Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I am not a big Huffington Post reader, but I do pay attention to the blogging of a friend of mine named Mark Joseph, one of those journalism students who went to the dark side and works in Hollywood. MJ just shot off an interesting critique of some of the early U.S. Supreme Court coverage — especially the stories focusing on the religious beliefs of nominee John Roberts and his wife, Jane.
I had to read this dispatch by a Rome correspondent for The Economist a few times to see if I had missed anything: some hint of parody or that refined British sense of irony perhaps. Alas, the report was just as humorless, shrill, and petulantly PC as I had thought.
Jonathan Turley is troubled, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, by how Supreme Court nominee John Roberts reportedly answered a question by Sen. Dick Durbin. Durbin is, like Roberts, a Catholic, but one who has no trouble ignoring his church’s teachings on abortion while he serves in the Senate.
I decided to look in the Reporter’s Holy Book, by which of course I mean the AP Stylebook, to see what those gods of style have to say. The entry for abortion reads: “Use anti-abortion instead of pro-life and abortion rights instead of pro-abortion or pro-choice.”
New York Daily News columnist Zev Chafets has published “The Rabbi Who Loved Evangelicals (and Vice Versa),” in the cross-town competition’s New York Times Magazine.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I wrote my master’s thesis on the struggle in mainstream newsrooms to improve coverage of religion. A short version of that turned into a 1983 cover essay for Quill.
In his latest column for The Times of London, Matthew Parris tries to pick a rock out of his shoe. He chastises his fellow journalists for reporting stories based on the limited facts available and then dropping those stories when they don’t pan out:
Regular readers of GetReligion will know that we don’t spend much time blogging about religious media, unless it is a site offering very solid information that is of interest to mainstream Godbeat reporters. The work of Ted Olsen and the CT blog crew leaps to mind. There are valuable sites on all sides of the Anglican Wars, too. And so forth and so on.
So a man repeatedly beat his three-year-old son and shoved him into a box, which induced shaking, vomiting, and, eventually a coma. The boy died this January. The father is claiming that he beat the hell out of the kid in order to keep his son from becoming a “sissy” or going gay.
