Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One cannot overstress the following fact: The whole “red” and “blue” typology works at the level of the Electoral College and, much more so, when applied to “progressive” and “traditional” cultures with counties (think college towns vs. rural) and zip codes (think latte artsy urban vs. Home Depot suburban). But it is impossible to divide American culture into two zones at the level of most people’s lives.
Some of you may have heard that we had a wedding down here in Palm Beach County. Yes, Donald Trump’s third trip to the altar did receive a little bit of media attention here and elsewhere.
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the Los Angeles Times is on a tear these days on the religion beat? Several times a week, the newspaper’s push-tech email I receive every morning includes two or three stories that dig into the religion hook of major events and the lives of interesting people.
During the past few years, I have hesitated to write about the national coverage of Baylor University’s academic civil war — either in my Scripps Howard columns or on this blog.
It’s time to play “spot the evangelical code words,” the game in which the Washington press tries to figure out when President George W. Bush is sending mysterious secret messages to those religious “values voters” who want to turn American into a theocracy.
The Ethics & Public Policy Center has posted its transcript of “Religion, Rhetoric, and the Presidency,” the speech White House speechwriter gave to two dozen U.S. and international journalists on Dec. 6. The text covers his remarks and then the response by National Journal White House correspondent Carl Cannon.
In the mid-1990s, I had a chance to speak to some editors gathered in a Bible Belt city — let’s leave it at that — about how to improve religion coverage at their newspapers.
A long, long time ago — a quarter century, to be precise — I was a copy editor and rock columnist at a daily newspaper in Central Illinois. Careerwise, what I wanted to do was write about religion, which was one reason I had studied the history of religion in America as well as journalism at Baylor University and then did a master’s degree in church-state studies, which combined theology, political science, history and some law.
Since the purpose of this blog is to look at mainstream coverage of religion news, you would think we would spend quite a bit of time dissecting the coverage of mainstream print’s only wire service dedicated to covering religion. Makes sense, right? That would be the Religion News Service, or RNS, now operated by Newhouse.
