Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It must be very difficult to maintain any sense of journalistic objectivity while writing about a family’s religious beliefs when it is almost certain that those beliefs are linked to the death of a child.
Anyone who spends any time studying the history of journalism, especially the American model of the press, knows that reporters and editors really, really, really love what they call “facts.” Some historians have even said that journalists worship “facts.”
It’s one thing to rip a routine or bad story. It’s another to criticize an excellent story with one flaw. The exercise can seem, and perhaps often is, pedantic. So if the criticism is to be convincing, it better be valid.
News media from around the world parachuted into Ohio and Texas this week to cover the much anticipated primary elections that managed to further the Democratic Party’s confusion over their choice for a 2008 presidential candidate.
It usually happens during Holy Week each year — a new rash of media pieces attempting to undermine miraculous stories about Jesus and his life. Some of them have been very bad, but the media find it difficult to miss this annual rite of passage.
There’s a controversy in Cincinnati about the “Bodies … The Exhibition.” However, it appears that there is no controversy at all about the same show in Baltimore.
The January/February issue of Psychology Today features a 5,000 word story, ostensibly on clergymen who lose their faith. While you have to get a copy of the dead tree version to read the whole thing, you can read the first few hundred words here. Having just finished writing a history of atheism for another magazine, I was excited to read the piece.
It is time to open up our Associate Press Stylebooks and read that entry, once again, about what is, sadly, one of the most popular words in modern journalism:
Apparently I’m not the only American with a new little bundle of joy. Bucking the trend in other industrialized nations, we’re experiencing a little baby boomlet, with the most children born since 1961. Some 4.3 million babies arrived in 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
