Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Today’s Times of London has a major story on a reconciliation program in Northern Ireland that has brought together Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants, including a woman who had prepared to be a suicide bomber. Here is the beginning of the story:
Somalia, in the news recently for its pirates, has faced chaos within its border for decades. Militia groups are fighting the government and the government is having trouble getting control. The New York Times ran a story about a recent attempt by the government to get an upper hand:
Can you believe it was seven years ago that Attorney General John Ashcroft was outed for covering up the statues of the naked ladies in the Department of Justice building? He apparently didn’t like being photographed in front of the statues (representing “The Spirit of Justice”) when he gave speeches and press conferences. It was major news and, as a result, fodder for weeks of late night talk show jokes.
An interesting questions that my students keep asking about Internet journalism is whether information that is printed in online publications — as opposed to ink-on-paper text — is “real.”
When the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that marriage should be redefined to include same-sex couples, many media reports quoted people saying Iowa seemed an unlikely candidate for such a radical change to marriage law. Certainly Iowans never would have voted in support of such a change to their laws. But even though the decision is weeks old, media outlets have been strikingly incurious as to how gay rights activists managed this tremendous coup. One might imagine that if social conservatives had managed to, say, outlaw abortion on demand, the media might have been a tad more interested in how that political battle had been won.
In the wake of some give-and-take about what constitutes a religious and what a secular perspective on the recent post about the ‘death’ of conservative Christianity, I was much taken by a brief BBC Newshour story a few days on, of all things, ghosts. Did you know that, according to a recent Theos poll, almost four in ten Britons believe in ghosts? Five out of ten believe in heaven, and, and seven out of ten believe in the human soul. Apparently the belief in ghosts has actually grown over the past four decades.
Most news stories I have surveyed on President Obama’s speech Tuesday on the economy (among other things) have mentioned his use of the biblical metaphor of the nation’s economy being built on a rock, but few have gone beyond the message’s surface. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here.) For starters, none of the stories I read mentioned that President George W. Bush used a lot of religious metaphors and was at times criticized for using such language.
Yesterday I noted a Detroit Free Press story that referred to a Good Friday Mass at a Catholic church. No Mass is celebrated on Good Friday but the service is called the Mass of the Presanctified. So I sort of gave the reporter a pass, even though it violates Associated Press style guidelines.
Journalism can cause some strange pairings simply because two things happen on the same day. World Series games and natural disasters, for example. Often that means that two disparate events end up in the same newspaper, but that doesn’t mean they should be in the same story.
