The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Spring 2021 The Religion Beat Gets Beat: The Rise and Fall of Stand-alone Religion Sections in Southern Newspapers, 1983-2015 Tara Yvette Wren Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Wren, Tara Yvette, "The Religion Beat Gets Beat: The Rise and Fall of Stand-alone Religion Sections in Southern Newspapers, 1983-2015" (2021). Dissertations. 1885. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/1885 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE RELIGION BEAT GETS BEAT: THE RISE AND FALL OF STAND-ALONE RELIGION SECTIONS IN SOUTHERN NEWSPAPERS, 1983-2015 by Tara Yvette Wren A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Communication at The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved by: Dr. Vanessa Murphree, Committee Chair Dr. Christopher Campbell Dr. David Davies Dr. Cheryl Jenkins Dr. Fei Xue May 2021 COPYRIGHT BY Tara Yvette Wren 2021 Published by the Graduate School ABSTRACT This paper explores the religious news coverage of five southern newspapers in Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas. The newspapers researched in this study are among those that published a stand-alone religion section. Newspapers surveyed include – The Clarion-Ledger (Mississippi), The Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), The Dallas Morning News (Texas), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Georgia), and The Tennessean (Tennessee).