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Congratulations to movie critic Michael Elliott for making his way into Entertainment Weekly‘s feature story on the new movie The Artistocrats. EW quotes producer Paul Provenza on how the documentary is attracting opposition because of its subject matter (a skeleton of a vaudeville joke, onto which comedians add the most vulgar possible premises):
Please follow these instructions. Sit down. Click here. Read the story. Then click here just to confirm that this is not, in fact, a story from The Onion. This is, in fact, a report from the Los Angeles Times. Now read the story again and note that this is the rare opportunity to do what reporter William Lobdell has done — quote outraged Catholic traditionalists and progressives in the same story.
It was, for those of us who study media bias, one of the most famous anecdotal leads in the history of the mainstream media’s awkward attempts to write about itself.
The Sunday Telegraph carried a couple of interesting pieces on the growth of Christianity in China, though I think the author missed a few issues. The first article looks at the growth of Christianity as the country’s “new social revolution” and the other looks at the reason Christianity is growing (hint: democracy protests and Western values).
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. writes in an op-ed that the Saudi government uses American mosques to promote jihad. In the article I linked to in yesterday’s post on construction of Muslim mosques, the writer mentions deep into the story that the funds for one particular mosque were raised from the local community. But the story explains little about this other than delving into the particular difficulty Muslims have in constructing religious buildings due to the ban on borrowing money in Islam.
I have a confession to make. From time to time, I have been known to read about a fascinating article that is in some elite publication that does not publish online versions of its articles and then wait to blog about it until somebody, somewhere goes ahead and posts the text anyway. Thus, I can link to it. Bloggers out there: have you ever done this? Come on. Come clean. You see this happen on bulletin boards all the time.
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne believes that questions of faith should be asked of Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts. His argument is based on the idea that politicians invoke religion only when it benefits them, and for that reason Roberts should answer questions about his faith, just as any other candidate for office.
Sridhar Pappu is a masterful writer of profiles — just a few issues back in The Atlantic, he wrote an article on Geraldo Rivera that was both respectful and critical. In the September Atlantic he writes eight pages on Mitt Romney, the Latter-day Saint who serves as the governor of Massachusetts.
Every now and then, a story comes out in a niche magazine or alternative form of media that stops me dead in my tracks and makes me say, “Wow! What a scoop! What will the MSM do with that?”
