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Today is Good Friday, the day when Christians commemorate the crucifixion and death of Jesus. It appears we made it through Holy Week without any media debunking of Jesus’ miracles. Maybe they got it out of their system with the whole Seven Deadly Sins silliness.
Once upon a time, reporters investigated the abortion industry. In 1978, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a week’s worth of stories about unsafe conditions at local clinics. Two reporters and several representatives from the Better Government Association posed undercover. The result: two clinics closed down, a doctor’s medical license was revoked, and a governor’s task force about the clinics’ practices was appointed.
When I worked at the Charlotte Observer, a long, long time ago, one of the stars of the newsroom was a feature writer named Frye Gaillard. He’s been writing books for years now, but it seems that one of his earlier works was a bit prophetic.
Once again, the local Indianapolis media are ignoring the religious issue involved in the second Muslim being elected to Congress. A week ago relatively high voter turnout for a special congressional election propelled local city council member Andre Carson into Congress. He is facing a stiff Democratic primary battle in less than 8 weeks, and if he wins will run against the Republican nominee in the general election in November.
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.
