Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
For instance, the lead story on USA Today’s Religion page right now is a heartwrenching feature about a father and daughter who suffered indescribable loss in the Haiti earthquake last year.
One of the things we discuss here with some frequency is the awkward way stories get written so as to diminish or hide religious details. This is just as true with breaking news as it is with human interest stories. It’s frustrating and religious adherents can usually tell that there’s something missing — ghosts lurking in the shadows.
What we have here is the kind of commentary on the news that GetReligion tries to avoid, since the purpose of this blog is to offer criticism — positive and negative — of actual religion-news coverage in the mainstream press.
Let’s face it. Your GetReligionistas have been doing what we do for quite some time now and, at this point, it takes a lot to shock us when it comes to journalists leaving religion-shaped holes in important stories.
Perusing the Faith and Values section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I came across a little story — 335 words — about a little church — Sunday attendance of 15 — that decided to disband and start over.
Several dozen professors at Catholic colleges have written a blistering letter to Rep. John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, in advance of his commencement address at Catholic University on Saturday. The New York Times‘ Laurie Goodstein highlighted the letter and compared it to the outcry over Notre Dame University’s invitation to President Barack Obama last year.
One would think, after decades of liberal Protestant battles about sexual morality, that each and every American journalist who comes near one of these stories would have the basic facts down pat.
Many of us took courses in college we felt were unnecessary but few of us got to vent about it on usatoday.com. University of Iowa sophomore Allie Wright uses her space to complain about how she found a religious studies course to be fairly irrelevant to her major–journalism.
Last night a passenger was subdued on Boston-bound Delta flight 1102 after trying to open up an emergency exit door. The same thing happened on Continental Airline flight 546 from Houston to Chicago. In the former case, the man in question was upset because the flight was delayed and, well, he’d had too much to drink. There aren’t many details in the latter case. We just know that he is one Reynel C. Alcaide of Burbank, Illinois, 34.
