Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Everyone knows what Sen. Barack Obama said about small-town Pennsylvania voters at a fundraiser in my native city, or at least everyone who listens to the news or reads a newspaper. For those who don’t know, click here. Obama’s remarks were fairly well publicized.
The other day I wrote about mainstream media coverage of a religion story involving my church body, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. I wrote about the cancellation of the LCMS’ only nationally-syndicated radio program (“Issues, Etc.”) and sudden firing of its host and producer in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last month. I also attended a worship service in St. Louis to pray for the men who were fired, ate some bratwurst at the fundraising dinner following the service and took part in a demonstration the next day at church headquarters.
A long, long, time ago — before that Pope Benedict XVI person came to town and took over the lives of your GetReligionistas (with some help from a controversial sect in Texas) — the Los Angeles Times ran a short educational feature entitled, “Muslim true/false — What you think you know about them is likely wrong — and that’s dangerous.”
The Associated Press’ Eric Gorski wrote a ton of stories about the pope’s visit. One dealt with the relationship Benedict XVI has with American youth.
The greatest reporter you’ve never heard of is Samuel Lubell. In his 1950 classic The Future of American Politics, Lubell explained why Harry Truman, against all odds and the conventional wisdom, won the 1948 presidential election. What made Lubell’s book great was his skill at interviewing ordinary voters, telling their stories with nuance and subtlety, and detecting the larger pattern from their responses.
Religion reporters covering atheism should approach the subject as straightforward as any other group of individuals who believe in similar ideas about God, an afterlife, the reason for evilness in the world, and the need for community and morality. To assume that atheists come down on the same side of all those issues would be to engage in gross stereotyping and fail to give significant depth to covering a complex minority in the United States.
I had an intriguing GetReligion-related experience last week. A religion reporter wrote about a news story that I’m personally involved in. As a reporter, it is always interesting to watch another reporter in action. But when you actually care about the story involved, everything is taken to a new level.
Anyone who knows anything about Baltimore — whether through news or through entertainment — knows that our inner-city neighborhoods are plagued by violence, with young, African-American males almost always on both sides of the guns.
Last week we discussed the need for reporters to distinguish between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In the comments, reader Michael Nielsen — a Mormon social psychologist — pointed us toward an op-ed he wrote for the Salt Lake Tribune that argued for improved information about the relationship of polygamy to the LDS church:
