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May 20 is “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” We looked at coverage of this event a month ago. It was the brainchild of an illustrator upset at Comedy Central’s censorship of the South Park show. South Park, which has depicted the Prophet Muhammad in the past to no criticism, was pretending to depict Muhammad again. Comedy Central fearful of Muslim violence, blocked the pretend depictions and censored previous shows.
Recently I asked a woman from Nigeria what she thought of the media’s coverage of her country. She said what frustrated her most was when reporters gave sweeping statements or connected African countries as though it were one uniform nation. I thought of our conversation when I read a recent New York Times piece on Kenya’s culture wars. Stay with me as we read these first few paragraphs.
A reader submitted the following Cincinnati Enquirer story along with a list of questions left unanswered by the story. But before we get to some of those questions, let’s set the stage. Here’s the lede:
The Washington Post is known for puffy Style-section profiles of movers and shakers in the Washington area. A few years ago, we looked at the puffiest Washington Post Style profile I can recall. It was about Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL Pro-Choice America. We learned from that piece that she organized sales to benefit Mexican farm workers as a teenager, makes food from scratch, reads a lot (“every word in every paragraph”), and loves to wash dishes. Here was a sample from that hagiography:
Long-time readers of GetReligion know that since the beginning of this blog we’ve been playing whack-a-mole with reporters who misuse the term “fundamentalist.”
As you would expect, the Baltimore Sun is in full celebration mode when it comes to the consecration of the Rev. Canon Mary Douglas Glasspool of Annapolis as a new assistant bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. This makes sense for all kinds of reasons, in terms of the newspaper’s views of the changes that must be made to help build a better and more enlightened world.
Here at GetReligion, we write about reporters and their journalism. But you wouldn’t have stories without story subjects. And I always find it interesting when subjects discuss what it was like to be written about in an article.
Pope Benedict XVI is on a visit to Portugal. As is his custom for trips outside the Vatican, he takes reporters’ questions while in-flight. One of the responses has gotten quite a bit of media coverage. Here’s how Reuters put it:
As someone who spent four years in Eugene, Oregon, a.k.a. Berkeley North, I had a fair amount of exposure to Rastafarianism. I think most people’s only contact with the religion — if they’ve had any at all — comes from college kids and/or big weed-smokers who invoke Bob Marley, the religion’s most famous ambassador. The upper-middle-class white kids at school were constantly sparking up the one-hitter between classes were derisively known as “Trustifarians,” as in trust fund Rastafarians.
