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Here is a principle that I have tried to teach my journalism students in the decade since I left the newsroom and took a full-time gig in a college classroom. All together now: It is better to interview the person who is sitting in front of you rather than the person that you wish was sitting in front of you.
I was disappointed to see that James Carroll was the Washington Post Book World‘s pick to review John Cornwell’s new quasi-biography of John Paul II. A detailed read of the review did not let me up.
Much of the recent coverage and the commentary on James Dobson has been entirely predictable, focusing on the buffoonery of another evangelical seeing sinister forces behind another popular children’s show.
Last week, Father Kendall Harmon — an Episcopal priest who has had more than a few close encounters with the mainstream media — left a dangerous comment in response to my post about the Poynter.org debate inspired by Washington Times veteran Julia Duin’s comments on the role that experience and training play in quality religion reporting.
For the last few days, publications from dailies to weeklies to really happening websites have been putting the final touches on news and views packages on the Iraq elections, to be held Sunday (though expatriate voting has already started). And here the issue of news judgment becomes interesting.
On the evening of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, I frantically pounded out some commentary in which I invited readers to “spot the code” words in the text, those mysterious passages in which the president sent marching orders to the theocrats.
One cannot overstress the following fact: The whole “red” and “blue” typology works at the level of the Electoral College and, much more so, when applied to “progressive” and “traditional” cultures with counties (think college towns vs. rural) and zip codes (think latte artsy urban vs. Home Depot suburban). But it is impossible to divide American culture into two zones at the level of most people’s lives.
There’s little new about the story that Jamie “Jay” Bakker — the son of PTL Club cohosts Jim and Tammy Faye — survived a hellish journey through teenage alcoholism, reclaimed his Christian faith and has become a pastor in Atlanta. Bakker wrote about it in his autobiography, Son of a Preacher Man (2001).
Last week, when the whole world was abuzz with news that the Spanish arm of the Catholic Church had made noises to the effect that condoms were AOK in the fight against AIDS, a few friends asked me what I thought of this new development of doctrine.
