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Every year, I usually take a few minutes to go through Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People package to Google a lot of names I’ve never heard before. It probably says more about the magazine’s editors and who they want as subscribers than anything else.
We looked at some of the coverage of the Comedy Central’s censorship of the South Park program. South Park has long shown offensive images of Jesus and other non-Muslim religious figures. It has also attempted to show inoffensive “images of Muhammad” but been censored by the network — and other media covering the issue — out of fears of violence. I put “images of Muhammad” in quotes because their most recent censored images were actually of a bear and a taxi-cab (that Muhammad was supposedly inside).
Here is a sticky question: What is a reporter supposed to do when writing a story about a religious group that does not see itself as a denomination and strives not to use traditional (remember that word) language to describe itself and much of its work? Do you use the traditional terms and explain that the group being covered does not use them or do you use the group’s unique terms, knowing that you’ll need to translate them for readers?
Honk if you’ve heard the phrase “more spiritual than religious.” That, not “WWJD,” appears to be the mantra of today’s young people, even those who call themselves Christian. The movement has significant ramifications for Christianity — and religion in general — in the United States.
I’m not sure what to make of the most recent Associated Press story about what the Pope may do. When I first looked at it, it was all of four sentences long and had some troublesome language.
Here’s the headline on The New York Times’ latest story delving into Pope Benedict XVI and his handling of clergy sexual abuse:
Anyone who has followed this weblog for very long knows that, from the get-to, we have been rather upset that legions of reporters insist on ignoring the wise guidance offered by the Associate Press Stylebook concerning when to use, and when not to use, the hot-button label “fundamentalist.”
I know CNN fancies itself as a serious news source relative to other cablers, but imbalanced stories such as this one don’t exactly help them int he claim. In a puffy piece that ran on Earth Day, we got this advice on how to have a “green” love life:
Maybe it’s the nature of the beast that when you write a profile of the House chaplain, you have to give the run-down between who appointed who after who got mad at who. But it would be nice to see fewer stories that come out of Washington filtered through an almost completely political lens.
