Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Like a gazillion other people, I’ve started reading The Christian Science Monitor each morning. That’s because former hostage Jill Carroll has been telling her story on its pages over the last week and a half.
Tom Cruise‘s dumping by Paramount Pictures for his off-screen behavior brings Scientology back into the news. It’s still too early to say for sure, but early news accounts are fairly clear that Paramount executives were put off by his crazy antics over the last year.
Oh the confusing tales that we journalists weave, except when we attempt to deceive by making them too simple.
On the terrorism beat, the big news of the day is that the phrase “martyrdom videos” is showing up in almost all of the leads written about the developments in London.
The New York Times ran a rather shocking article on British Muslim calls to violence. The hook is that the Antiterrorism Act of 2006 makes it a crime to glorify or encourage political violence but that some Muslim leaders are doing just that without government reprisal.
OK, I realize that Katie Couric is a superstar, kind of the Anglo Oprah, the touchstone Alpha Female for a generation of people who are seeking some way to find a television news mix that hits the heart buttons out there in the “we’re tired of politics and information” world of middle America.
“British Muslim Leaders Facing Generation Gap,” a Los Angeles Times headline informed us on Thursday. Is this news to anyone? Aren’t most leaders in Western cultures facing a generation gap of some kind or another? I know for a fact that there are gaps between generations [insert snarky comment here].
Altering photographs is nothing new, especially in this digital era. When applied to the news business, it is a Jason Blair-style crime along the lines of plagiarism and fabrication — maybe worse because altered images are sometimes difficult to detect and images are so powerful. The media watchdogs have largely failed in covering this issue of altered and staged photographs, and they are failing the public.
There are, of course, huge differences in the two stories. Great Britain seems to be dealing with genuine terrorists bent on mass murder while the French rioters were less terrorists and more gangs intent on creating havoc, and not necessarily death, in their neighborhoods.
