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The death of William F. Buckley Jr. raises the question of what journalists mean when they use words such as conservative and liberal. Buckley was a Catholic and a conservative. But was he a Catholic conservative?
When I was a kid, my best friend broke his arm sliding into second base in a Babe Ruth baseball game on a Sunday afternoon. We teased him that his injury was a result of playing baseball on a Sunday.
If you heard that the ultra-hip Washington Post Style section was going to do a feature story about a conservative Christian college located in the heart of Manhattan — in the Empire State Building, for heaven’s sake — you would assume that certain issues would come up and be used in a rather snarky manner.
It was just yesterday that readers were complaining that I was too hard on a New York Times contributor for her piece expressing surprise that Christians can be funny. But usually I think I’m too understanding of the mistakes reporters make.
I wrote last week about The Indianapolis Star‘s failure to cover or mention the fact that a candidate running for a local congressional seat in a March 11 special election would be the second Muslim member of the House if elected. A GetReligion reader in our comments pages noted that the newspaper faced the difficult role of writing for a public that “is not the most tolerant in the republic.”
To paraphrase my friend Dan Kearns, The Washington Post‘s story about the Pew study is too much Aristotle and too little Plato and Thucydides. It contained interesting facts and figures, but lacked a big idea or organizing device.
This past summer I was talking with another religion-beat professional and this nationally known journalist put something into words that I had been feeling, but had not yet articulated. This scribe who will not be named said that on many days she or he felt like he or she was turning into a public-relations person for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
This week’s New York Times Magazine had an article about a Christian comedienne who’s all the rage on YouTube.
