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The major news magazines’ coverage of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s religiosity was more like that found in newspapers than, well, magazines. It contained a few facts but no explanations. While there were a couple of exceptions to this trend, those exceptions are instructive.
Newsweek published an interesting but uneven cover story about Barack Obama’s relationship with his father and father figures.
A few weeks ago, I criticized a New York Times story about Sen. Bob Casey, Jr.’s expected speech at the Democratic convention partly on the grounds that the story failed to specify its nature. Would Casey address his opposition to legal abortion or some other topic, such as the economy or Barack Obama’s skills on the basketball court? The story never said.
In The New York Times, reporter Amy Harmon wrote about a Florida ruling that requires state schools to teach evolutionary biology. Her lede began with the story of a high school teacher who attempted to instill evolution’s principles into his students:
Give credit to Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner of The Politico. The reporters unearthed a 1990 Harvard Law Review article written by none other than its president, Barack Obama. The story provides an interesting early glimpse into Obama’s thinking about abortion and fetal rights, as the authors explain:
Have you read Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy? The book is a favorite of mine. Its greatness lies not only in the story, but also its accumulation of detail. In reading the book I felt as if I knew all about Clyde Griffiths– his shame at his poor Christian parents, his envy of the wealthy guests at the Kansas City hotel where he worked, his cold-blooded plan to murder his working-class pregnant girlfriend.
In her spiritual profile of filmmaker and actor Woody Allen, Newsweek reporter Jennie Yabroff begins her story this way:
You may have read read that the California State Supreme Court ruled that religious doctors cannot refuse to inseminate lesbian women artificially on religious grounds. The decision came down yesterday and has generated quite a bit of buzz.
In case you missed the cover story of this week’s Time, reporter David Van Biema wrote a profile of evangelical mega-church pastor Rick Warren. He presents Warren as a kind of evangelical King David on a global scale.
