Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Washington Post Foreign Service writer Kevin Sullivan had a lengthy piece on religion and the Internet today. The article is full of details about how Indian Hindus use the Internet in their religious devotion. Here was one of the early paragraphs:
Like it or not, digital technology and blogging software have raised up armies of freelance media critics, many of whom are dedicated to taking potshots at the principalities and powers in the mainstream press.
The Secular Coalition for America generated a bit of news on the left West Coast by announcing that Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif. , does not believe in God. The Los Angeles Times picked up the story and played it in a way that confirms for conservatives everything they thought about liberals. Take, for instance the headline, the subhead and the lede:
Evangelicals are going at it again over the environment, and the media have hardly sparred us a detail in covering the blow-by-blow in this round. For starters, Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times laid out the fight Saturday as an attack by “leaders” such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family on those who have “strayed too far from their signature battles against abortion and gay rights.”
A Southern friend in a cassock and collar sent along this thought for the day, by way of Garrison Keillor and his Writer’s Almanac out in Public Radio land. You can listen to this online, of course:
So I was talking to my wonderful mom last night and she mentioned an article about the Episcopal Church she read in “the newspaper” that had a notable error. I asked her which paper (Denver has two papers and they also subscribe to or receive other local papers) and she didn’t remember. Neither did she remember what day it ran or who wrote it. I asked her if she remembered that I write about the problems mainstream media reporters have with writing about religion. She did and said she meant to mention it to me earlier. So this is just a reminder to my mom and all other readers that we love it when you point out good and bad articles you read or segments you watch or listen to. Within a few hours or days at most.
The Style section of The Washington Post is known for blurring the lines, from time to time, between traditional news features and the first-person, magazine-style writing that once was labeled “new journalism.” The emotional, first-person piece by Anthony Shadid titled “The Bookseller’s Story, Ending Much Too Soon” is labeled an “appreciation” and that is what it feels like.
Harvard religion professor Diana Eck’s New Religious America: How A “Christian Country” Has Now Become The World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation looks at how changing immigration laws have shaped the country. She tells stories about Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists.
