Religion in the News
By Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil
The biggest religion news stories in 2011 involved tensions with Islam, followed by faith in presidential politics, a new Pew report reveals. Some of the key findings in the study, “Religion in the News,” include:
Religion coverage made up just 0.7 percent of all mainstream media coverage in 2011, down from two percent in 2010
Religion received as much attention as race, gender and LGBT issues
Islam made up nearly one-third of all religion news stories last year
The top religion stories of the year included: religion in the election, Peter King’s “Radical Islam” congressional hearings, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, the Westboro Church protests, religion in September 11th commemorations, the Catholic priest abuse scandal and Terry Jones’s Quran burning
For more on religion coverage in the mainstream media, Moment speaks with Jesse Holcomb, a research...