Politics

A moderate "sheikh of death"?

We’ve written at length about our frustration with the overuse of political terminology to describe religious groups. The labels “conservative” and “progressive” might mean something in politics, but they have their limits when it comes to discussion of faith.


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We're 0.8% of the coverage!

There was some unsurprising but sobering news from the folks over at Pew this week. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life analyzed more than 68,700 stories from 2009 and determined that religion stories accounted for 0.8 percent of the total news coverage from last year. That’s down a smidge from 2008′s 1.0 percent. By comparison, news about health care comprised 11 percent. Education and immigration, on the other hand, are about where religion coverage is.


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The sudden rise of violent rhetoric

Last week our powerful and very effective Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, of the health care legislation the House was considering, that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Well, we’ve passed that bill and some of us wish the media would have concerned itself with what was in the bill a bit more before the vote, much less after. But even before the House voted in support of the bill, most stories dealt with politics. And now that has descended into some pretty partisan media coverage. The media obsession of the moment is that health care legislation’s opponents are a violent and uncontrolled mob, the likes of which we’ve never seen (or something).


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