Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
From a media standpoint, Ted Haggard really is the gift that keeps on giving. And Associated Press reporter Eric Gorski has kept on the story of the former evangelical leader. His latest report tells us that Haggard will be assisting with promotion for a documentary following his life after he was brought down in a 2006 sex and drugs scandal.
Singer Alexandra Burke recently won top honors on Britain’s X Factor TV talent competition, and she drove Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” to the top of the pop charts. Ruth Gledhill of The Times asked her colleague Alan Franks to reflect on Cohen’s spiritual life.
Sometimes an artist appals believers by presenting a public work they construe as libelous or offensive. Those showings normally garner a fair amount of publicity.
Let me confess, right up front, that I am not a big fan of first-person celebrity interviews in the Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair style.
Journalists are often impelled to indulge in navel-gazing at the ping of an incoming email. One topic we tend to chew on, like a cow masticating her cud, is: do we display bias? Our second favorite: are we as bad as those other guys?
You might think that the debut of his Christmas special was as good a time as any for journalists to explore the beliefs of Stephen Colbert, one of television’s most vocal comedians, and 2008 Presidential candidate who disappointed millions (thousands? his immediate family?) by being forced to drop out of the race in South Carolina last year (go on and laugh –but who could have envisioned Minnesota’s Al Franken?).
I don’t know about you, but out here in the Philadelphia exurbs we are in the grip of the kind of crisis that brings the area to its knees– about four more inches of snow than apparently anyone expected.
Criticizing Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™, for churning out glurge is now criminally easy, but Paul Cullum betrays an ignorance of flyover country in writing about Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage (direct to DVD this week). Working from a 16-point memo of Kinkade’s filmmaking tips, Cullum first tries to classify Kinkade as “a postmodern Norman Rockwell for the evangelist set.”
Remember August (yes, it seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?) when the McCain campaign produced this Internet ad?
