Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
What we have here is the kind of commentary on the news that GetReligion tries to avoid, since the purpose of this blog is to offer criticism — positive and negative — of actual religion-news coverage in the mainstream press.
Filed conveniently under “odd news,” UPI has picked up a story that has been across blogs, Twitter, and provided convenient fodder for the outraged.
The Templeton Foundation gave its annual million-Euro prize this week, and The Guardian‘s science correspondent Ian Sample focused on the religion and science combo more than anything else, even though its recipient says “I’ve got no religious beliefs at all.”
I don’t watch MSNBC much but quite a few readers and friends sent along this video of host Martin Bashir interviewing Pastor Rob Bell. This one interview has turned into a kind of media event in and of itself.
I’ve been paying a little bit of attention to the media hullabaloo over the Alabama Governor’s altar call and it got me thinking of how I wish another high profile figure’s comments on religion had gotten a bit more mainstream media treatment. I speak, of course, about the powerful Ricky Gervais. My husband and I are fans of Gervais, who’s probably best known as the creator of The Office. The British version of the show is brilliant. Now, little of his work since then has been worth any of your time, but that’s another story.
My sense is that reporters often look to religion when covering people who are against abortion. It might seem obvious, since people do often cite their underlying religious beliefs as their reason for opposition. Though when reporters explore why people do provide abortions, religion suddenly disappears from consideration.
A reader sent us a link to the Slate feature “The Wrong Stuff: What it Means to Make Mistakes.” It’s written by by Kathryn Schulz and features Q&As with notable folks discussing their relationship to being wrong.
So Juan Williams gave a lecture — on the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall — at the University of Maryland School of Law, where he received a standing ovation from a pack of lawyers from Baltimore. That, my friends, is not a Fox News crowd.
The headline on the recent Time cover story tried to set an epic tone, summing up a story that was going to courageously explore an election season that has intimidated politicians (mostly on one side of the political aisle) and, thus, has intimidated journalists.
