Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The carving of India and the subcontinent into tense, clashing nations is, literally, the greatest tragedy of the 20th century that hardly anyone in America knows about. It was a nightmare so hellish that some of its images and stories are simply not mentioned. The denial is that deep.
Death and burial issues bring up a complex mix of beliefs, faith, rituals, customs and cultural traditions. The Chicago Tribune‘s religion section was able to cover a few of the issues in a rather short story on the growing number of religious traditions specially catered to today in the Chicago area.
The news out of England is that the House of Lords has, in a landslide, voted to do away with Britain’s common — but almost completely irrelevant — law making blasphemy a crime.
News of a growing, sometimes militant, movement targeting Scientology has been brewing in tech publications for a number of weeks now, and mainstream press is finally stepping up to the plate to cover this rather significant situation. In a lenghy story Monday, The Los Angeles Times covers a couple of months worth of Internet and street protests against Scientology.
Whenever your GetReligionistas get together — face to face, as opposed to cyberspace — one of the things we bemoan is that our readers — that would be you guys — really don’t seem to respond much whenever we go out of our way to praises stories in the mainstream press.
I wrote last week about The Indianapolis Star‘s failure to cover or mention the fact that a candidate running for a local congressional seat in a March 11 special election would be the second Muslim member of the House if elected. A GetReligion reader in our comments pages noted that the newspaper faced the difficult role of writing for a public that “is not the most tolerant in the republic.”
This past summer I was talking with another religion-beat professional and this nationally known journalist put something into words that I had been feeling, but had not yet articulated. This scribe who will not be named said that on many days she or he felt like he or she was turning into a public-relations person for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
I have been putting off posting the second part of my dialogue (click here for earlier post) with freelance journalist Andrea Useem for two simple reasons: (1) I was out of town for a week, attempting to survive four days of traffic-challenged driving in greater Los Angeles and (2) we normally fill our 5Q+1 interviews with hyperlinks to all of the publications, schools, think tanks, etc., linked to the journalist’s career and, in this case, Useem has just been too busy for me to look up all of those links.
