{"id":8165,"date":"2004-01-15T09:03:39","date_gmt":"2004-01-15T09:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/learn_your_beat.html"},"modified":"2004-01-15T09:03:39","modified_gmt":"2004-01-15T09:03:39","slug":"learn_your_beat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/learn_your_beat.html","title":{"rendered":"Learn Your Beat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via The Revealer, a very good (and with a definite point of view which some might find disagreeable) new weblog of religion and journalism, How the press gets it wrong<\/a><\/p>\n

\nBut my experience suggests that mispronunciation problems are only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, with few exceptions\u2014such as Newsweek’s Kenneth Woodward during his long tenure as a regular writer there\u2014most “religion journalists” actually seem quite ignorant about religion generally. Which is precisely why they are calling me. It is not because they have an informed background and close familiarity with religion, and are simply looking to pick up a few good quotes to add color or an air of authority to the story. No. They call knowing almost nothing about what they have been assigned to write on and are essentially asking me to take the good part of an hour to educate them about it.<\/p>\n

….I find it hard to believe that political journalists call Washington think tanks and ask to talk with experts on background about the political strategies of the “Democrizer” or “Republication” parties, or about the most recent “Supremicist Court” ruling. Surely reporters covering business and markets do not call economists asking 45 minutes of elementary questions about how the business cycle works or what effect it has when the Fed drops interest rates. So why do so few journalists covering religion know religion?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via The Revealer, a very good (and with a definite point of view which some might find disagreeable) new weblog of religion and journalism, How the press gets it wrong But my experience suggests that mispronunciation problems are only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, with few exceptions\u2014such as Newsweek’s Kenneth Woodward during his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLearn Your Beat - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/learn_your_beat.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Learn Your Beat - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Via The Revealer, a very good (and with a definite point of view which some might find disagreeable) new weblog of religion and journalism, How the press gets it wrong But my experience suggests that mispronunciation problems are only the tip of the iceberg. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}