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That rumble you heard a day or so ago was a disturbance in the Godbeat — or in this case, perhaps, the gods-beat — Force. There was this announcement over at The Revealer, our lively counterpart on the left side of the aisle in the religion-and-press sanctuary.
I have been meaning, for the past day or so, to point GetReligion readers toward a withering Boston Globe report by Charles M. Sennott on the state of the Roman Catholic Church in postmodern Europe. (Hat tip to Amy Welborn, of course.)
We could have started an entire blog during the past six months on the subject of the Democratic Party and religion. Check out this package at The Dallas Morning News — in the new weekly Points section edited by Rod “friend of this blog” Dreher — on the theme “Can the Democratic Party be fixed?”
OK, OK, this story is a few days old, but I just had to pass it along because of the oh so sweet headline: “Christian Diets: Fewer Loaves, Lots of Fishes.”
I was flipping through the back pages of the news section of my local newspaper this weekend and this Associated Press story stopped me in my tracks.
According to the seminars offered by our friends at Poynter.org, one of the quickest ways to improve religion news coverage in the MSM is for journalists simply to stop removing the faith elements of stories in which they are already present.
No doubt about it — David Kelly at the Los Angeles Times has found a good story out in the red-zone wilds of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
In the book Boiling Point: Monitoring Cultural Shifts in the 21st Century, the evangelical pollster George Barna and writer Mark Hatch make the following observation about the awesome power of mass media:
Now here is an interesting media-relations question. What does it mean when a group of Democrats gets together to announce a package of legislation and the press conference merits a wave of coverage from the Christian Communication Network, the Conservative Voice and LifeNews.com, but the event receives no coverage at all — zero, zip, nada — in the MSM?
