Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As always, the goal here in GetReligion land is to dig into the nuts and bolts of religion-news coverage in the mainstream press. Truth is, this is easier to do when the coverage is bad than when it is good. Besides, when we praise coverage almost no one writes comments and these good-coverage posts do not affect the trolls who say that we hate the mainstream press.
If asked to prepare a list of mainstream foreign correspondents who “get religion,” Pamela Constable of the Washington Post would be in my top handful of names. Simple stated, she does not look at conflicts that are packed with religious language, symbolism and actions and then automatically assume that this is the result of “tribalism” and/or vague “sectarian” forces in the culture. In the past, I have also pointed GetReligion readers toward her evocative memoir — “Fragments of Grace: My Search for Meaning in the Strife of South Asia.”
With Brigham Young University still alive in March Madness, the news ripples continue to expand from the earlier coverage of the suspension of hoops star Brandon Davies for violating the school’s moral code. It isn’t surprising, in other words, that editors still have Mormon moral dilemmas on their minds.
The Catholic Cuomos of New York are constantly in the news, which means that journalists are continuously having to wrestle with adjectives.
One of my many seatmates during my nearly 24 hours of travel this weekend (remind me to tell you about the married woman sitting next to me who spent hours hitting on her 19-year-old colleague sitting next to her) had a copy of the Wall Street Journal. In it was a beautiful essay by Ian Buruma, the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College.
I have heard one question over and over in the past three or four days: “What do you think of the Washington Post Magazine story about the whole uproar in the Orthodox Church in America about Metropolitan JONAH?” Or words to that effect.
What you think of the following Calgary Herald story will largely depend on how you answer the following two questions.
So what we have here is a mysterious CNN report that raises way more questions than it answers and, frankly, the kinds of questions that readers are able to raise about this story are making me frustrated.
When dealing with bloody events that take place in the Islamic world — such as the beheading of reporter Daniel Pearl — mainstream reporters often argue that these events are essentially political and, thus, have little or nothing to do with religion.
