Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
On May 25, I tweeted out the image at the top of this post with the note “WaPo story about 12 of 16 surgical abortion clinics in MD having a variety of failures gets this headline?”
Let’s say that there is a Republican president in office right now, one with ties to a somewhat doctrinaire form of Christianity.
Tuesday’s front page of the Washington Post had a collection of interesting stories above the fold: “Justices uphold Md. law on DNA,” “For Hezbollah, a risky engagement in Syria,” a large and compelling photo of “Chaos in Turkey’s streets,” and “Why the sharp rise in suicides by boomers?” I’m not nearly so melancholy about the demise of the print news product as some I know, but this type of front page is what I love — happening upon interesting stories you may not have sought out online on your own.
The other day, I wrote a post about the fact that many journalists struggle to understand, to be perfectly honest about it, the role that Christian faith plays in the African-American church. There is a tendency to see the black church as a political institution, and that’s that.
Whenever your GetReligionistas pick on the Style gods at The Washington Post — primarily with our pronouncements that alternative points of view are good things in features about controversial issues (perfect example here) — there is always someone out there in comment-pages land who tells us to lighten up and get real.
Headlines over the Boy Scouts of America’s decision to allow openly gay members are still flying fast and furious.
Above is a nice little snippet of an Ira Glass interview. Interview of Ira Glass, I should say. The popular host of public radio’s This American Life reflects on why the show does so much good coverage of Christians. It’s because the media do such a bad job of covering them otherwise, he says. He says the Christians he knows and works with — including the “fundamentalists” — are nothing like how Christians are portrayed in the media.
Yesterday, CNN ran a feature highlighting the faith of members of a Bible group the meets on the PGA Tour. The article itself is well-done and provides an superb model for how to address religion in sports.
