Essay / Misc.

Is the New York Times Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

A colleague tipped me off to this howler at the New York Times. Under a picture of a crowd at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Times prints the caption:

Worshipers at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus is traditionally believed to be buried. But a new documentary says he might have been buried elsewhere.

Believed to be buried? If this were USA Today, they’d probably have a survey nearby, “Where do YOU think Jesus is buried?”

Trying to Google this story, I accidentally hit a 1997 story in which they made the same mistake.

Bless their hearts, the NYT puts out a lot of words, so if they blow it every decade or so on the central truth of Christianity, we should cut them some slack. No doubt they’ve also managed to report the resurrection a few times in the intervening ten years. “The press just doesn’t get religion,” somebody once said, and if you’d like to see more than just wisecracks on the subject, the crew over at the Get Religion blog does a professional job of analyzing the religion beat in a truly helpful way.

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