Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
OK, I realize that Katie Couric is a superstar, kind of the Anglo Oprah, the touchstone Alpha Female for a generation of people who are seeking some way to find a television news mix that hits the heart buttons out there in the “we’re tired of politics and information” world of middle America.
For some time now, the Los Angeles Times has been running a feature, Outside the Tent, in which the editorial page invites the newspaper’s critics to take their best shots at specific issues.
For those who are curious, I am hanging in there on our request for a correction in em>The Washington Post about that April story by correspondent Karl Vick. That was the one with the headline that said “In Turkey, a Deep Suspicion of Missionaries: Priest’s Killing Shows Complex Ties of Islam to Nationalism in Officially Secular State.”
As a rule, GetReligion limits itself to dissecting the work of mainstream journalists when they wrestle with news stories about religion. But, every now and then, you see a story in which your heart really goes out to the journalists who are trying to do this difficult job.
There is a rather interesting sort-of GetReligion piece in The Wall Street Journal today, only it isn’t written by one of us, and the author — that would be former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg — doesn’t really dig into the religion issues all that deeply. The piece is called “Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Neighborhood,” and it focused on that CBS interview Sunday night that pitted the aging lion Mike Wallace against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Once upon a time, news stories used to break at the local level and then, gradually, work their way up the news food chain through the wire services until they reached, or failed to reach, the national newspapers and networks.
This weblog has received a fine comment from Neil Averitt, author of the Washington Post travel piece about his visit to Mount Athos that I mentioned last Thursday. Since this is precisely the kind of dialogue with journalists that this blog welcomes, I thought I would pull his letter out of the comments pages to share with more readers.
As noted in the past, Newsweek Managing Editor Jon Meacham really doesn’t do ordinary journalism anymore.
