Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Today’s immigration news becomes a little more real when you know people it will directly affect. Whether or not you personally agree with the decision, it will impact faith communities as much as the rest of the country.
There were a couple of interesting posts on CNN’s Belief Blog that caught my eye yesterday. The first was a post extrapolating from Bryce Harper’s “clown question” retort a deeper meaning relative to the Washington Nationals phenom’s Mormon beliefs. I then caught myself researching various baseball players’ religious affiliations and was quite surprised to find out that another player I’d met in a bar once was also identified as LDS. But the point being it’s a great hook for a religion angle.
As we’ve lamented a few times (or a million) here at GetReligion, nobody puts on a staged-for-media hatefest like the spiritual termites of the Westboro Baptist Church.
I’m going to back into the media analysis here by mentioning that there is a very media-savvy, progressive public relations non-profit called Faith in Public Life. The Washington Post describes the group as one of several organizations that “that meld religion and liberal politics” and the group itself describes its work here:
As the battles continue over religious liberty issues — by which I mean battles over issues that the White House has described as having religious-liberty implications — journalists continue to struggle with that old, old issue of simplistic labeling.
The headline above is a reference to Bryce Harper’s response to another silly question from a reporter, but you simply have to check out this collection of utterings from CNN anchor Christine Romans. I’m pretty sure it’s the style that sets me off just as much as the content. She really thought that question about feminism was har-har-har funny, didn’t she!
On 17 August 1980 seven week old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from her family’s campsite near Ayer’s Rock in the Australian desert.
If you want to make a story go viral, you might have NPR do a dramatic reading of some pop song or discuss more epic autotune potential that could come out of PBS.
