Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A few years ago, I covered an Atheist de-baptism ceremony where de-converts would blow dry their hair, attempting to reverse whatever they thought baptism meant. It was unclear how many of the few hundred officially renounced a formal membership where they had to do something specific to formally part ways, since it looked more like an excuse for a party.
I’m so old that I remember when Catholic leaders getting involved in anything even slightly political meant that journalists would write hard-hitting pieces. Sometimes journalists would just follow the “too political” talking points of well-funded PR campaigns run by political opponents of the Catholic leaders.
One of the things that your GetReligionistas keep saying — to the point of aggravating many readers — is that it is often possible for journalists to spot and define a religion ghost quite easily, using relatively few lines of type in this post-USA Today journalistic world in which we live.
Read the lede to this Minneapolis Star-Tribune story, and tell me if it doesn’t make your head spin:
I’m out of the country right now visiting my in-laws in Mexico. They don’t have wifi! So my posting may be a bit lighter the next few weeks as I cobble together trips in search of internet.
The deadly consequences of blasphemous speech have been the focus of some great writing on militant Islam and its intolerance of free thought. While I wish to take nothing away from these reports, I would urge GetReligion readers not to forget that censorship under the guise of hate speech laws is alive and well at home.
I can’t recall which television program I watched recently that had an interview with Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, but I remember thinking that I’d like to see more local coverage of this man who is so prominent among the Catholic bishops and their religious freedom focus.
A week ago I wrote a post headlined “Savvy PR firms drive coverage of HHS mandate.” I wrote it because it struck me that a Los Angeles Times story hewed pretty closely to the public relations campaign I’d been seeing — since first alerted to it by CNN — of a PR campaign orchestrated by Faith in Public Life, heavily funded by the Open Society Institute of prominent atheist billionaire George Soros.
