Terry Mattingly

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Wanted: Religion reporter (no experience required)

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Back in the early 1990s, the leaders of the Freedom Forum think tank put together a team to study a nagging question: Why do mainstream newsrooms have so much trouble covering religion news? The result was a study titled “Bridging the Gap” (full text here) that, essentially, argued that the situation was pretty complex, but that the biggest problem was that most journalists simply didn’t know enough about religion.


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The Times salutes a smart evangelical

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You can tell that because, in reporter Michael Luo’s “Preaching the Word and Quoting the Voice” story, the New York Times stresses that the leader of the city’s Redeemer Presbyterian is not like those other evangelicals. Then the story tells the reader this again and again and again and again. (By the way, what does that headline mean? I’m lost.)


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Who lit the bomb in Nigeria?

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Anyone who knows anything about global religious-liberty issues has known for several years that Nigeria is a bomb waiting to go off. In the north, Muslim states have pressed for sharia law. In the largely Christian and animist south, leaders have struggled to embrace the rule of law, as defined in the West. The two legal doctrines cannot, by definition, coexist and, thus, Nigeria has been sitting on a legal and religious landmine.


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WashingtonPost.com catches a ghost

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Every morning, my email includes a news digest from the Washington Post. The nice thing about WashingtonPost.com is that the administrative tools allow me to set up a decently nuanced set of filters beyond the usual “national,” “politics,” “sports” and other topics that MSM leaders think are important.


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Rioters do not make good editors

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I know that the following op-ed piece isn’t hard news, but it is opinion about the shaping of the news. And I do think that some very interesting people are getting upset about the same things.


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Dawn Eden writes again

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For those interested in a GetReligion flashback, today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page includes a review of the new book Fired! by actress Annabelle Gurwitch. The book sounds interesting, especially its list of 21 synonymns that people in power use in this sensitive age in place of the blunt words “You’re fired.”


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A ghost in the syringe?

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Reader Matt Holiday says that he sees a religion ghost in the following Reuters story by Carolyn Abate, which describes the problem that California state officials are having finding medical professionals who are willing to take part in the execution of convicted killer Michael Morales. Here is the final section of the story, which contains the direct quote in which Holiday says he sees a ghost:


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