Tag: journalism

In the News: Wicca, Climate Change, Gaza and Much More

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A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →

Numbers Lie: Hacking at Islam

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Numbers never tell the whole story–which is why liberal pleas to rely solely on science and facts carry so little weight.

Internet years are like dog years.  Way back in 2003 when The Revealer was founded as a joint project between NYU’s Journalism Department and The Center for Religion and Media, we placed a more traditional emphasis on educating future journalists about how to report about religion: with links to academic and reporting resources, explicit examples of how journalists get religion right and wrong, and by debunking hypocritical or imbalanced, precious or erroneous reporting.  While our emphasis on that aspect of our mission has varied over the past eight years, we’ve always paid close attention to what tools institutions use to school journalists in religion’s means and ways.

For instance: there’s a cool new online course about Islam, created by Washington State University and Poynter News University.  Designed by Lawrence Pintak (who will be speaking at an event co-sponsored by The Center for Religion and Media on October 5th), the course is meant:

as a tool for journalists who want to be accurate in educating their audience about the religion and culture of Islam, Muslim communities in the U.S., and the distinctions between Islam as a political movement and the radical philosophies that inspire militant Islamists.

Smart and necessary!  But that’s not what the Culture and Media Institute (CMI, part of Brent “that’s indecent!” Bozell’s family of non-profits) has to say about the project. Continue Reading →

Journalism's Nowhere

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Jay Rosen at PressThink on the things he’s learned in 25 years of teaching journalism:

It’s Bill Keller insisting that “torture” is the wrong word for the New York Times to use in describing torture because it involves taking sides in a dispute between the United States Government and its critics. It’s Howard Kurtz suggesting that Anderson Cooper was “taking sides” when he called the lies of the Libyan government lies. But it’s also the reporter who has to master the routine of “laundering my own views [by] dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.” And it’s that lame formula known as he said, she said journalism. It’s the way CNN “leaves it there” when two guests give utterly conflicting accounts.

Long ago, something went awry in professional journalism the way the Americans do it, and it left these visible deformations. In my own criticism I have given various names to this pattern: agendalessness, the quest for innocence— most often, the View From Nowhere.

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Journalism’s Nowhere

Posted on by

Jay Rosen at PressThink on the things he’s learned in 25 years of teaching journalism:

It’s Bill Keller insisting that “torture” is the wrong word for the New York Times to use in describing torture because it involves taking sides in a dispute between the United States Government and its critics. It’s Howard Kurtz suggesting that Anderson Cooper was “taking sides” when he called the lies of the Libyan government lies. But it’s also the reporter who has to master the routine of “laundering my own views [by] dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.” And it’s that lame formula known as he said, she said journalism. It’s the way CNN “leaves it there” when two guests give utterly conflicting accounts.

Long ago, something went awry in professional journalism the way the Americans do it, and it left these visible deformations. In my own criticism I have given various names to this pattern: agendalessness, the quest for innocence— most often, the View From Nowhere.

Continue Reading →