Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Long ago, while I was on the religion beat at the Rocky Mountain News, I covered several protests linked to military facilities — including a memorable day following Catholic activists out across the prairies of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas looking for nuclear missile silos. Sometimes people got arrested, but most of the time the authorities looked the other way.
From time to time, your GetReligionistas have enjoyed poking fun at the mainstream journalists who cannot, simply cannot, accept the fact that Focus on the Family czar James Dobson is not the Rev. James Dobson.
In the wake of EEE’s post on the latest nonNewsweek sermon from the Rt. Rev. Jon Meacham, please allow me to jump in with a comment or two on the Wall Street Journal counter-statement — before several dozen readers send me the URL.
If reporters want to get their telephone calls returned promptly, all they have to do is ring a branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Journalists may not get the information that they’re seeking or the full cooperation that they need — especially if they are working on a story linked to doctrine, the faith’s many critics or accusations by ex-Mormons — but that call is going to get returned.
Every now and then, some other organization or person gets out a sharp knife and attempts to do unto some mainstream news source what GetReligion does unto others day after day.
I thought I had heard everything about the deep, deep roots of the sexual abuse scandals — plural — in the Roman Catholic Church. I say “plural” because they really go back to the early 1980s and the waves of acid have been rolling in ever since.
We may need to start some kind of petition to the Associated Press to ask for some kind of warning in the stylebook about use of the word “devout” when used to describe religious believers. We have seen similar issues with the word “practicing” in front of the word “Catholic.”
So the ever snarky team at the Washington Post Style section decides to do a feature story about male circumcision.
Not to bury the lede or anything, by when it comes to religion writing, Prof. Ari L. Goldman of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has been there and done that. During his two decades at the New York Times, he was one of the nation’s most trusted bylines on the religion beat and I have heard that judgment voiced by a stunningly broad range of clergy and Godbeat critics.
