Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Jon Meacham has occasionally cited John Adams as saying facts are stubborn things, but apparently some facts aren’t stubborn enough to be noticed by Newsweek under Meacham’s editing.
We haven’t seen a bill voted out of the House of Representatives yet, but the culture war about health care reform is in full tilt, with allegations from conservatives that bills will include federal funding for abortions — not to mention “death panels” that will chose who will live, and who will die.
If there is anything that unites most professional journalists, it is a love affair with what most of us call the “killer quote.” This is not a quotation that literally kills someone, although I have seen a quotations that all but killed someone’s career.
Every now and then I stop and think to myself, “How in the heckfire did I do my job — make that my jobs, plural — before there was email and the World Wide Web?
One in a series of stories about life in South L.A., this piece from the Los Angeles Times about a Catholic priest leading a lot of kids to a better life starts out with a ton of promise.
Late last year I thought about blogging on a Q&A with Robert Novak in Washingtonian magazine. Now, with Novak’s death after a long battle with brain cancer, I’ve found that the reporter in that Q&A, Barbara Matusow, also deserves credit for recording one of the best quips about Novak. Matusow did this in a remarkable — and at times painfully candid — 5,000-word profile published in the June 2003 Washingtonian. She describes Novak’s baptism at St. Patrick Catholic Church in downtown Washington:
As tmatt reminded us the other day, this summer is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, the music festival. The combination of music, drugs and fellowship can’t be repeated — or can it? Surfing the Pennsylvania media yesterday, I came across this classic from the Post-gazette.com, a reminder that for some of us, Woodstock never ended.
Some days, posting for GetReligion requires a great deal of work to explain some theological nuance that a reporter failed to understand. Other days, the work is downright easy. As is the case with pointing out the bias and problems in this hacktastic Associated Press piece on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Let’s make one thing clear: I am a smidgen too young to be into this whole, “Hey man, did you make it to Woodstock or not?” thing that’s going on in the mainstream media right now. My priest, however, is another matter, since he was there and I still think he looks like Jerry Garcia.
