Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It would be interesting to know if New York Times reporters Michael Luo and Laurie Goodstein started work on their above-the-fold A1 story on the “new breed of evangelicals” before Jerry Falwell died last week. The story has been much discussed in the blog world (it’s currently number 9 on the NYT‘s list of most blogged stories in the last three days), but there really isn’t much new in this report.
Both Time and Newsweek have chosen to bid farewell to Jerry Falwell with one-page essays on whether Falwell’s death also means trouble for the political involvement of conservative evangelicals in politics.
All week long (while the Jerry Falwell coverage rolled on, with good reason) I have been puzzled about a strange story that I read in The Washington Post. Allow me to flash back.
It was just a week ago that we looked at New York Times reporter Amy Harmon’s story on genetic testing of fetuses. She wrote that some parents of children with Down syndrome are lobbying other parents not to abort their children with Down syndrome. The story, which was very well done, left me hungry for more coverage of genetic testing issues.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that an unnamed candidate could generate substantial interest in the Republican Party, particularly among the evangelical voters. The current crop of main tier candidates has been disappointing to them, and they are yearning for a candidate with whom they can fall in love. At least that’s the story line that journalists have been giving us lately.
Let’s not bury the lede: I have been surprised and pleased by the excellence of the mainstream media coverage of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death. I think it is crucial that, because his power has faded so much, journalists were able to step back and evaluate his life with less venom.
The general consensus in the day-after coverage of the passing of the Rev. Jerry Falwell has been that he ignited the political movement that is today known as the religious right. Here’s Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times:
As the masthead of this weblog says, we all know that there are times when reporters just don’t “get” religion. And then there are times when it seems that copy editors just don’t “get” what some religious terms mean or do not mean. It’s a puzzle.
The news of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death will undoubtedly receive mounds of additional press coverage beyond what is currently out there. Two news organizations that have a tendency to influence the rest — The New York Times and The Associated Press — have already weighed in and their reports are worth a close look.
