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A major challenge for reporters covering Tuesday’s speech by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the subject of race in America is getting the right amount of background. Obviously there are libraries of potential context that could arguably be inserted into a newspaper’s coverage, but that’s just not practical.
It’s a famous storyline from Western literature, not to mention the lives of millions of believers: a person responds to God’s call and becomes Christian. Think of St. Paul falling to the ground and hearing God’s voice or St. Augustine hearing a voice say “Take and read, take and read.”
Unless I have missed something (if so, please correct me), the Washington Post has a mere six news stories and columns in today’s paper about The Speech by Sen. Barack Obama. This may seem a bit out of line, but somewhere out there in evangelical-land there has to be a twisted, right-wing novelist or a screenwriter who is thinking about writing some kind of sequel for the “Left Behind” series. This was one amazing speech.
I watched Barack Obama’s speech on race and religion yesterday morning. But I imagine that I was one of relatively few people to actually watch the speech in its entirety (see it here) or read the whole transcript. That means that it’s been up to the media to summarize, translate and convey meaning about the speech to a larger audience.
Another day, another bomb and 43 more deaths. And this time there seem to be serious questions about what precisely happened near the Imam Hussein shrine in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, which is located inside one of the tightest security zones in post-surge Iraq.
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.
