Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
There has been a slew of coverage of Miss California’s statements that she does not support gay marriage laws and her belief that her comments resulted in a missed chance at being crowned Miss USA. For a summary of the in depth, extensive coverage of the incident, and to make sure I don’t misconstrue any of the critical details of this factually sensitive story, here is a summary from the Associated Press:
The National Institutes of Health posted their draft guidelines for the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research last Friday. When President Barack Obama announced his new embryonic stem cell funding policy in March, he said guidelines would be set by the NIH. The new draft guidelines can definitely be changed in response to responses received during the comment period or through promised legislative action, but here’s how they stand now:
Over the years National Public Radio (NPR) has found a niche among listeners who want in-depth reports on complex issues. Their offbeat radio essays offer a sometimes idiosyncratic alternative to those who want more diverse fare than “news radio” and cable news may offer.
An interesting questions that my students keep asking about Internet journalism is whether information that is printed in online publications — as opposed to ink-on-paper text — is “real.”
When the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that marriage should be redefined to include same-sex couples, many media reports quoted people saying Iowa seemed an unlikely candidate for such a radical change to marriage law. Certainly Iowans never would have voted in support of such a change to their laws. But even though the decision is weeks old, media outlets have been strikingly incurious as to how gay rights activists managed this tremendous coup. One might imagine that if social conservatives had managed to, say, outlaw abortion on demand, the media might have been a tad more interested in how that political battle had been won.
In the wake of some give-and-take about what constitutes a religious and what a secular perspective on the recent post about the ‘death’ of conservative Christianity, I was much taken by a brief BBC Newshour story a few days on, of all things, ghosts. Did you know that, according to a recent Theos poll, almost four in ten Britons believe in ghosts? Five out of ten believe in heaven, and, and seven out of ten believe in the human soul. Apparently the belief in ghosts has actually grown over the past four decades.
Most news stories I have surveyed on President Obama’s speech Tuesday on the economy (among other things) have mentioned his use of the biblical metaphor of the nation’s economy being built on a rock, but few have gone beyond the message’s surface. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here.) For starters, none of the stories I read mentioned that President George W. Bush used a lot of religious metaphors and was at times criticized for using such language.
Please allow me to jump into tmatt’s file of guilt for a moment of confession about a recent news item from Fort Worth, Texas.
