Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
We are beginning to see some interesting advance stories based on the texts that Pope Benedict XVI will use during his upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Yesterday I raised some of the journalistic questions surrounding coverage of the raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in Texas. And I was happy to see I wasn’t alone in being intrigued by those questions.
The last few days have been filled with the sad story of the removal of over 400 children along with their mothers from a polygamous community in Texas.
One of our standard criticisms at Get Religion is that reporters focus on politics to the exclusion of religion. I wonder if the press grasps the flip side of this notion. By overlooking or underplaying religion, reporters fail to illuminate politics sufficiently.
Voodoo, in its New World form, is a syncretized religion. It blends religion native to West Africa and Central Africa with Christianity. Reporter Marc Lacey wrote about the new Port-au-Prince-based head of Voodoo in a profile for the New York Times:
Anyone who spends any time studying the history of journalism, especially the American model of the press, knows that reporters and editors really, really, really love what they call “facts.” Some historians have even said that journalists worship “facts.”
When I worked at the Charlotte Observer, a long, long time ago, one of the stars of the newsroom was a feature writer named Frye Gaillard. He’s been writing books for years now, but it seems that one of his earlier works was a bit prophetic.
Another day, another bomb and 43 more deaths. And this time there seem to be serious questions about what precisely happened near the Imam Hussein shrine in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, which is located inside one of the tightest security zones in post-surge Iraq.
Day after day, your GetReligionistas receive a steady stream of email from people who seem to pay little attention to what it is that we actually do at this weblog.
