Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
You know, I laughed out loud when I popped open the first email asking me what I thought of this story. Then I did what any news junkie would do in this day and age. I slapped a silly headline on it and sent it to some of my friends.
Yesterday I pointed out the laughably biased spin the Los Angeles Times put on its own poll about support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. While the pro-marriage amendment folks had a 19-point lead over the nays, the Times made it sound like it was hanging by a thread and doomed to fail.
Sometimes I’m surprised at how little the media covers the vibrant world of online religion. Snejana Farberov of Columbia News Service penned a piece about, loosely, God and the internet. She describes how churches broadcast their sermons online:
The Newsweek headline — “Penthouse Gets Pious” — grabbed me. But the story doesn’t quite deliver. In it, business reporter Jennifer Ordonez’s story argues that internet porn is forcing adult magazines to diversify. Here’s how the story begins:
Sometimes when I’m watching Jeopardy, which I do every night, I like to guess what religion or denomination contestants belong to based on clues — the college they attended, the mission trip they went on, their hometown — from their brief introductions. So Newsweek‘s Sally Atkinson is a reporter after my own heart.
In March, an article in The New Yorker made some pretty big waves in Episcopal circles. As we discussed at the time, the article was actually a book excerpt from The Bishop’s Daughter by Honor Moore, whose father the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore was the trailblazing Episcopal Bishop of New York from 1972 to 1989.
News reporters are starting to step up to the challenge of exploring the complicated issue of why a person joins a church. A pair of articles published this week explore both sides of the coin that is a person’s decision to attend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
Ever since I saw the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed last month, I’ve been waiting for some mainstream media coverage of the film. Other than surprisingly few reviews — some by reviewers who didn’t bother to actually watch the film — I haven’t really seen anything.
When the Jeremiah Wright scandal first broke, I was one of the voices here calling for more context. Well, I’m done with contextualizing. Sometimes it’s nice to just get a news story that asks hard questions while treating a subject fairly.
