Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I decided to look in the Reporter’s Holy Book, by which of course I mean the AP Stylebook, to see what those gods of style have to say. The entry for abortion reads: “Use anti-abortion instead of pro-life and abortion rights instead of pro-abortion or pro-choice.”
When I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I wrote my master’s thesis on the struggle in mainstream newsrooms to improve coverage of religion. A short version of that turned into a 1983 cover essay for Quill.
Regular readers of GetReligion will know that we don’t spend much time blogging about religious media, unless it is a site offering very solid information that is of interest to mainstream Godbeat reporters. The work of Ted Olsen and the CT blog crew leaps to mind. There are valuable sites on all sides of the Anglican Wars, too. And so forth and so on.
Mercy! What a 48 hours or so to disappear into the zoo of I-95 while listening to the latest Harry Potter novel. It seems that I have missed a minor development up here in the greater Washington area.
From time to time, GetReligion, The Revealer and other sites that dissect religion coverage are criticized for being too negative and not pointing out the good as well as the bad.
The Associated Press has producted a solid update on an emerging MSM theme in the wake of the London bombings — the debate inside mainstream Islam over when violence is acceptable and when it is not. A serious uptick in coverage of this issue is crucial, especially for moderate Muslims and others interested in religious liberty.
The snail mail is extra, extra late today here in West Palm Beach. So late that it may end up being delayed into the regularly scheduled evening summer thunderstorm.
OK, OK, but for about half of America — for competing reasons — this is a religion news story. Here is the early Los Angeles Times review — by Emily Green — of you know what. Everyone keep their eyes open for religion-angle stories tomorrow and Sunday.
One of the ongoing themes here at GetReligion is that it is hard to jam the MSM into either a pure liberal or pure conservative camp. Here’s a sample of that from a few weeks ago. Instead of old-fashioned left and right, what the media research finds is a consistent pattern of libertarianism on moral and social issues. Thus, the constant tension between the MSM and traditional religious believers.
