Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
If there is a list of GetReligion’s deadly journalism sins that affect religion coverage, one of the top items has to be this one: Don’t play the God card unless you intend to follow through and offer the reader some facts about the actual role that faith played in the story.
Sorry ’bout this, but it’s time for another picky post on religion-beat linguistics. But first, a question about one of the biggest and most important religion trends of the late 20th century.
Which is amazing if you stop and think about all of the important religious events and trends that made it into the headlines this week.
Suffice it to say that the Newspaper That Lands in My Front Yard has a complicated church-state story on its hands. It’s one of those stories that takes place when civil religion collides with free speech (and old local traditions) and the usual suspects start getting mad.
Clearly, we are in the early stages of a major wave of mainstream and niche-media coverage of the new John Jay College of Criminal Justice report about the half century or so of clergy sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
First of all, my apologies that this Crossroads podcast is arriving several days late. You see, some key members of your GetReligionista team have spend quite a bit of time on airplanes in the past week or so heading hither and yon (seeing snow on the ground as I went through the Denver airport really brought back some high-altitude memories for me).
We had an interesting discussion the other day in the comments pages after my post about coverage of the decision by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to approve the ordination of noncelibate gays, lesbians and bisexuals (and potentially cohabitating straights, as well). The discussion focused on the old, old, old Godbeat term “mainline Protestantism.”
It was the little Reuters story that launched 1,000 winking headlines as the week came to an end. Surely you saw some of them, such as the two that caught Mike Allen’s eye for Playbook:
