Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times is a columnist and, thus, tends to produce the kinds of opinion-driven pieces that we don’t deal with a lot here at GetReligion. However, we will mention op-ed pieces and work in advocacy journals (you know, like Newsweek) when we think the topic will be of interest to journalists who cover the religion beat.
The Detroit News and Baltimore Sun recently produced two shockingly non-news worthy articles about the role or religion in this 2008 presidential election.
Yes, it is news that the Democrats are fielding a significant number of candidates next Tuesday who are overtly opposed to abortion — and that at least a few have a decent chance of winning.
Two recent articles in the New York Times highlight a trend that hasn’t gotten much press attention so far this year: an almost unheard of number of anti-abortion challengers running as Democrats.
Religion reporter Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette produced a compelling and original article on the view evangelical women have on Palin as both a role model and a pulverizer of long-standing stereotypes. Rodgers mixes hard data from sources such as polls with softer anecdotes from a wide variety of perspectives that paint a narrative reflecting many of the discussions going on within the broad area of Christian evangelicalism.
Margaret Talbot, writing in the latest New Yorker, has a fascinating piece about evangelical teenagers’ sexual attitudes and practices. It begins by noting that the news of and reaction to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy shocked liberals. They expected evangelical voters to freak out over the news rather than be unfazed by it:
I know that I have said this before, but every time that I head out to Southern California, I pick up the Los Angeles Times and I’m reminded of how much news there is in the dead-tree-pulp edition, compared with what I usually see reading the same newspaper online. I always see extra religion stories and religion-haunted stories on paper that I don’t see in the digital world. Why is that?
Do British faith-based programs for prisoners help them walk the straight and narrow while in jail and cut recidivism rates when they get out?
Your GetReligionistas have been jumping all over the Los Angeles Times, in recent months, because of its cheerleader reporting on issues linked to gay rights and gay rites.
