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 long, long time ago — pre-Internet, for heaven’s sake — I had a long conversation with Bill Moyers, then of CBS, about why the mainstream press has so much trouble covering religion. This was one of those occasions in which he used a striking image to describe this problem — that far too many reporters and editors are “tone deaf” to the music of religion.
Hopefully, after more than a year of writing for GetReligion, I have won the respect of you, kind reader.
Via Rocco Palmo’s Twitter feed, I came across this Miami CBS affiliate story about the Roman Catholic archdiocese there launching a television campaign about the sacrament of penance:
Time for a quick dip into my GetReligion guilt file to look at a Religion New Service story that intrigued several readers who felt slapped by the headline it inspired at USA Today, which was, “Parents discourage daughters who would be nuns.”
It’s encouraging to see news outlets continuing to cover the death of a 14-year-old girl who was accused of adultery and sentenced to 101 lashes.
Yesterday I had a mini-meltdown when the BBC site was offline for an hour or so. I must be more reliant on them than I had realized! One of the stories I was trying to read was written by BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott, headlined “Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relics“:
As always, the goal here in GetReligion land is to dig into the nuts and bolts of religion-news coverage in the mainstream press. Truth is, this is easier to do when the coverage is bad than when it is good. Besides, when we praise coverage almost no one writes comments and these good-coverage posts do not affect the trolls who say that we hate the mainstream press.
The way this story from the Los Angeles Times opens, it gives the impression that the Shiva Sisters are like the Jewish mourning version of Batman & Robin.
If asked to prepare a list of mainstream foreign correspondents who “get religion,” Pamela Constable of the Washington Post would be in my top handful of names. Simple stated, she does not look at conflicts that are packed with religious language, symbolism and actions and then automatically assume that this is the result of “tribalism” and/or vague “sectarian” forces in the culture. In the past, I have also pointed GetReligion readers toward her evocative memoir — “Fragments of Grace: My Search for Meaning in the Strife of South Asia.”
