Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
For some reason, there’s just something about a billionaire pizza czar trying to build a neo-Frank Lloyd Wright Catholic college and a conservative, faith-friendly town to go with it that makes mainstream journalists get miffed. I mean, check out some of these earlier GetReligion visits to the press coverage of Ave Maria University near Florida’s west coast.
Your friends here at GetReligion are not big on reading the tabloids, but we have received a few notes from people asking what we think of the tabloid-esque coverage of Father Alberto Cutie, the famous “Father Oprah” of television and South Beach.
Every now and then, people send GetReligion gifts. Think of these gifts as GetReligion-esque posts that have already been written by people who do not write for this weblog.
So here is the lede on the Washington Post news feature about undrafted Washington Redskins offensive lineman Edwin Williams of the University of Maryland. He’s a long-shot to make the roster, but, well, he has cleared some big hurdles before. The religion angle is right up top, out there in the open.
It’s very hard to write a story about homosexuality, conservative activists, hypocrisy and politics without veering into religion — at least a little bit.
In a strange kind of way, a team of reporters at the Washington Post metro desk (including my long-time friend Hamil Harris) has written a fitting sequel for that recent news feature about the First Family’s struggle to find a church home, one that fits them in terms of political realities and the liberal Christian beliefs that drive the heads of the household.
If you read the comments threads on the Divine Mrs. MZ’s recent post on Notre Dame, President Barack Obama and the U.S. Catholic bishops (or some of them, at least), you can see that we are veering back into familiar territory. I am referring to the tendency among many mainstream journalists to make references to trends among “Catholic voters,” “American Catholics” and other broadly defined terms that reveal next to nothing in terms of usable information.
Now that the White House has settled the puppy issue, folks inside the DC Beltway have returned to whispering about the even more symbolic issue — the First Family’s church home. This means it’s time for a trip into tmatt’s folder of GetReligion guilt.
I meant to put a link up to this fascinating little essay earlier, but forgot in the blitz that is the final week of the semester at the Washington Journalism Center.
