Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
So even though I’m normally complaining about how journalists only notice religion when it involves politics, I’m giving myself up to the political machine this week and discussing more stories about Romney and his Mormonism. Coverage has been all over the map. Contrast, for instance, this headline from The Boston Globe:
After the embarrassment of last week’s CNN-YouTube debate, you might think other media outlets wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Ordinary voters were given the chance to ask candidates questions via video. But many of the questioners weren’t so ordinary, including one man who served on two of Hillary Clinton’s committees.
Suppose American politics were a colas war, with conservatives representing Coca Cola and liberals Pepsi. A reporter tells you that a top presidential candidate drinks neither brand. That would be a real insight, right?
Our founder tmatt is too busy today to do an end-zone backflip, so I will comment on the news of Mitt Romney’s impending speech about his faith.
People read different newspapers for different reasons and, here in Beltway land, one of the main reasons people read The Washington Times is to be able to listen to some of the inside conversations in the conservative establishment — including its discontents. It’s kind of like centrist, churchgoing Democrats trying to read between the lines in E. J. Dionne Jr. columns in The Washington Post.
In a story about the right-to-life movement, reporter Nicholas Riccardi of the Los Angeles Times left readers with the impression that an individual human embryo is not, well, a human:
What is the point of reporting on Web rumors that are plainly false and contribute little to the political discussion? Unfortunately it becomes necessary when the rumors and false reports become too much of the story.
For several days, I have been trying to decide what to write about the teddy bear named “Mohammed” in the Sudan. I was trying hard to avoid it, since the GetReligionistas strive to write about how the press covers religion events, as opposed to commenting on the religion events themselves.
Newsweek‘s cover story this week about the roots of Rudy Giuliani’s worldview was like a one-sided, incomplete version of 1985′s Heaven Help Us. Both depicted Catholic schools in the 1950s and ’60s in New York City as authoritarian and rigid. But in contrast to the movie, which pointed out that many priests were holy, compassionate, and down to earth, Newsweek stressed that parochial schools were a breeding ground for autocrats like “America’s Mayor”:
