Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Is this Spanish news magazine cover of Michelle Obama art or porn? Is it racist and sexist? Or is it a political fantasy of the noble savage, an incisive commentary on the centrality of Mrs. Obama’s sexuality in the presidential election campaign? Is it Granada I see or only Asbury Park in this profile of the First Lady?
The last night at the Republican convention was one that included a ton of religion. While some of the networks didn’t cover all of the speeches, there were multiple testimonies from people who talked about Mitt Romney’s life as a Mormon. They gave truly interesting testimonies about how Romney had interacted with them in their lives. One liberal Mormon I follow on Twitter joked, saying, “Y’all just went to Mormon church.”
A Los Angeles Times story this week on a Muslim youth camp starts out as one of those lazy summer features that most reporters could write in their sleep:
I realize that this is strange, but I continue to read press reports (wink, wink) containing evidence that Mitt Romney is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and that this could cause him trouble with evangelical Protestant Christians. Am I alone in reading about this?
Normally I criticize the media for its single-minded obsession and focus on politics. A journalist friend on the political beat recently suggested that most media has become a trade press for the political class and I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But even I get very excited about political conventions. Since I was a child — and yes, I was a weird child — I absolutely loved listening to political speeches at conventions. I can still quote certain lines from speeches Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson delivered at conventions in the 1980s.
Anyone who knows anything about the history of religion-news coverage in the journalism marketplace knows that there used to be an age in which America’s major newspapers — the top 10 to 20 markets, mainly — all had “religion editors” whose primary duty was to produce materials for the weekly “religion pages” that were buried somewhere back inside the Saturday newspapers. These reporters occasionally wrote stories for the front page, perhaps when the city’s most powerful high-steeple church got a new pastor or fired an old one, but that was not the norm.
About that high-profile claim that a political and cultural progressivism “literally bleeds through the fabric” of The New York Times:Â Anybody catch the story on Tyler Clementi’s parents leaving their evil, gay-bashing evangelical church?
Earlier this week, the Associated Press had a nice long story on a Taliban fighter’s religious liberty. “American Taliban fighter Lindh: Prison ban on daily group prayer violates religious freedom” begins by telling us that a federal prison rule barring John Walker Lindh from group prayer is “absurd” and is “causing him to sin against his religion by prohibiting such gatherings in the name of security.”
