Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A week ago I wrote a post headlined “Savvy PR firms drive coverage of HHS mandate.” I wrote it because it struck me that a Los Angeles Times story hewed pretty closely to the public relations campaign I’d been seeing — since first alerted to it by CNN — of a PR campaign orchestrated by Faith in Public Life, heavily funded by the Open Society Institute of prominent atheist billionaire George Soros.
Sometimes, your GetReligionistas come across mainstream religion-news stories that leave us saying, “That was kind of good, but that left me wanting more.” As if that mixed message wasn’t confusing enough, the truth is that some of these stories may leave one of us “wanting more,” in a good sense, or “wanting more” in a bad sense. Some cause us to feel both ways at the same time.
Sen. Marco Rubio was in the news quite a bit yesterday. Part of it was that he released his new book. Part of it was that an old Charlie Crist campaign foe who now works for Romney allegedly told a reporter that Rubio wasn’t even being considered for the Veep slot. Another day in the fun, fun world of political reporting.
For some reason I’ve been fascinated with looking at how different media outlets report the same news. Sometimes what they choose to highlight, the angle they go with, the people they interview, etc., are all the same. Sometimes they’re quite different.
Please be patient with me as I dig through lots of material that built up in my infamous GetReligion guilt folder. Here is a story from a few weeks ago that raises a very, very, very basic journalism question.
One of my first assignments during a newspaper internship in college was obituaries, fairly tedious writing with no byline for a much desired clip. I will never forget how my editor emphasized how people really do read them and if you get something wrong, family members, already distraught by the loved one’s death, will confront you pretty quickly. Pressure, much?
You may have read last week about a California jury awarding $28 million in damages to a Candace Conti, a woman who said the Jehovahâs Witnesses allowed an adult member of her congregation to molest her when she was a child.
I have been on the road for a week or more and, when I returned home, there was a huge stack of Baltimore Sun newspapers for me to triage. One of the first GetReligion-esque stories that I ran into concerned a local news event that the Sun has been ignoring for months (see previous GetReligion coverage here).
