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The past few months have been strange at the intersection of faith and advertising, beginning with the big three networks’ rejection of the United Church of Christ’s TV spots and continuing with Rolling Stone‘s temporary rejection of an ad promoting a new gender-inclusive version of the Bible.
Keith Olbermann has been on a tear about James Dobson and Focus on the Family for several days now, mostly on his MSNBC blog, but Tuesday night he took his grievances into prime time.
Louis Romano hits where it hurts in his profile of Joel Osteen in Sunday’s Washington Post by closing on what Osteen would call a negative note:
As “Meet the Evangelicals” pieces go, Time‘s cover package this week is high-quality work. It revisits familiar faces (Billy and Franklin Graham) but also introduces names that would be less familiar even in some evangelical circles (Luis Cortes, Douglas Coe). The photographs show these evangelicals in their natural elements, looking relaxed, friendly and smart.
Much of the recent coverage and the commentary on James Dobson has been entirely predictable, focusing on the buffoonery of another evangelical seeing sinister forces behind another popular children’s show.
There’s little new about the story that Jamie “Jay” Bakker — the son of PTL Club cohosts Jim and Tammy Faye — survived a hellish journey through teenage alcoholism, reclaimed his Christian faith and has become a pastor in Atlanta. Bakker wrote about it in his autobiography, Son of a Preacher Man (2001).
GetReligion fell silent last week on the several stories about Rolling Stone rejecting an ad for Today’s New International Version Bible. Why?
In an interview last year with Salon, Terry Gross of Fresh Air addressed the charge of some conservatives that National Public Radio works from a liberal bias:
“Church ends taboo on mercy killings,” crowed the headline on Sunday’s Observer, and the story that followed, by social affairs editor Jamie Doward, carried on in the same excited manner:
