Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Sometimes reporters should be commended for nothing more than tackling tough stories. The Washington Post‘s Pamela Constable looked at the vitally important but explosive issue of wife abuse in the Muslim community.
In his feature article “Let’s Die Together” in the May Atlantic, David Samuels does a heroic task of explaining why anonymous group suicide is becoming popular in Japan. The opening image Samuels uses, of a car in a Tokyo suburb in which five young men and one young woman died together, reminded me of a scene in P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men, in which a group of elderly people on a bus cruise hold hands and jump to their deaths from a cliff.
Singer Sheryl Crow has been in the news recently for her confrontation with Karl Rove and her thoughts that we all need to use less toilet paper. But it was a local story out of St. Louis that caught my attention. Religion reporter Tim Townsend writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a trip the singer was making to St. Louis to raise money for a Catholic hospital that helps children with cancer.
Sometimes readers wonder why we look at mainstream media coverage of abortion. A few have suggested it’s not a religious issue. Yet many religion reporters routinely cover both the pro-life and pro-choice movements and cover abortion regularly. Well, the losing side of the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has been noticing religion. Readers have sent along various anti-Roman Catholic opinion pieces — most notably The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s cartoon and Rosie O’Donnell’s screed on The View. But we don’t care whether editorial writers or pundits have opinions on religious issues. That’s just what makes for an exciting editorial page. Although even Rosie O’Donnell’s crazy conspiracy theories don’t salvage The View, do they?
Every now and then, you read a feature story in a major newspaper and, as you read and read, you think to yourself: “OK, at some point, the reporter just has to raise a moral or religious question about all of this. Don’t they?”
It has been quite some time since GetReligion plugged one of the weblog offerings of Christianity Today and the omnipresent Ted Olsen.
The mainstream media explanation for the tragic actions of a young college student in Blacksburg, Va., has been that he was troubled, sick, mentally ill and a textbook case of a school shooter.
In a 5-4 ruling earlier this week, the Supreme Court upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The mainstream media are known for struggling with abortion coverage.
You’ve been out there clicking from site to site, because you know that the 24/7 cable-news channels are trapped in old-video-loop hell. You’re looking for new information, but you are also waiting.
