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During the past decade of so, pollsters have begun paying attention to an interesting phenomenon. A growing percentage of young Protestants who would ordinarily be called “evangelicals” have started running away from that word.
For this week’s Crossroads podcast, host Todd Wilken and I discussed media coverage of the spirituality of Wall Street protestors. We’ve frequently noted the hostile posture that many news outlets have toward those religious activists who have conservative positions but in many ways the treatment received by religious activists who have liberal positions is even worse. That’s because they’re largely ignored. This was definitely a problem with early coverage, although it has improved, as we discussed in a recent post.
Last night, I was reading a couple of stories that suffered from the same problem. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
Back when the Occupy Wall street protests began, I complained about the lack of coverage in general and the lack of coverage of religion angles in particular. When the coverage improved, I made sure to note that as well. It’s my observation that the best reporting comes from ideological outfits, particularly (as you might suspect) on the more progressive side of things. ReligionDispatches is a great resource, for instance.
Last week we looked at some of the few stories about Muammar Gadafhi’s death that engaged religion angles. This past weekend, the religion angle became unavoidable.
One of those news outlets that does consistently great religion coverage, most of it of the global variety, is Reuters. Its Faith World blog is one of the best ways to stay on top of big news from around the world. Case in point — this fascinating story about Macedonians being pressured to convert to Islam in Pakistan. Elswhere on Reuters is a good discussion of how newsrooms should approach graphic image distribution when it comes to showing the corpses of men who’ve died as Moammar Gadhafi did. (Confused about all the spellings for Gadhafi? See here.)
Religion flared up in last night’s debate in Las Vegas, with Anderson Cooper asking the GOP presidential candidates to address questions about whether or not to vote for a candidate based on their faith.
Today was a long day and I didn’t get to dig into the tree-pulp edition of The Washington Post until after dark, during a later-than-normal commuter train home to the south side of Baltimore.
