This article is clearly written and reads well, and, based on what I've read from other news outlets, is largely accurate in its assessment of McCain's attempt to court Evangelical Christian voters. However, its main problem is that it is not well sourced, and the only sources it provides links to within the piece are to other TIME magazine articles [Clarification added Sept. 8, 2008: There are 9 hotlinks in this online article, and all of them link to other TIME magazine articles. The reporter does cite a few other sources, but having outbound links to sources other than just TIME would have bolstered the accuracy of this piece.] This makes it look like TIME is providing these links only as traffic-drivers to other parts of its ... More »

Some interesting perspective on a valid question. Not a Christian myself, I'd assumed Palin would solidify that group of voters. So I found the breakdown of different viewpoints within the community interesting.

Any story that makes as many generalizations as this one, with little in the way of supporting evidence, must be read with caution. The author's claims about evangelicals moving in this or that direction, no longer supporting this or that, and so on, may be true. But it is almost equally plausible that the opposite is true. The author has only marginal evidence to support her assertions.

This opinion piece has moderate journalistic value. The author seeks to divide up religious believers into boxes, as if there is not a common faith among the different Christian denominations. This forces the author to make left-right distinctions that do not make sense. Surely Palin is more of a mainstream Christian than Obama, who belonged to an extreme left-wing church until very recently, one that is on the left-most 5% of the political spectrum. An unbiased article would have noted his switch this year when mentioning the Palin family's switch of churches 6 years ago. Otherwise the article has a reasonable balance, including some favorable comments about Palin.

A well written and good article. What I found astonishing were the comments made about this article. The statement that her sources were other Time magazine articles were pure fiction and fabricated. She made one reference to Time and that was to quote a survey of Evangelicals. She pointed out the survey did not represent the age group of 18-35 respondents. Time's survey covered only 10% of this age group, where in fact it is much higher. The criticism of this article was appalling slanted. I wondered whether they had read the same article I did.

From my point of view it was opinionated, but still good factual news. Some of the sentences were a little long or complicated, making it harder to read at points. At times there was a disapproving undertone where the journalist's opinion started to seep into the story, but they did a good job of not running with that for too long. Plus, the reliability is more important in a political story such as this. In order to be trusted as valid, it was to remain mostly objective, balanced, and factual. This article did a pretty good job of that. It was filled with good information and interesting facts. Since this was a TIME article, I would expect nothing less. I am in a journalism class that required me to read an article from this ... More »