Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Sally Quinn, the atheist who professed knowing “practically nothing about religion or the internet” when she started the Washington Post/Newsweek religion site On Faith, had a curious admission in her most recent piece. Her essay is about how the news of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy will affect religious voters. She begins by admitting that Sen. John McCain’s pick of Gov. Sarah Palin angered her.
Of all the stories I’ve seen about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, one stood out as particularly good. TIME‘s Nathan Thornburgh reported on the story from Wasilla, Alaska, and the trip there seemed to have affected him — in a good way.
In the spring, I encouraged reporters to write about the California Supreme Court’s decision to redefine marriage from the viewpoint of religious traditionalists and not just religious liberals and seculars. So I was happy to come across a recent story in The Los Angeles Times with the headline of “California churches plan a big push against same-sex marriage.” Finally, I thought, on this issue reporters were getting traditional religion.
On Wednesday The Chicago Tribune turned its pages over to advocacy journalism representing the unfortunate attitude that the West knows best, and the “poorer parts of the world” must conform to the rules established by modern experts to keep the world from falling into a state of calamity. This article by the Tribune‘s London correspondent Laurie Goering proclaims that everyone should have fewer children (though it fails to provide the precise number) in order to prevent global warming and keep the planet from over-populating.
The news of poll results showing that two thirds of all British Muslims students do not believe that it is OK to kill people in the name of Islam creates an interesting case study of poll coverage. Or something like that.
A day or two ago, I ended a post about the announcement that Sen. Joe Biden would be Sen. Barack Obama’s running mate with the following question:
While the religion angle was soft in first-day coverage, expect plenty of references to Sen. Joe Biden and his rosary beads in the days ahead.
Have you read Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy? The book is a favorite of mine. Its greatness lies not only in the story, but also its accumulation of detail. In reading the book I felt as if I knew all about Clyde Griffiths– his shame at his poor Christian parents, his envy of the wealthy guests at the Kansas City hotel where he worked, his cold-blooded plan to murder his working-class pregnant girlfriend.
In news lingo, there is this thing called a “follow” story and it is something that modern, shrinking, distressed newsrooms rarely have the time or resources to do.
