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Theme stories frustrate me. The stories that are written annually are particularly annoying. Like around the start of school, or Christmas time. Typically reporters avoid them, and I don’t think they’re very popular with readers. But I guess they are necessary and some people enjoy them. If it’s Christmas time, you simply have to do something, right?
Peter Kann, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and chairman of Dow Jones, had a wonderful piece in The Wall Street Journal that I encourage you to read. Noting that CNN’s pre-election programming had names like “Broken Borders,” “Broken Government,” “Broken Politics,” he says the media, too, are in need of some mending.
Writing about atheism here at GetReligion would seem somewhat oxymoronic since we are well, a blog about the media’s coverage of religion. But even atheists have a degree of faith since it takes faith to believe that there is in fact no God out there.
Here inside the cloistered alternative universe called Washington, D.C., many politicos are paying an unusual amount of attention to the health of Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota. The latest, as of 42 minutes ago as I begin typing, is that he has been conscious at several times since last week’s emergency brain surgery.
We’ve been snatching up the hints, eating up the intimations and listening to mesmerizing speeches, but we are all still waiting for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. — the latest Next Big Thing in the 2008 presidential race — to tell us what he believes. No, not his position on the issues, or that he thinks Democrats should court evangelicals, but what he believes.
When a compelling book hits the stores, journalists covering the same subject can’t help but write about it. Rare and special are the books that break news with any real content, so in lieu of that, journalists seek external news angles in order to write about the book. It’s better than simply shilling for the publishing industry and writing a review, right?
This week The Denver Post‘s Eric Gorski broke a story about a Colorado megachurch pastor resigning amid allegations of homosexual conduct. The congregation in question is, like Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, down the road from where I grew up.
Do you hear what I hear? Conservative evangelicals are migrating their presidential hopes from Massachusetts to Kansas because of a letter Mitt Romney wrote in 1994. Or are they?
One of the most interesting stories in the 2006 Christmas Wars broke the other day in the Pacific Northwest, where the staff at the Port of Seattle hauled off all the Holiday Trees because of a conflict with a rabbi from the Chabad-Lubavitch organization about a long-delayed request to erect a giant Hanukkah menorah.
