Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
According to the seminars offered by our friends at Poynter.org, one of the quickest ways to improve religion news coverage in the MSM is for journalists simply to stop removing the faith elements of stories in which they are already present.
It’s always a pleasure to see an independent weekly breaking news of national importance, which The Stranger (Seattle) is doing in a story involving Microsoft, an African American megachurch pastor and a proposed gay-rights bill in the state legislature.
No doubt about it — David Kelly at the Los Angeles Times has found a good story out in the red-zone wilds of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
Ernesto Cardenal’s time in the media spotlight was brief but iconic. The bearded poet of the Sandinista revolution removed his beret and attempted to kneel when greeting Pope John Paul II in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1983. John Paul not only stopped Cardenal from kneeling but also delivered a finger-wagging scolding about the priest’s volunteering his talent for verse to the Sandinista cause.
Given that newsstand copies of the May Harper’s have an ad flap that reads “The Christian Right’s War on America,” it was only a matter of time before one of us GetReligion sleuths broke down and bought a copy to investigate.
In the book Boiling Point: Monitoring Cultural Shifts in the 21st Century, the evangelical pollster George Barna and writer Mark Hatch make the following observation about the awesome power of mass media:
Now here is an interesting media-relations question. What does it mean when a group of Democrats gets together to announce a package of legislation and the press conference merits a wave of coverage from the Christian Communication Network, the Conservative Voice and LifeNews.com, but the event receives no coverage at all — zero, zip, nada — in the MSM?
I know this may sound too crazy to be true, ladies and gentlemen, but some university professors had their doubts about the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Try to wrap your head around this: Some adult Roman Catholics who had earned degrees and were paid to teach young people held on to the quaint notions that moral and theological truth flow from a transcendent source; that sex outside of marriage is a moral wrong and will harm people spiritually and, often, physically; that shouting down your professor is boorish and anti-democratic; and that, while the church favors democracy in secular governments, the church’s dogmas are not subject to a popular vote.
