Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I finally got around to reading Lauren Collins’ profile of Michelle Obama in the March 10 New Yorker. It’s sympathetic but no puff piece — packed full of information that isn’t necessarily flattering. Obama’s stump speech includes the idea that we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents, and so on.
Day after day, your GetReligionistas receive a steady stream of email from people who seem to pay little attention to what it is that we actually do at this weblog.
What a campaign season this has been. It’s amazing how much religion has played a part this year — from Huckabee’s surprising win in Iowa to Mitt Romney’s big religion in America speech. And now this, as reported by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic:
There have been more than a few stories about Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor and pastor. A survey of broadcast media left me a tad unimpressed with the journalistic treatment. It seems news outlets are either exploiting the political rhetoric of Wright without any context or soft-peddling it to the extreme.
If you are part of a family that homeschools its children and is religious, The New York Times is your friend Sunday morning. The newspaper’s sports section has a nice news/feature story on last week’s national homeschool basketball tournament in Oklahoma City, and for once, the story doesn’t take the “zoo approach” toward homeschooling. (As a disclaimer, my 15-year-old sister played in this basketball tournament this past week.)
At this point, I do not think that GetReligion will be creating its own special web site to cover the upcoming visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the United States (at least, to the parts of the U.S. that really matter).
Barack Obama supporters won’t like this, but let the word go forth. Reporters should write more stories about Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and his relationship with the Democratic presidential candidate. Yes, I say this even after Wright left the campaign.
So frequently the mainstream media reduces religion to a litany of moral statements. The only time you can get coverage of religion, it seems, is when these moral views intersect with public policy or politics. But then when there is a major moral issue in the news — be it prostitution, plagiarism or embezzlement — religious understanding is noticeably excluded from the coverage.
This week I’ve been on a bit of a tear about the shoddy coverage of the Vatican’s supposed reissue of the Seven Deadly Sins. But I absolutely can’t let pass another horrible example of media malfeasance. Reporter Richard Owen, who was responsible for much of the “deadly sin” silliness, filed the following report from Rome:
