Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
So this is what big religion news in the Los Angeles Times has come to: 281 words buried on AA5. In a glorified brief with a photo, in eight paragraphs stuck in the second section of the paper, came the news that the Vatican was seeking a replacement for Cardinal Roger Mahony:
We cover stories about the intersection of sports and religion a lot here, but I had to point out this New Orleans Times-Picayune piece about the strong ties the religious community has to the New Orleans Saints. I’m a huge fan of sports but not a huge fan of the way that some clergy elevate sports to the level of the divine. Still, this story did a good job of explaining how this interplay works in the unique alternative universe that is New Orleans.
Remember that reporter vice I discussed last week? If you need a refresher: Reporters and people and people are prone to temptation and maybe the greatest temptation of a reporter on deadline for a story they aren’t married to is to rely, often over-rely, on previously quoted experts.
In conjunction with yesterday’s annual prayer breakfast in Washington D.C., everybody’s got politics and religion on their mind. Or perhaps more appropriately, the religion of our politicians. The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut saw it as a fitting occasion to reexamine the religiosity of the President. The headline on the piece, “Obama’s spirituality is largely private, but it’s influential, advisers say” seemed to appropriately reflect the complexity of the issue, so I had high hopes for the story.
Reporters have a very, very bad habit. It’s a vice I discovered while still a cub reporter at the UCLA Daily Bruin and watched colleagues fall prey to over the years that followed. I’ve got to admit I fell victim a few times too.
When Scott Brown, R-Mass., was elected to the U.S. Senate a couple of weeks ago, I noted the lack of media coverage of his religious views. I had just assumed he was Roman Catholic since no one had said anything. Turns out he’s Protestant and belongs to a type of church that normally doesn’t get much media coverage.
Among the stories looking back at President Barack Obama’s first year in office, we’ve seen a few revisiting his worship life. More than a few readers sent in this story from ABC News, headlined “Holy BlackBerry! Obama Finds Ways to Keep the Faith During First Year in Office: Has the First Family’s D.C. Church Search Come to a Close?” Here’s the lede:
I constantly tell my students that one of the hardest tasks in journalism is to write a balanced, insightful profile of a controversial person. This is especially hard to do here inside the Beltway, but that is not the topic of the day.
On Thursday, a flight from La Guardia was diverted after a bomb scare. One of the passengers, a Jewish teenager, was doing his morning prayers and it alarmed the flight attendant. Not because of the prayers, per se, but because of the tefillin he was using. Based on passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy, Orthodox Jews use two small square boxes with straps attached to them and place on on the head and tie the other to the arm. Inside the boxes are parchment with Scripture.
