Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Craig Gross, the founder of XXXChurch, has never been one to shy away from the tongue-in-cheek media attention that comes from running the the Internet’s “#1 Christian porn site.”
We’ve had many days of protests and the conditions are dramatically different now than even yesterday. Protesters, police and military are on the streets of cities throughout Egypt, despite a curfew and unbelievable crackdown on communications. News outlets are reporting that their staff are being beaten up, arrested, or thwarted in their attempts to get the news published and broadcast. There was a surreal moment when Al Jazeera was broadcasting while police were trying to shut them down. Reuters reports that more than 400 have been wounded, some with bullets.
Last week, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was arrested for the murders of eight people. Now, normally if anyone in the country is accused of murdering 8 people (and, in fact, a reading of the grand jury report indicates he is suspected in the murders of untold more, and I do mean untold), that would be big news. This has not been big news. It’s been covered, but not in the way the 24-hour news cycle covers, say, a missing blonde woman.
The 38th annual March for Life was held today, an event for which media coverage is always a contentious topic. The video embedded here is something that came out from a pro-life group after some of the media coverage of last year’s march. As such, the language is rather partisan. But I highlight it to show what, exactly, pro-lifers complain about. Others argue that these complaints are such an annual rite themselves that maybe pro-life leaders should take some of the blame for their public relations problems.
Freshly inaugurated as Alabama’s new governor, Robert Bentley already is making national headlines — but not the kind likely to excite the Republican or his press office.
Some media outlets are catching on to the fact that the new Miss America was homeschooled for most of her life, so I joked earlier that perhaps the Miss America pageant would become the next National Spelling Bee competition for homeschoolers. Between bikinis and ball gowns, though, pageants are probably a far cry from spelling bees (remember this fantastic CNN interview?).
I get most of my foreign religion news from Reuters. They consistently report on stories of global interest with an eye toward religious details. But this story left me a bit cold. It promises a lot with the headline “In France, far right seizes on Muslim street prayers.” But I never quite understood what that meant, much less whether “far right” was an accurate description of who we were talking about. It begins by describing how streets and intersections in Paris are flooded with Muslim worshipers on Fridays. They don’t have room in buildings so they pray in the street, rain or shine. No big deal to the locals, we’re told:
In the latest Crossroads podcast I talk about how the media invented a papal war on celebrity names out of whole cloth. That led into a broader discussion of how the media lost a bit of credibility this week with some poor decisions about how to cover the tragedy in Arizona.
Done right, journalism can be downright messy, filled with complex subject matter and competing voices — all given a fair chance to explain their points of view.
