Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I want to get a couple atheist stories out of my guilt file before it’s too late. Ignore this YouTube here for a second and let’s look at the good media coverage. Here’s the Associated Press report on a recent atheist event:
So former Sen. Rick Santorum has dropped out of the GOP side of the horse race for the White House, which is a pretty big deal here in DC Beltway land. After all, nothing in life matters as much as the fine details of political horse races. That’s what average Americans wake up in the morning wondering about. Right?
In a front-page story on Easter Sunday, the Los Angeles Times made some rather broad statements concerning President Barack Obama and religion.
Yesterday I came across an ABC News/Nightline request for help with a story they’re hypingreporting:
So there’s this college in Provo, Utah, that’s run by a socially conservative church. All of the students who choose to attend the school agree to adhere to a pretty strict honor code that governs the way they dress, forbids them from drinking alcohol, and explicitly bans students from having sex. I am, of course, talking about Brigham Young University and it shouldn’t exactly be news that the place exists or that students there are held to pretty strict moral standards.
One of the defining rituals of my young life was watching the Masters with my father, who was almost as good a golfer as he was a Baptist pastor and hospital chaplain. I drove home from college several times to keep that ritual intact.
As I write, the hammer is falling on a hapless editor in the offices of the Moscow Patriarchate for airbrushing a watch off of the wrist of Patriarch Cyril. The doctored photo of Cyril and the disappearing watch has been a gift to the Moscow press corps, prompting a flurry of arch and knowing stories written at the expense of the Russian Orthodox Church.
We usually stay away from critiquing columns here since we focus on mainstream coverage of religion news. Occasionally, though, a columnist will use reporting to make claims about the state of religion.
It was clear, this weekend, that the major West Coast newspapers didn’t expect the controversial (yes, I used that word deliberately) artist Thomas Kinkade to die at 54 years of age. Thus, the newsrooms did not have pre-written obituaries about the self-proclaimed “painter of light” ready to update and publish.
