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 Religion Newswriters Association is currently meeting here inside the Beltway, which guarantees that somebody, from somewhere is going to release a boatload of new information about some trends in American religion.
When I was a cub reporter lo many years ago, I was advised to get great quotes. Getting the full context of the story was important; ensuring that the story was accurate and fair was important; but nothing was quite as important as getting great quotes. Great quotes, and only great quotes, made the Story.
Nothing makes you miss the former prevalence of overseas news bureaus like a really fantastic foreign service report. Emily Wax, who has moved from Africa to India, filed a personal but newsy account of the violence ravaging the state of Orissa.
Yes, your GetReligionistas are about to jump on Charlie Gibson and ABC News — again — about that serious error that took place in his interview with Gov. Sarah Palin. Actually, we also need to jump on one of Gibson’s defenders, which would be the all-powerful Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. I should stress that I am a huge fan of Kurtz and there are probably more of his books in my Washington Journalism Center course bibliographies than any other mainstream writer. I do not enjoy knocking one of my favorite mainstream journalists.
Give credit to Michael Slackman and Nadim Audi of The New York Times. For their story about Egyptians’ perceptions of the 9/11 attacks, the two reporters were not content to flip through their rolodexes and call a bunch of experts. No, they interviewed ordinary Egyptians on the street. The fruits of their shoe-leather reporting were mostly ripe.
If you are looking for the Bush White House to drop a bombshell on the fall campaign, keep your eye on the mountains of western Pakistan.
If you paid close attention to all of the mainstream coverage of the fighting between Russia and Georgia, you may have noticed that the stories ignored a crucial fact about these two nations.
A few weeks ago I wrote about an increase in coverage of the “diverse Amish” lifestyles and found it curious that there had been a great deal of minor news articles on various legal conflicts the communities were having with the governments around them. An answer to my curiosity arrived in the form of an Associated Press article on the fact that the Amish have nearly doubled their population in about 16 years.
