Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
An editor, whose religion I don’t know, sent this Associated Press story along with the note, “Maybe I’m too sensitive to these things, but this strikes me as kind of a vile headline if you think about it–not that some people mistake him for a Protestant, but the implication is that they wouldn’t support him if they knew he was Catholic.”
Just so that title doesn’t confuse anyone, let me make clear that we’re talking about two different stories.
Last year, we were nearly giddy over a report that showed religion news had doubled … to 2 percent of overall media coverage. Hey, we’ll take it. In 2011, sadly, we did not see the same level of religion coverage in the press.
So, this post represents the 7,000th GetReligion offering that is still stashed on our server. That’s a landmark, of some sort or another, especially since this comes so soon after our 8th birthday party the other day.
An iron constitution, a phlegmatic personality and a clean conscience means that it is rather hard to wind me up over a news story. When I start on my morning newspapers my strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.
Anyone who has worked on the religion beat, or anyone who has read GetReligion for a year or so, knows that one of the biggest faith-based challenges that journalists face is the demand — year after year — to come up with valid, insightful stories about religious holidays.
Have you been following the reports out of Afghanistan after it was learned that Qurans and other holy books had been burned by troops? The story keeps developing. More people have been killed, including NATO troops, and President Obama sent a letter of apology to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
If you watch internal church debates, you know that nothing gets people riled up more than just about anything to do with sex: premarital sex, homosexuality, you name it. People feel quite passionately about these issues, enough to part ways with one another. So I laughed out loud when I read a line from a piece published in New York Times about a “quieter battle” being waged within churches over gay marriage and gay ordination.
