I always find it fascinating how different news outlets cover the same story. As
an example, here are four stories, two from Reuters and two from AP. Notice the
distinct differences in tone and presentation.
Frail Pope Struggles Through Lourdes Mass (Reuters)
Pope Struggles Through Lourdes Sermon, Needs Water (Reuters)
Frail Pope Celebrates Mass at Lourdes (AP)
Pilgrims Crowd Field for Mass With Pope (AP)
There’s been a lot of talk lately of the potential effects on mainstream journalism by blogging. One improvement I’d suggest is linking to source material!!! It drives me nuts when a journalist posts a story about some survey, poll, website, research, or whatever and doesn’t tell us where to find it!
To any journalists reading this (yeah, right), if you’re going to summarize someone else’s work, please tell your humble readers where to find the material in its entirety. Thank you.
Here’s an example. Would it really have hurt to provide a link to Vote for Change or Rock for Life?
Perhaps the impact of The Passion of the Christ was bigger than I was initially
led to believe. The Mighty Barrister seems to think the
survey results are biased.
“Despite marketing campaigns labeling the movie the ‘greatest evangelistic tool’ of our era, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of those who saw the film stated that they made a profession of faith or accepted Jesus Christ as their savior in reaction to the film’s content.”
Surprised? I was at first, but not once I did a little digging. It turns out that George Barna, “Founder and Directing Leader of the Barna Research Group, Ltd.,†is a born-again evangelical.
Barna’s religious preferences appear to have colored his conclusions, if not the survey’s methodology itself. Take, for example, the last sentence in the quote above. It is almost guaranteed that nearly all of the people who saw the movie were believers in Christ before they saw the movie. He tells us that 53% of the people who saw the movie were “born again Christians,†but he doesn’t tell us how many were Catholics. In fact, the only time he mentions Catholics at all is in a slightly disparaging remark, noting that “Protestants were more likely than Catholics to give The Passion an “excellent†rating (78% versus 68%, respectively),†– and this is mentioned right after he says that the groups most likely to disparage the movie were “atheists and agnostics, homosexuals and liberal Democrats.†We are in fine company.
Friend and sometime co-blogger Jerry Nora was mentioned in the June/July issue of First Things. 🙂 (Thanks, Quenta Narwenion)
"It's been a while since I've had occasion to remark on Peter Singer of Princeton University, the ageing bad boy of moral philosophy. But now Gerald Nora, a second-year medical student, sends me the dust jacket of the 1996 edition of Singer's Rethinking Life and Death. Mr. Nora is right in suspecting that the blurbs 'praising' the book might have been chosen by Professor Singer's enemies. For instance, there is this from the Washington Post: 'Far from pointing a way out of today's moral dilemmas, Singer's book is a road map for driving down the darkest of moral blind alleys. . . . Read it to remind yourself of the enormities of which putatively civilized beings are capable.' Precisely. If you want a roadmap for driving down blind alleys, this is it. Then there is this from the publisher: 'A profound and provocative work in the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.' Precisely again. Even more precisely, it is in the tradition of thinking that Huxley so powerfully warned us against." – Richard John Neuhaus
The fight for a
la carte cable has crossed over into main-stream media.
Cable Channel-Shuffling Considered
Congress has raised a question that the cable TV industry does not want to answer: Why can’t I get SpongeBob SquarePants without having to buy Stripperella, too?