Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As part of our new effort to highlight opinion columnist and their work that could have and should have been covered as straight news, I wanted to highlight a pair of articles by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. The first, which dates just before Christmas, highlights some interesting statistics purporting to show that “[w]e liberals are personally stingy.”
One of the journalism terms we use on this site is the “hook.” Like it sounds, it’s that thing in the lede of a story that snags reader/viewer/listener attention. There is so much news and information competing for attention that news consumers need a reason to stop and read or watch or listen to your story.
We talk about “ghosts” quite a bit at this blog, by which we mean religious issues that are hiding, uncovered, in mainstream news stories.
Yes, it’s easy to criticize the work of an editorial intern, even one who is a Fulbright scholar and has a master’s degree. Still, where was a decent copy editor at The Nation when Drew Haxby wrote about the sexuality debate within Anglicanism? For that matter, why should any copy editor have to deal with so much stilted writing?
Many of us were born to teenage mothers or had children as teenagers. My dear father and President-elect Barack Obama were both born to teenage mothers. At this point in history, however, the general social outlook on teen pregnancy is that it is a net negative. Perhaps this is in part because teen marriage has declined significantly.
We normally focus on covering news in our posts, rather than commentary about news. After all, everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
It’s always interesting to see which data analysis or surveys get covered by mainstream media outlets and which don’t. A bunch of media outlets chose to highlight a study this week comparing 289 teens (average age of 17 in 1996) who took abstinence pledges at that time with 645 teens who were otherwise similar but didn’t take abstinence pledges. That is, the two groups shared, among other things, similar religious, sexual and political views. The study did not in any way compare either of these groups with the 11,000 or so teens from the same data set who didn’t take pledges and weren’t similar in their political views or religious views.
Back when I was a full-time religion-beat reporter, I was involved in covering several papal visits to the United States. There was a game that I used to take part in with several other mainstream reporters when we covered papal speeches, a game that I called “Spot the soundbite.”
