of course. Here at GetReligion, we tend to worry about the lack of diversity in newsroom biases. So many reporters have similar educational and economic backgrounds and similar views on the contentious issues of the day. I’m not breaking any news here.
The political firestorm over former White House official David Kuo’s Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction is as much about religion as it is about government bureaucracy and election-oriented politics. Is it a seminal work exposing the Bush administration as a bunch of frauds and political opportunists? No, journalists have already told that story, but it could prove to be a tipping point in prompting some evangelical leaders to reconsider their GOP allegiance.
The final two articles in the New York Times series on “how American religious organizations benefit from an increasingly accommodating government” deal with money. Lots of money. Reporters are known for being those students who failed miserably at math and thus decided to go into a career that supposedly would keep them far far away from numbers.
As we slide closer and closer to election day, some political reporters are looking ahead to 2008 and the status of “value voters” and the evangelical vote.
Legislators must go crazy, whenever they enter the arena of church-state law, trying to write laws that protect the innocent without creating legal sanctuaries in which the demons of fraud and corruption have even more room to dance.
David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times has one of the better articles out there dealing with the religious right’s reaction to the Foley scandal. While Kirkpatrick follows the style of the Washington Post‘s Alan Cooperman by talking to people he finds to be average evangelical voters, he comes to a completely different conclusion: the Foley Scandal will not affect the evangelical turnout come November.
Some newspapers win Pulitzers through tenacious reporting, excellent prose and productive teamwork. The New York Times, which truly is one of my favorite papers, sometimes wins its Pulitzers by wielding its institutional clout, pulverizing readers with story after story about some expansive issue — seemingly dictated by editorial fiat rather than reader interest.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled across this post at Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire that cited a CNN interview in which President Bush said that history would judge the Iraq war as “just a comma.” He subsequently repeated the statement elsewhere and the good folks at Political Wire suggested that it was code meant for the religious right:
Dang it, that’s what I get for waiting an extra day or two before writing about that sprawling Los Angeles Times series, “The Vanishing Russians.” I was waiting until the last day to see if reporter Kim Murphy elected to dig into the religious questions raised all the way through this fascinating and depressing set of four articles.
