Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The mainstream press is still working its way through the “what it all means” stage. Here is The New York Times trying out different ways of saying that the new Democrats who gave their party the Hill majority are not “bright blue.”
One of the most important words in American political speech is “moderate.” The same thing, of course, is true in the world of religion.
In the age of the Internet, what do those sometimes entertaining, often overlooked, free weekly tabloids do to be independent and different from everything else out there? One way is by exploring offbeat subjects that will get overlooked for various reasons in the main paper or television news broadcast.
GetReligion focuses on mainstream media, so we rarely pay much attention to religious media. We do pay attention, however, if writers over there choose to focus on issues in mainstream media coverage of religion or, like some of the pronouncements of Dr. James Dobson, they have things to say that are news in and of themselves.
When I wrote about Linda Greenhouse’s problematic story anticipating the Supreme Court arguments over a federal ban on partial-birth abortions, reader Mattk wondered why we would cover it here at GetReligion:
I’m not sure if non-journalists understand how much of a news outlet’s work depends on the selection of stories. Here at GetReligion, we tend to focus on problems with the way a given story is treated. Whether it is treated at all is a bigger issue.
As we like to note around this here blog, there are issues in church-state law that almost always produce unity among the experts, even among experts on opposite sites of those familiar cultural divides.
The flurry of election-related news this past week has kept me from noting an excellent piece in The New York Times last week that is absolutely superb and touching in its handling of a sniper situation in Iraq. Reporter C.J. Chivers, with the help of producer Eric Owles, supplemented the article with an equally poignant photo gallery and voiceover.
