To my shock, no one out in cyberspace filed a pope-retirement question over at veteran religion-reporter Richard Ostling’s handy new website, “Religion Q&A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy Answers your Questions.” Come on folks! The retired Time and Associated Press scribe is out there willing to give you input on the kinds of news-related questions that often pop up here in the GetReligion comments pages. Ostling wants to provide basic info. Take him up on it! Lacking a question from a... Read more
The Washington Post published something yesterday that it shouldn’t have. Why? Because it was false, as in fake. Nevertheless, it’s worth highlighting here for the lessons we can learn from it. The piece was headlined: Sarah Palin’s Plan to Reach Millions of Devoutly Religious People Through al Jazeera It’s since been completely rewritten — because it was false — but the HTML for the botched item remains “sarah-palins-plan-to-reach-millions-of-devoutly-religious-people-through-al-jazeera.” Oh, it remained that way when I first wrote this piece last... Read more
For a newspaper junkie, one of the joys of the digital age is being able to scan hundreds of front pages when major breaking news occurs. And the first resignation of a pope in nearly 600 years falls under the category of major breaking news, right? Already, tmatt and Mollie have tackled key angles and questions in the media’s coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s surprising announcement — read their posts here, here, here and here. I want to focus on the... Read more
I hope everyone is having a blast with Day 2 of Papalpalooza. I’ve actually enjoyed some of the media coverage I’ve come across but we all know what happens when I post on good stuff. <crickets> Right. So let’s look at other approaches taken. I know it’s The Guardian but I did like the transparency of this piece, which reads something like a parody of how the mainstream media treat the Roman Catholic Church. Headline: Next pope’s in-tray: five key... Read more
So here is an interesting journalism question for this digital age: What do we do with the earlier versions of stories by major news organizations if the editors later take them down and replace them with cleaned-up, expanded versions? Do all of those headlines and paragraphs go into journalistic limbo? Were they ever published in the first place? Take, for example, the following headline from The New York Times: Pope’s Successor Is Likely to Share His Doctrine By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO... Read more
On one level, I am rather disappointed to note that the editors at the Associated Press have already fixed an awesome typo that a Beltway journalist sent to me early today, the one that said the Pope Benedict XVI has, as is common among elderly men, experienced “some prostrate problems” in recent years. Yes, that’s certainly the truth. Arthritis can make it hard to do prostrations during liturgical prayers. Perhaps that typo crept into the copy while members of the... Read more
Well that’s not the news I expected to wake up to! Pope Benedict has announced he’ll retire at the end of the month. And as Michael Brendan Dougherty writes: There is no way I’m prepared for the ignorance about to be on display in the media Joshua Trevino snarked: Summing up most media comment: “Is it normal for the Pope to also be the Bishop of Rome? Will we see future Popes focus on just the Papacy?” NBC host Chris... Read more
Little news of the gay marriage debate in the French National Assembly has made its way across the Atlantic into the American press. The lack of news coverage could be due to the perception that the outcome is not in doubt. The governing Socialist Party and their allies on the left hold a majority and have directed their members to vote in favor. Or France, being a very foreign country, the goings on way over there are of little concern... Read more
If you’ve paid attention to religion news at all in recent days, you probably know that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has responded to the latest attempt by the White House (.pdf here) to draw a legal line between religious liberty in church pews and freedom of religious expression in the marketplace and the rest of American life. The bishops’ key point appears to be that this latest version of the Health and Human Services mandate “falls short” of... Read more
Your GetReligionistas, as the divine Mrs. MZ once stressed, are way, way, way past the point where we joyfully go out of our way to write about the journalism issues linked to the mainstream media coverage that is, from time to time, poured out on behalf of the Womenpriests movement. Some readers have been tempted to think that we do not believe that this movement is worthy of coverage. This is nonsense, of course, since GetReligion has been arguing since... Read more
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