Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Gayle Haggard, the loyal wife of fallen evangelical mega-pastor Ted Haggard, was all over the mainstream media world (Oprah, “Today,” etc.) last week promoting her new book: “Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour.”
We all know the celebrity book tour drill. Suddenly, a superstar is assaulting us from all imaginable media outlets with a gripping saga of failure and redemption that is, of course, told in much greater detail in a new book, which goes on sale tomorrow!
Sometimes, it’s hard to believe what your ears are hearing — especially when you are listening to broadcast journalists having to work on deadline under tremendous amounts of pressure. That is why journalists hire experts, people to help them navigate the dense and often tricky language and symbolism of complex organizations, rituals and traditions.
Let us now praise the men and women of the PBS newsmagazine “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly,” who have been covering religion on the tube since 1997.
When late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was killed in May, the mainstream media covered the issue extensively. There were front-page stories for days and the major papers ran pieces discussing what the murder meant for the abortion rights movement, what types of pregnancies women end late, and whether the pro-life movement bore responsibility for the death.
I’m not sure GetReligion has ever highlighted a gap in religious coverage before. But I think I’ve find just the occasion. And my blind hope is that the reasoning behind this omission was a collective decision to ignore the problem — in this case, Jon Gosselin, the former co-star of “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ and a fallen hero for American evangelicals — and pray he will just go away.
For die-hard NFL fans, the whole Bret Favre story has been kind of like a car crash in slow motion during an exciting race. It’s very hard to look away and, besides, this particular car may land wheels down and make it to the finish line ahead of, uh, the Pack.
The New York Times ran a very old story the other day, a story about a topic that has, in fact, been around for several decades.
There’s something I just like about the Q&A format. It’s nice to just see the particular questions that reporters choose to ask their sources as well as how those sources respond. There are two that I would like to highlight. The first comes from the Washington Post‘s “Voices of Power” series. That’s where reporters sit down with inside-the-beltway power players for a videotaped chat.
