Just for the fun of it, pretend that you’re a line editor at a 100,000-circulation newspaper in the Southwest — say, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.
Ready, OK? Cheerleading in Arizona
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Weinergate: Repentance, forgiveness and contrition
So we’re at the confession stage of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s sex scandal. For those who haven’t been following along, I’ll try to give a quick recap.
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Pod people: hypocrisy & virginity checks
In the latest Crossroads, I discuss with host Todd Wilken the media coverage of hypocrisy, the murder of a Pakistani journalist and virginity checks in Egypt.
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Anti-Semitism and the 'intactivists'
I can’t imagine that a month ago many reporters thought one of the stories that would be grabbing a lot of attention would be efforts to criminalize the circumcision of a male minor. But a voter initiative qualified for the November ballot in San Francisco, and suddenly a lot of people seem obsessed with a little bit of skin.
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A rebel Anglican bishop in Zimbabwe
If generic New York Times readers know anything at all about Anglican bishops in Africa, surely they know that most of them are quite conservative on matters of faith and practice. For example, they are opposed to homosexual activity of any kind — a position that is very common on a continent in which their growing churches often directly clash with conservative Islam.
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CNN: Only social conservatives can be hypocrites
I don’t typically watch cable news, but too many people I follow on Twitter were insisting that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interview with Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was must-see TV. I was able to watch a repeat of the interview, which was good TV, for what it’s worth. Afterwards, there was a segment on crisis communications and how poorly Rep. Weiner has handled the situation.
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Ghosts in the Egyptian virginity tests?
CNN is up with a horrifying story about what female protesters went through during the recent Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. A senior Egyptian general has admitted that women were subjected to “virginity checks.” Amnesty International had alleged as such in a report following the protests. That group claimed that females “were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.” Those reports were denied. Things have changed:
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Survey says: I have better sex than you
Yesterday I pointed out the curious manner in which journalists wrote up a study showing that non-believers, Catholics and evangelical Christians have smaller brains than Protestants who don’t claim a “born-again” experience. But at least that study, though having a small sample size, was done by real academics at a real university using typical methods of analysis.
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Cutting edge synagogue-state clash
It would be hard to imagine a more apocalyptic battle between synagogue and state than the ballot-box battle that is unfolding in San Francisco over the right of Jews (and anyone else) to circumcise their newborn males. Now the battle is spreading down the left coast to Santa Monica.
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