Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
What we have here is the kind of commentary on the news that GetReligion tries to avoid, since the purpose of this blog is to offer criticism — positive and negative — of actual religion-news coverage in the mainstream press.
Let’s face it. Your GetReligionistas have been doing what we do for quite some time now and, at this point, it takes a lot to shock us when it comes to journalists leaving religion-shaped holes in important stories.
One would think, after decades of liberal Protestant battles about sexual morality, that each and every American journalist who comes near one of these stories would have the basic facts down pat.
What we have here is an interesting New York Times feature story about a dead or dying community, one of those rust-belt towns in which — this is a fact — the economic realities of this age are giving people less and less to live for.
GetReligion, as we frequently remind readers, is not a religion-news site. It’s a weblog about how the mainstream press struggles — with good and bad results — to cover religion news, including hidden or even obvious religious “ghosts” in stories that are not obviously about religion.
Anyone out there in GetReligion reader land today who, for whatever reason, feels the need to get depressed?
First let me note that, even as we justifiably debate some questions about the life, death and burial of Osama bin Laden, I am one of those guys who think that mainstream press coverage of the religious elements of this story has actually been quite solid — in some cases pushing past the early answers from the White House and into unexplored territory.
Hang on, because this is going to be a strange post. It’s possible that this only makes sense to me, at the moment.
All kinds of people have, during the past decade or two, voiced all kinds of complaints about the state of journalism as practiced in our mainstream media. Many of these complaints are even accurate.
