draft of annotated bibliography - 2 out of 5

Hoover, Stewart. Religion in the Media Age. Abingond: Routledge, 2006. 8 Oct. 2007 . This book examines how media and religion share the same court and cannot be intrinsically separated. Hoover states media is slowing taking over religion’s role to share social, cultural, and moral information to the public. The developments of media into cyberspace created a new religious market where religious information became more readily available to the public, which resultantly caused the public to think more about religion in general. Conversations about religion will undoubtedly contain some aspect of the media within them because they are so closely intertwined.

Mooney, Chris, and Matthew Nisbet. "Undoing Darwin: When the Coverage of Evolution Shifts to the Political and Opinion Pages, the Scientific Context Falls Away." Columbia Journalism Review 44 (2005): 30-39. 8 Oct. 2007 . This is an examination of the role journalism plays in scientific and religious news articles. Mooney and Nisbet examined seventeen months of evolution stories in large as well as local papers to come to a conclusion about the way evolution was reported. They found scientific stories, such as the evolution versus intelligent design debate, were written as more opinion pieces than scientific articles. This conclusion reveals journalism’s tendency to downplay the scientific side of stories by placing a more political and religious slant on articles. The media plays a critical role in the way scientific-religious issues are perceived.