Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Yes, it is news that the Democrats are fielding a significant number of candidates next Tuesday who are overtly opposed to abortion — and that at least a few have a decent chance of winning.
Two recent articles in the New York Times highlight a trend that hasn’t gotten much press attention so far this year: an almost unheard of number of anti-abortion challengers running as Democrats.
Trust me, I realize that there is no obvious religion angle in the now infamous opinion column by Michael S. Malone that ABC News dared to post on its website.
Religion reporter Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette produced a compelling and original article on the view evangelical women have on Palin as both a role model and a pulverizer of long-standing stereotypes. Rodgers mixes hard data from sources such as polls with softer anecdotes from a wide variety of perspectives that paint a narrative reflecting many of the discussions going on within the broad area of Christian evangelicalism.
I do not, as a rule, watch Fox News. I cannot, for example, understand why that network — which has such a strong foothold in red zip codes — has never done a better job covering religion news.
I know that I have said this before, but every time that I head out to Southern California, I pick up the Los Angeles Times and I’m reminded of how much news there is in the dead-tree-pulp edition, compared with what I usually see reading the same newspaper online. I always see extra religion stories and religion-haunted stories on paper that I don’t see in the digital world. Why is that?
A few days ago a reader sent in a really bad BBC article about French President Nicolas Sarkozy threatening to sue a company for selling a “voodoo doll” using his image. The piece was mostly a snarky take-down of Sarkozy and his other attempts at litigation and included this sort of laughable throwaway paragraph at the end:
As soon as I heard Sen. Barack Obama’s speech to Northern Virginians this week, I was sure we would have to do a post criticizing media coverage of it. The speech had some strong religious imagery, and in the past, religious references from politicians have been scrutinized and picked over. Here’s how the Washington Post covered the rhetoric:
Time for a confession: I am not so bothered, as a matter of journalism, by Jon Meacham’s two recent cover essays for Newsweek. Terry critiqued Meacham’s previous essay, and I’ll reflect more on this week’s essay, “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Blue.”
