Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Well, NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams is going over like a lead balloon. NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepherd calls it a “public relations nightmare.” Before we get into some of the news coverage of the firing, one huge thing needs clarification.
This might be the time to raise a frequent GetReligion complaint up to the level of common law: If journalists play the God card in their ledes, they really owe the reader some basic information about the significant role that religion plays in the story.
Get ready to add a new website to your daily reading list. So far at least, the Real Clear Religion website, a sister site to Real Clear Politics, is producing some quality religion news aggregation. Real Clear Religion editor Jeremy Lott explains the new site in a blog post.
Late last night, NPR fired senior news analyst Juan Williams. On Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” where he also contributes, there was a discussion about something that had happened on “The View” the previous week. Apparently Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar flipped out when guest O’Reilly said that “Muslims” had perpetrated the terrorist attacks on 9/11. They walked off the set in disgust.
As you would imagine, the whole Rand Paul affair is a pretty big deal at the Louisville Courier-Journal. In fact, the newspaper’s lengthy profile of the candidate — paralleling a Jack Conway profile of similar length — began like this:
How’s this for a blast from the past? Nearly 20 years after Anita Hill’s sexual harassment claims against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas riveted the nation, the “he said, she said” drama has exploded back into the headlines.
So this past weekend former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was giving a speech at a Tea Party event and told the crowd that they couldn’t “party like it’s 1773″ until enough conservatives were elected to Congress to make a difference. The reference to the Boston Tea Party was obvious enough to the Los Angeles Times that they didn’t bother explaining its significance to readers.
When it comes to religion, Ned Flanders generally steals all the thunder for references to faith and The Simpsons. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s daily newspaper, shook things up for a day, offering some quality fodder for religion blogs by declaring Homer Simpson as Catholic. We could probably create a context out of this, but check out some of the headlines:
When news broke on Monday about the death of a prominent pro-life activist, I expected to read about it in the conservative and pro-life press. But I wasn’t so sure what to expect in terms of the mainstream media.
