On the day after the Super Bowl, what was the hot topic in your social-media feeds?

Was it bad lip syncing or a visible pregnant superstar?

Maybe the first-ever showdown between two Black starting quarterbacks? Or was it that each of these quarterbacks paused for rather lengthy moments of private prayer before the game began?

Advertisements? Naked avocados? The usual parade of beers? Deadly-serious triangular snacks? Electric vehicles that are not on sale yet? Or how about that sonogram of an unborn child with a thing for Pringles?

Now, do you think your answers could be connected to the presence of religious topics in your search-engine history files? Which of the angles listed above were most likely to get covered in “mainstream” news sources and which probably showed up in “religious” or “conservative” news?

This is another way to say that, one way or another, the odds are good that Americans are going to end up arguing about hot-button topics linked to religion.

That search-engine question was directly linked to the discussions at the end of a podcast that I did the other day with the Acton Institute social-media team. The main topic (#surprise) was my recent essay for their journal Religion & Liberty: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism.”

To be blunt, I think this is the most important thing I’ve written about the religion beat since my 1983 cover story for The Quill: “The Religion Beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets.” Thus, GetReligion has already offered quite a bit of digital ink (and a podcast of our own) on this topic. Think “RIP American Model of the Press? It appears that online financial realities killed it ...” And also, “It's just good business? The growing debate about America's news-silo culture.”

Thus, here is the Acton description of the podcast material:

How has journalism — and its audience — changed, and why? Has the internet transformed broadcasting into narrowcasting? How has a transition from the old bias of liberalism to illiberalism, even “Jacobinism,” remade what journalists produce and we consume? Then the guys look at the Super Bowl ads and explore why they seem to be less entertaining and mostly just celebrities in different unfunny situations. And was the Super Bowl ad that drew the most attention an ad for Jesus?

See? I wasn’t blowing smoke about the link to the Super Bowl content and even the ads.

If you read about that “controversial” Pringles commercial in the mainstream press, you probably saw something like this tiny item from Yahoo!Sports:

This ad features a sonogram image of a fetus with a Pringles can stuck on its hand. If someone on the Pringles ad team won a bet by doing that, congratulations. You're a legend now.

If you read about the same commercial on the Catholic News Agency website, there was an entire article examining the details: “Pringles commercial airs most pro-life ad of the Super Bowl.” Here’s a sample of that whole can-stuck-on-hand riff:

The grandfather goes on to explain that it happens to “surgeons, judges, airport ground crew” and finally “even your little cousin Timmy,” whose sonogram image clearly shows a baby with a photoshopped Pringles can around his hand.

The sonogram image prominently featured in the most-watched TV event in America was praised by pro-lifers as bringing attention to the humanity of unborn children, even if it was with a photoshopped Pringles can.

Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review lauded the commercial, thanking Pringles on Twitter and saying, “I’m officially calling it the pro-life Pringles commercial.”

What a world.

Meanwhile, there have been quite a few news reports and opinion pieces in recent weeks about the state of modern journalism and, in particular, whether “objectivity” and the old-school American Model of the Press are alive or dead (see “Behold! ChatGPT has interesting, haunting thoughts on religion-beat questions”),

If you doubted the firestorm nature of these discussions, please see this new piece from the always readable Andrew Sullivan, a gay-rights icon who is so liberal on the First Amendment that many now call him a cultural conservative.

This one is a must read.