Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Back when I was a full-time religion-beat reporter, I was involved in covering several papal visits to the United States. There was a game that I used to take part in with several other mainstream reporters when we covered papal speeches, a game that I called “Spot the soundbite.”
I am happy, but not surprised, to find that GetReligion has readers in moderate Muslim circles, especially when it comes to issues of women’s rights and the actual practice of that faith.
While my recent thread about rites on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day rolls on and on, please allow me to raise another seasonal issue that is dear to my heart.
This is not the Christmas story that I wanted to write about, today, but The Los Angeles Times has raised a question that makes it, for me, a must cover for this weblog.
During the past 25 years or so, I have written more than my share of mainstream news stories and columns about religious seasons.
Here’s the perfect Christmas and holiday season gift for that local editor that you’ve been meaning to call about the quality — good or bad — of the religion-news coverage in the newspaper that lands in your front yard each morning.
Once upon a time, the editor of the New York Times wrote a memo (PDF here) to his staff in which he waxed philosophical on a number of matters important to his newspaper. The inspiration for his memo was a self-study document (PDF here) that followed an investigation into a number of ethical lapses at the old gray lady of newsprint.
Nothing stirs up as much GetReligion guilt in my heart as the arrival of a new issue of The Atlantic Monthly in my mailbox at work. Month after month, it seems that there is some giant story that I want to write about on the blog — immediately, post haste — yet it is so long and involved that it just keeps slipping and slipping and, well, then that new issue arrives and stirs up my guilt.
