Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As a believer, I am not quite sure how a nonbeliever would react to Thursday’s story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about an interstate billboard intended to reach out to atheists and nonbelievers in the area. See here how the story introduces the billboard:
Lisa Miller of Newsweek wrote about a heretofore unknown element of Barack Obama’s campaign: As many as 100 pastors call in to pray for Obama, including several famous ones, such as T.D. Jakes and Joseph Lowery.
There are few things that journalists in Washington, D.C., like to talk about more than this subject — journalists in Washington. I am sure that this surprises GetReligion readers, especially those inclined to belief in the utter depravity of man.
So I’m reading Washington Post reporter Rob Stein’s article on the latest frightening report to come from the Centers for Disease Control and Research. The latest report is that efforts to get teenagers to delay sex and use condoms is “faltering.” But by frightening and faltering, they mean that the data suggest we’ve hit something of a plateau after years of improvements.
There’s been something of a trend among a certain subsection of evolutionary anthropologists to explain religion as the product of a gene. Not that there is any evidence of a religion gene, mind you. Heck, not that there’s any evidence that such a gene is possible! But if there was, you see, it could explain Methodists.
Here we go again. Newsweek has another one of those think pieces about trends in modern Islam that show movement toward a day when moderation will rule and extremists will be be disgraced as the fake Muslims that thinkers in the West hope and pray (if many Western thinkers pray) that they are.
A news story from across the pond about Christian preachers being told by police officers not to preach in a predominantly Muslim area is an example of how a news organization slant can present a relatively simple factual situation in any number of different ways.
Being in the media criticism game, I like to read the various ombudsmen and press critics out there. I’m pretty sure Jack Shafer at Slate is my favorite. His criticism is unconventional and thought-provoking. His latest column looks back at novelist Michael Crichton’s 1993 prediction that mass media would die within a decade. When the decade came and passed and media remained strong, people thought Crichton misguided. But now that the media giants are faltering, Shafer revisits the issue with Crichton.
One question my students always ask is this: “How do journalists decide what parts of a speech are most important? How do you know what goes at the top of the story?”
