Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
During my days at the Charlotte Observer, I had quite a few tense interviews with Southern Baptists. This in not surprising in a major New South city in the early years of the great Southern Baptist Civil War.
Once again, the New York Times is shocked, shocked to discover that a few of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops believe that there should be a connection between abortion (an issue treated with singular seriousness by the Vatican) and the ballot box (the final holy of holies for newspaper elites).
We don’t blog on opinion columns much, but there is a source and some factual material in this recent George Will column that points in the direction of hard news and that dreaded pew gap angle. So some Brits discover that the very essence of American conservatism is rooted in “anomalous religiosity” and the institutions that grow out of it in politics. So what is the answer to that? The development of a true religious left that is a winner, as opposed to the fading numbers of the old mainline. Once again — where is the Da Vinci Vote?
In most mainstream news reports, President Bush’s campaign is built on a foundation of right-wing religious zealots who want to lock homosexuals in closets, trample women’s rights and, what the heck, flirt with a Left-Behind nuclear showdown by building a Messianic Jewish megachurch on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
We don’t go out of our way, here at GetReligion, to write about articles featured in religion publications and we certainly don’t throw a lot of digital ink at the materials sent out by denominational press offices and public-relations companies.
Journalists cannot always predict which stories will cause a ruckus, but reporter Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News knew that his report about a local “Bus 19″ exhibit was going to raise eyebrows. The bus had been attacked by terrorists, with 11 people dead. Now it was being used as part of a tour to promote the cause of Israel. It was being displayed in North Dallas as part of the Yom Kippur holy day.
Months before the 1996 election, some of the politicos behind President Bill Clinton’s campaign tried to find out which poll questions best predicted a voter’s Election Day choice. On which questions were the lines most starkly drawn between a Clinton voter and a voter determined to pull the GOP lever in the voting booth?
This is one of many stories that I intended to write about last week or even earlier, but let me bring it up here on a quiet non-hurricane weekend. As regulars to the blog know, I have been highly interested in recent stories in the New York Times, the Associated Press and elsewhere, in which reporters seemed to be tiptoeing around a tense area in journalistic style — the rule about referring to an unborn child as a “fetus.”
