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Last week I mentioned that I’ve become mildly obsessed with the murder of Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi-American woman who was beaten so brutally at her home in El Cajon, California, that she later died.
It’s the question that gets asked whenever an alleged comedian on HBO goes a bit nuts on the subject of religious believers.
One of our most visited pages last month was a post about the lack of coverage of comments made by Saudi Arabia’s top religious official (Got news? Destroy all churches!). As I mentioned in that post, Arabian Business News reported:
Can you imagine what kind of coverage a major mainstream news organization might give a faith-healing church that took in millions of dollars that seem to have vanished?
The Washington Post Style gods recently ran a long, long, long news feature that I am absolutely sure will be of interest to GetReligion readers. It contains all kinds of religious stuff — good and evil, sin and calls for repentance, claims of spiritual transcendence and healing.
There’s a story about a book publisher being asked how to write a best seller. He said the title of it would be “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.” But I can’t help but thinking “The Conspiracy of Jesus’ Dog” would also rank high. (Memo to self: get on it.) Or maybe I could combine Jesus, Lincoln, dogs and conspiracy theories. Lincoln is reported to have said, after all, “I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark.
It is hard to read the recent Washington Post story about the rising power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian political life without concluding that the most important word in it is “Islamist.” After all, this term shows up 11 times in the text — including in the lede.
