Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In Christianity Today, LaTonya Taylor offered the definitive look at “The Church of O” 10 years ago. There are many reasons why I’m not the type of woman to get into Oprah Winfrey, but her religious views always intrigued me.
The Los Angeles Times doesn’t much do stories like this one anymore. A shade under 2,000 words, with a good hook and decent depth, this weekend feature about an Okie convert to Islam.
It’s so easy to make mistakes on the religion beat, especially when covering someone as complicated as President Barack Obama.
As a journalism professor, one of the toughest challenges that I face is helping students learn how to avoid what I call “buried pronoun disease.”
The 9-year story of Elizabeth Smart’s abduction appeared to come to a close this week as her captor was sentenced to life in prison. Smart, now 23, was 14 when she was kidnapped from her bedroom in her family’s home almost a decade ago.
The other day we looked at the way the media handled a study that showed that Protestants who don’t identify a “born-again” experience had less hippocampal atrophy than Catholics, non-believers and those who do claim a “born-again” experience. I noted that all the headlines I could find highlighted that “born-again” Christians had “smaller brains.”
Click here if you want to read the dead-tree-pulp Washington Post story about the final show by Oprah Winfrey. Or don’t. It really doesn’t matter, because this story is about a television event — not a signpost event in the development of pop and/or civic religion in American culture. Ditto for this news report in the New York Times.
Yesterday I pointed out the curious manner in which journalists wrote up a study showing that non-believers, Catholics and evangelical Christians have smaller brains than Protestants who don’t claim a “born-again” experience. But at least that study, though having a small sample size, was done by real academics at a real university using typical methods of analysis.
