Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Oh dear. Just as the rumors about Newsweek are becoming more positive, the news product offered by Time is suffering. Last week we looked at a very poor piece of journalism about female priests in non-Roman Catholic churches. And we looked at the odd defense offered by the reporter.
I’ve been meaning to cover the story of the four Christian evangelists who were arrested at the Dearborn Arab International Festival in June. It is fascinating to me how much coverage the media devoted to the non-burn of the Koran in Florida compared to the actual “going ghost” of Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris or the actual arrest of four street evangelists in Dearborn. I would just love for someone who was involved in the coverage of the Koran burn threat to explain why they wrote eleventy billion stories on the Florida pastor and none on these other situations.
When my beloved Texas Rangers clinched the American League West championship on Sept. 25, Josh Hamilton steered clear of the champagne-and-cigar celebration in the visitors’ clubhouse in Oakland, Calif.
It has been some time, let me tell you, since I read a mainstream news report linked to this era of clergy sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church that left me, well, smiling with appreciation. It’s hard to even imagine such a thing, right?
As I was tying the knot last year, most of my peers were not, according to a new study that suggests the recession has accelerated a decline in the number of people getting married.
Earlier this year, we looked at the story of Father Mark Gruber, a popular Benedictine monk who was let go from St. Vincent College after porn was found on his computer. When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the story in February, tmatt noted that some of the hardest news stories to cover are personnel disputes inside private colleges and universities, particularly religious ones, due to privacy issues. It turns out he was particularly prescient.
For reasons known only to New York Times editors, Kate Zernike is continually given free rein to write about the Tea Party. There have been a litany of complaints about her coverage, perhaps most notably when earlier this year she accused Human Events editor Jason Mattera of speaking in a “Chris Rock voice” and using “racial stereotypes” to mock Obama. Mattera was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Zernike didn’t realize that was just how he talks. Not content with the amount of racial phrenology she’d employed to date, she wrote a piece about race and the Tea Party pegged to the Glenn Beck rally that contained this immortal sentence:
The other day, we observed the interesting fact that editors of the Baltimore Sun were not interested in the story of how a priest from here in Charm City — Father F. Richard Spencer, to be precise — ended up being named by the Vatican to serve as the new auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese for U.S. Military Service. His record as a military chaplain under fire is actually rather fascinating.
