Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A couple of weeks ago, there was quite a bit of coverage regarding the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the most important ancient Christian manuscripts. Nobody flagged any stories as being particularly bad and it was during a pretty busy news cycle — so we didn’t look at coverage here at GetReligion. But a reader pointed me to another critique of the media coverage that is worth considering.
If a headline by Time.com sounds too good to be true — “Drug Dealing for Jesus: Mexico’s Evangelical Narcos” — it’s because the article fails to deliver any serious evidence to back its claim. We’re told that members of La Familia Michoacana “purport to be devout Evangelical Christians” (that D-word should set off incredulity meters across the land) and that “They are also made to study a special Bible authored by the gang’s spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno, alias El Mas Loco, or ‘The Maddest One.’”
This is a strange one and I know that. I wasn’t sure that I was going to post a link to this story — “Who says religion is boring?” — until the link went live at Romenesko’s virtual water cooler and I started hearing from friends, colleagues and even a critic or two.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that Pakistan had admitted to India that the terrorists who laid siege to Mumbai last November, killing 166, had been members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a radical Muslim groups formed two decades ago to fight Indian rule in the Kashmir region.
One of the hardest things that journalists have to do, from time to time, is cover controversial stories when they can only get voices on one side of the fight to talk on the record. Normally, one camp is seeking coverage and the other is trying to avoid it.
The Los Angeles Times had an interesting feature recently. It’s a look at the 13 of the most “faith-offending films.” Reporters Patrick Kevin Day and Jevon Phillips write:
Our friends at Episcopal Café may be about the only media people to place Walter Cronkite’s faith so high in a story, but there it is, right in the headline: “Walter Cronkite, newsanchor & Episcopalian, dies at 92.”
Which is more newsworthy? Well, the answer very much depends on the lens journalists are using to cover the nomination of Dr. Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. President Barack Obama’s nomination of the renowned geneticist and public Christian hasn’t flooded the news pages — but it is making waves on the opinion pages and the blogosphere.
