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One rarely gets to see a religion ghost hiding in the details of a newspaper’s all-powerful manual of language, style and grammar. But there one was, drifting between the lines of a New York Times article on the hot new shops that, for a few hundred dollars, allow a woman to buy sepia-toned ultrasound digital prints of her unborn child to give to family members and friends — by hand or email.
The story of Sen. John “Call me JFK” Kerry and the Catholic bishops is going to roll on for awhile. There all kinds of hooks that journalists have not really explored yet, such as the nature of the divisions among the U.S. Catholic bishops and how these fractures are linked to other issues within Catholicism. For example: Do Catholics still need to go to confession? How often?
What a time for Google to get messed up. As I started work on this post, Google News had some kind of technical problem that mixed up the URLs for stories on same-sex marriages in Massachusetts and those on the video decapitation of American Nick Berg.
When we last visited the Palm Beach soap opera about the Menorah and the Nativity scene, the church-state experts at the Palm Beach Post had concluded that this was not a case that hinged on U.S. equal-access laws. No, it was about — cue drum roll — two uppity Christian ladies who were guilty of “recidivist anti-Semitism.”
Here are some dates to mark on the God-beat calendar. On June 17, Sen. John “What would JFK do?” Kerry is planning a fundraising event in posh Aspen, followed by several events in Denver.
It’s terrible work, but someone had to do it. Columnist Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News bravely leapt on a deadly radio the other day, daring to listen to another cycle of Air America programming so that others would not have to do so.
Javed Anjum was an 19-year-old Christian student in Pakistan who died on May 2 of “renal failure,” after suffering broken ribs and loss of eyesight. It also seemed that someone had yanked out his nails.
If someone really wants to start a media rumor, there are worse places to put it than PAGE SIX in the New York Post. Thus, for the past week, I have been watching the ripples spreading from this apocalyptic report, which is offered with minimal editing:
There was a sobering angle on the Iraq-prison abuse story today, hidden down in the body of the latest Howard Kurtz media column in the Washington Post. Find that headline, “A Kerry-Worrying Trend” and then dig down past the layers of inside-the-Beltway paranoia and score keeping.
