Politics

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Nope, no religion here

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It’s pathetic how American policymakers fail to recognize the significance of religion in the battle against terrorism. What is more pathetic, and likely a cause of policymaker’s failure to recognize religion as essential to understanding terrorism, is that journalists don’t really get religion in covering terrorism. If the newspapers and newscasts policymakers read and watch do not cover religion as an essential component of the story, it is not likely that the elected officials will understand its importance.


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Pounding the polygamy beat

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When Texas judge issued an order Monday allowing the parents in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to begin picking up their children, I noticed that the CNN headline was:


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A Saudi parish? Last Egyptian belly dancer?

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Here we go again. Newsweek has another one of those think pieces about trends in modern Islam that show movement toward a day when moderation will rule and extremists will be be disgraced as the fake Muslims that thinkers in the West hope and pray (if many Western thinkers pray) that they are.


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Evangelism as hate speech?

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A news story from across the pond about Christian preachers being told by police officers not to preach in a predominantly Muslim area is an example of how a news organization slant can present a relatively simple factual situation in any number of different ways.


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The Jurassic media landscape

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Being in the media criticism game, I like to read the various ombudsmen and press critics out there. I’m pretty sure Jack Shafer at Slate is my favorite. His criticism is unconventional and thought-provoking. His latest column looks back at novelist Michael Crichton’s 1993 prediction that mass media would die within a decade. When the decade came and passed and media remained strong, people thought Crichton misguided. But now that the media giants are faltering, Shafer revisits the issue with Crichton.


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Advocacy in search of evidence

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Back in March, we criticized some of the stories that came from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that one in four teenage girls had a sexually transmitted disease. Many of the stories were thinly veiled advocacy pieces. They argued that this sad statistic was the result of a national policy of abstinence education.


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