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Did you hear that Oprah Winfrey is the reincarnation of God? Well, at least according to USA Today. Reporter Ann Oldenburg did just about everything but say Oprah was the sister of Jesus Christ in a 2,000-plus-word profile in Thursday’s edition.
Like everyone else in the world, I bet I’m going to go see The Da Vinci Code. But not because I expect it to be great or even a fun, brainless action flick. It’s more that I’m in a perpetual state of trying to understand how a book as ridiculous as The Da Vinci Code could enable Dan Brown to sit comfortably on piles of cash for the rest of his life. I had a colleague in my newsroom a few years ago who pronounced it the best book she’d ever read. How sad is that? Do readers really want three-page chapters? And do they need their characters reintroduced on every page? Was the book written for people suffering from short-term memory loss? Why why why?
The Washington Post headline said it all: “Some Parents Who Shy From Religion Want Their Children to Taste Its Psychological and Spiritual Comforts.” (As a former copy editor, I ask, “What was that? A double decker six- or eight-column headline in 36-point type?)
Here is the New York Times today, adding a few kind words about the late A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal, an elite journalist who in the 1990s became a hero to those of us who are deeply committed to those familiar freedoms of the First Amendment. He was passionate about freedom of the press and freedom of religion, even for unpopular religious minorities.
At the papers I’ve worked for, the way to get a correction was to reach either the Ombudsperson or the reporter’s editor. Speaking very pragmatically, the reporter has little reason to take the time to get in a correction over his/her fact error, especially since most publications track the number of corrections each reporter has caused; conversely, an editor is in position of pursuing the point and running the correction if it’s warranted. Don’t bother the writer; contact his/her editor.Posted by mark at 9:33 pm on May 11, 2006
There’s an interesting story coming out of Wisconsin about a woman who was fired from her job as a Roman Catholic school teacher because she conceived her children using in vitro fertilization.
It was 10 years ago — next week, in fact — that I wrote a column for the Scripps Howard News Service that began like this:
The 18-page letter from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to President Bush is gaining a lot of attention for its religious imagery and its call for Bush to look closely at his own religious convictions. It reads, says the Wall Street Journal editorial board, like “the Unabomber’s manifesto.” Ouch.
Here is another one of those situations in which I’ve read something in column A and that connected with something in column B and then that produced questions about some hard-to-define issue over in column C.
