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One of the most important things for reporters to do when covering a new study is to read the study and the supporting documents. There was a particularly good recent example of what happens when reporters don’t do that.
Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, began Thursday evening and lasts for a month. During the month, participating Muslims refrain from eating or drinking during daylight hours. Muslims believe Ramadan was the month during which the first verses of the Koran were revealed to the Islamic prophet Mohammed. The month is based on the Islamic lunar calendar and moves back about 11 days each year.
One of the reasons it’s important to have reporters who understand religion is so that they don’t miss the subtext or deeper meaning of words spoken by those they cover. Usually that’s just important for covering average people in their day-to-day affairs. But it’s also important for understanding how politicians speak in the rhetoric of civil religion.
Religion News Service has a story about churches “shifting” worship to Wednesdays. Or, at least, that’s what the headline as it ran on USA Today said:
It’s been almost a month since a reader sent in a discussion of the use of scare quotes in the San Diego Jewish World by Dan Bloom. He says that his correspondents call them other things, such as “sneer quotes,” “horror quotes,” “air quotes” and “quote-unquote quotes.” And Jon Stewart calls them something that is not family friendly at all.
A few weeks ago I started reading stories about how Germany had banned circumcision. Because of Germany’s historical treatment of Jews, and what that country has gone through to rid itself of its past, the story almost seemed hard to believe. But it was real and there was limited coverage of the move.
Last week, I wrote about the Washington Post‘s horror that a local Roman Catholic diocese was asking its Sunday School teachers to affirm their Catholicism.
We got complaints from a couple of readers about this story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, headlined “Improvising Illinois priest barred from pulpit.” It’s written by Tim Townsend, someone we frequently praise here at GetReligion:
