media criticism

They care for trans children and teenagers—and they’re getting death threats. On August 30th, Boston Children’s Hospital was shut down due to a bomb threat , and shut down a second time on September…

In the early ’90s, my Catholic grade school hosted a guest speaker, a member of the Pennsylvania state legislature. After giving our eighth-grade class a basic civics lesson, he opened the floor to Q…

When I was in yeshiva in Boro Park in the early 80s, I was asked by my Rosh Yeshiva, a Satmar Hasid, to go to Downtown Brooklyn to sign a few documents for state funds for the yeshiva. When I got…

While the Christian Right has been an increasingly powerful factor in American politics for decades, it has benefited from a strangely persistent culture of denialism. We needn’t review the number of…

What with Ukraine , Mar-a-Lago , Jerome Powell, and what-not, I suppose we can be forgiven (ha!) if we didn’t pay a lot of attention to the gnashing of teeth over President Biden’s long-delayed…

Jana Reiss, a senior columnist for Religion News Service, recently surveyed a number of recent television programs that “ present Mormonism in an unflattering light .” The column’s headline claims…

We’re not used to thinking of Ron DeSantis , Florida’s rabidly culture-warring governor and a possible 2024 frontrunner for the Republican presidential candidate, as a Catholic politician. He clearly…

Regular readers of Religion Dispatches will likely be familiar with my fairly frequent forays into media criticism. In addition to unpacking the ways in which the legacy media and elite pundits…

Most of us don’t want to grow up to be our parents, especially when we’re in our twenties and ready to forge our own path in the world. For better or for worse, age often proves that we’re more like…

Right-wing media have been relentless in their attacks on trans people. In a single three-week window during March and April of this year, Fox News aired over 170 anti-trans segments . And over the…