Mollie Hemingway

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Explaining the slight Sikh shooting coverage

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When a Neo-Nazi gunman killed and wounded worshipers at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, we looked at a few problems with the coverage. Some readers suggested additional problems. See here and here, for instance. I actually thought much of the coverage was good. This New York Times story (“For Victim in Sikh Temple Shooting, a Life of Separation“) was a keeper and the general coverage at CNN and its Belief Blog have been extensive and thoughtful.


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The inaccurate ways we portray nuns

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One of the most powerful ways we receive and process information is visually. And we don’t get too much of a chance to discuss how coverage of religion news is shaped by visual images that accompany copy. But someone sent me a link to a story and told me I had to check out the picture that accompanied it. It got me thinking.


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Reporter learns difficult lesson about Facebook rants

Earlier this month we looked at an incident involving a reporter covering the Chick-Fil-A protest for his paper in Florida. Reporter Mark Krzos had a public Facebook profile. On it, he shared his liberal views, affinity for the Democratic Party and its candidates, and his strong dislike of Chick-Fil-A. He appeared to go so far as to support blocking Chick-Fil-A outlets from being permitted to exist in Boston, for instance.


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Pod people: Learning more about the Alevi

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On this week’s Crossroads, host Todd Wilken and I spoke about media coverage of the Chick-Fil-A protests, the misplaced outrage at CNN when the channel was blamed for something an online commenter had written about the shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the Alawite/Alevi confusion displayed by the New York Times.


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Hits and misses in media coverage of nuns

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The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the organization that represents leadership of most of the sisters in the United States, is having its big annual meeting in St. Louis this week. And today is the big day where we learn how they’ve decided to proceed in response to the Vatican crackdown on them. In the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of glowing and puffy and rather one-sided coverage of the sisters. In the dispute, the Vatican was more rarely actually quoted than inaccurately summarized.


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Lolo Jones can't be sexy, Christian and a hurdler

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Some readers sent in a recent piece from Salon, which (for those who stopped reading it back in the 1990s) bills itself as “the leading progressive news site, combining award-winning commentary and reporting on the most important issues of the day.” But we don’t really look at “progressive” or “conservative” sites for how well they report the news because we’re more interested in mainstream publications. If they want to publish a piece about Gabby Douglas and how it would be easier to like her “if she were not so, so, so into Jesus,” that’s their business.


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