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 you’ve been reading GetReligion for very long, you probably know that “cult” is the kind of word that is almost impossible to use in public media without causing riots. Are we talking about a dangerous sociological cult? A doctrinal cult? If so, which religious group’s doctrines are providing the frame of reference in this case?
One of the news items creating buzz inside the DC Beltway this week is a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post exploring the lives and beliefs of African-American women.
One of the first things that I do with student journalists is teach them the following trick. If you are struggling with some particularly tough passage in a story, perhaps a tricky paraphrase with some complicated grammar, then it is wise to print a copy of your rough draft, walk away from the keyboard and read the stuff out loud. Most of the time, your ears will catch the mistakes.
The other day, I posted a blog about Baltimore Ravens cornerback Cary Williams, a young man with a remarkable and at times tragic life story. The plot changed for the better, however, when he went to live with a relative who turned out to be an ordained minister, even if the Baltimore Sun didn’t seem interested in that particular angle of the story. There was tons of evidence that faith played a major role in this story, yet very little of that information made it into ink.
Confession No. 1: There are times when I am reading a story in a major newspaper and, after two or three paragraphs, I am seized with this premonition that the story is going to be “haunted,” that there is a religious “ghost” linked to this topic and that journalists are not going to see it.
So what we have here is precisely the kind of editorial, op-ed, slanted, European-style, advocacy New York Times piece that makes many GetReligion readers spew their coffee and exclaim, “What in the %#@$%^ *&^$ is going on here? This is terrible! I can’t wait to see what the GetReligion gang has to say about this!”
Once again, let’s repeat together the following foundational truth of journalism — reporters are not responsible for the headlines that grace or disgrace their news stories.
It takes a certain amount of courage to write a news story about the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
From the day GetReligion opened its cyber-doors, we have argued that the liberal half of American Christianity deserves more coverage in the mainstream press. Most of the time, coverage of Christian liberalism turns everything into politics even faster than coverage of traditional, doctrinally conservative forms of Christianity.
