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.
Here we go again, with another post in our ongoing series about why mainstream journalists need to retire the word “devout” or, at the very least, be extremely careful when using this vague and almost meaningless adjective.
Now and then story goes viral that isn’t breaking or world-changing news, but is so deliciously silly that you have to give into temptation and post about it.
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:
