Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Religion is one of the specialty beats in the modern newsroom where knowledge and experience can really pay off. There are times when it really helps to have seen the same kinds of stories develop over and over again, which allows you a chance to look further down the road and anticipate what might happen.
I received a lovely and witty email this morning from GetReligion co-founder Doug LeBlanc, who still lingers out there in cyberspace doing that copy editor thing that he does. This is a guy that knows what makes me laugh.
Please believe me when I say that I understand the frustration that many reporters experience while trying to cover the Anglican Communion wars. I also know that GetReligion is causing some frustration among some reporters with our insistence that reporters keep trying, trying, trying to find language that is accurate and (even harder) neutral at all levels of the conflict — local, regional, national and global.
A funny thing happened last week after I dashed off a quick post about that omnipresent “eternal life” item in the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey produced by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Most conversations about globalization focus on economic issues and, clearly, that engine of modernization turns many other cultural wheels. But anyone who has studied mass media knows that images from other cultures — especially advertisements and entertainment images — have a profound impact on their own. A professor of mine once said that that two main messages carried by most ads are (1) you do not own this and (2) you do not look like this.
What do you know, I had no idea that Sen. John McCain was in the neighborhood. I didn’t see the security ‘copters buzzing around the mountaintop.
If you think back to the beginning of this Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem, the assumption was that a pack of fundamentalist rebels was getting together to plan and then announce a schism in the global Anglican Communion.
It’s a question that has been bugging me for a long time: What, precisely, is that sprawling “On Faith” site over at the Washington Post Online?
