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If politicians are going to wade into the faith vs. works debates in the book of James, then it is going to be a long, long campaign on the God beat. And what if the Vatican steps in as a referee?
Christianity Today has posted (and others, such as Poynter.org, have quickly linked to) a Tony Carnes story about the behind-the-scenes efforts being played by the Christian journalists in mainstream media who are close friends with former USA Today reporter Jack Kelley. The key lines are:
Anyone who writes in the New York Times editorial pages with the label “conservative” stamped on his forhead is going to take his lumps, even if he is the culturally progressive kind of conservative (pro-abortion rights, pro-gay rights) who would be welcomed in such a heady locale. So it’s no surprise that lots of folks are taking closer looks at David Brooks these days. This tends to happen when one betrays his class, even to a tiny degree.
My first full-time job in journalism was working as a copy editor, which meant that I spent much of my trying to write good headlines to go over news stories. One of the first rules I learned was this: Don’t put a funny headline on a story unless you think there is something truly funny about the content of the story.
Press coverage of the Episcopal House of Bishops is rather low key at this point, since anyone who has covered this story for a decade or two knows this “pastoral oversight” document isn’t going anywhere.
It may seem strange to blog the “competition” on the God-beat beat, but so be it. Jeff Sharlet over at New York University and TheRevealer has spotted a major ghost in the mainstream press coverage of the death of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Everyone is talking about the fall of the “spiritual leader” of Hamas and the militant Palestinians, yet no one seems to be putting any content behind that loaded word “spiritual.”
Kelly McBride has a thought-provoking essay up in the Ethics Journal at www.Poynter.org dissecting the case of the lesbian journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle who were removed from major roles in coverage of the ongoing same-sex marriage story after they got married.
In a quick glance through some of the coverage of the United Methodist trial of the Rev. Karen Dammann (shown at right in a United Methodist News Service photo) I found something interesting — a newspaper bravely steering to the left of the New York Times in coverage of a moral and religious issue.
