How The Media Covers Christians In America

More about the SBC convention fiasco. By any reasonable reading the original "anti-alt-right" proposed resolution offered by Dwight McKissic was poorly worded, overly broad in some places and inaccurately specific in others. The annual meeting didn't forward the proposed resolution on the first try and then a second try later when not many people were paying attention also failed. This is what the media was waiting for and they pounced. Here is the headline on my Yahoo! feed from "News"week writer Aidan Quigley:

Christian Leaders Refuse to Renounce White Nationalism at Southern Baptist Convention Meeting

Well, points to Aidan for his mastery of misrepresentation. As a bonus, the article was headed with this completely unrelated picture:

What does Trump have to do with this resolution? Well nothing. Is Trump a Southern Baptist? Nope. Was Trump at the annual SBC meeting? Also nope. Are there actually any Southern Baptists in that picture? Maybe but I don't see one I recognize. So why is there a pic of Trump accompanying this article? The answer is obvious. The media is trying to smear Southern Baptists as a bunch of redneck racists while undermining the Trump administration.

Trump = Steve Bannon = Alt-Right = Southern Baptist Convention

Which is great except that Steve Bannon is not alt-right by any measure nor is he claimed as part of the alt-right. I haven't seen any evidence to support that the alt-right is a significant issue in the SBC. Trump is not alt-right, and if you missed it has a Jewish daughter and is over the top in his support of Israel, not exactly a typical alt-right position.

The media doesn't care about race relations in the Southern Baptist Convention or anywhere else except as a means of selling papers, magazines and online ad revenue. This issue got media coverage because it provided an easy way for the media to take a cheap shot at conservative Christians. They got to drive some page views, make Christians look bad and then get them to jump on command.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Nothing a sincere follower of Christ can do will placate the secular Left in this country and the media is their mouthpiece and often their attack dogs. No matter how many resolutions are passed and denunciations proclaimed, they will still attack and attack and attack. The only way to make them happy is to embrace sexual perversion, reject every single Biblical norm and ultimately deny Christ. So my advice is to stop worrying about the media and start worrying about preaching the Gospel. We can't do anything to change the media's view of us but we can see real people changed by the power of the Gospel we are entrusted to preach.

How The Media Exacerbates Racial Division

The media and especially what used to be called print journalism enjoy an almost religious status in America. Journalism is accompanied by a mystique, they are the dogged truth finders wearing a snappy hat with "Press" on a card in the brim. They ask hard hitting questions and make crooked politicians and corrupt business leaders alike sweat and squirm and then they bring the news, pure and unadulterated, to we the people. The press carried such critical importance for the Founders of America that the freedom of the press is enshrined right after the freedom of religion in the First Amendment and included alongside the freedom of speech and the freedom to assemble, rights that are also under serious assault in this country especially on campus. The reality is quite different. The media now, and probably since the founding of this country, is largely a partisan, antagonistic cabal. I have been sitting on two examples for a while and just am getting around to posting this.

Story one in the Washington Post. Even the title is pregnant with click-baityness: Judge: Mostly white Southern city may secede from school district despite racial motive. The gist of the story is pretty straightforward. Gardendale, Alabama is part of the Jefferson County school district which includes Birmingham. According to Wikipedia, Birmingham is around 75% black with a median household income of around $38,000. Gardendale by contrast is 88% White with a median household income of $79,000. Another interesting contrast, Birmingham has around a quarter of households listed as a mother with no husband present and around 31% married couples. Gardendale is reported to have over 56% of households with a married couple and around 11% a mother with no husband present. The dramatically disparate relative rates of married couples and the huge disparity in income are not coincidental.

The story is laced with charges of racism on the part of Gardendale without even the courtesy of having them thinly veiled, including the top photo of the story showing posters of the all white girl's cheerleading squad and the essentially all white football team. The horror! For example:

A federal judge’s ruling this week that allows a predominantly white Alabama city to separate from its more diverse school district is stoking new debate about the fate of desegregation initiatives after decades of efforts to promote racial balance in public education.

Judge Madeline Haikala of the U.S. District Court in Birmingham ruled that the city of Gardendale’s effort to break away was motivated by race and sent messages of racial inferiority and exclusion that “assail the dignity of black schoolchildren.”

She also found that Gardendale failed to meet its legal burden to prove that its separation would not hinder desegregation in Jefferson County, which has been struggling to integrate its schools since black parents first sued for an equal education for their children in the 1960s.

Still, Haikala ruled Monday that Gardendale may move forward with the secession, basing her decision in part on sympathy for some parents who want local control over schools and in part on concern for black students caught in the middle. The judge wrote that she feared they would bear the blame if she blocked the city’s bid.

So this judge is going to magnanimously allow parents to have some say over their local school so that black students don't get blamed. It is telling that the effort for "integration" started in the 1960's. It is 2017 so basically for 50 years the government has been trying to force black and white school kids together and has so far failed. This is assumed to be the fault of terrible racist white parents but hold that thought until the next story. The WaPo story goes on.

Under Haikala’s decision, Gardendale may begin operating the two elementary schools within its boundaries this fall. If the city shows good faith in carrying out desegregation efforts at those schools over the next three years — including by allowing and paying for transfer students and appointing a black member to the all-white city school board — it may be allowed to take over the middle and high schools within its boundaries.

Even then, Gardendale would have to pay Jefferson County for the high school building that sits at the center of town, which cost the county more than $50 million to build. The high school plays a key role in the county’s efforts to integrate, using career and technical education programs to attract students from far-more-segregated areas.

So the judge will "allow" them to have their own schools, as long as they play nice and are forced to have a black member of the local school board. The town again is 88% white but apparently only a black representative on the school board can ensure a quality education (as if that is the point of this demand). How noble and generous of her! The idea that a judge sits imperiously while the parents in a town have to come to her hat in hand to ask if they may please have some control over their own schools is so contrary to the idea of America that it makes me nauseous. Notice also that Gardendale has to pay for the high school building in the center of town that "cost the county more than $50 million to build." Um, where do you suppose the funds came from that the county used to build that school? I am thinking a big chunk came from Gardendale with their median household income of $79,000. I am not good at math but it sort of sounds to me like Gardendale is being forced to buy back the high school building that they, at least in part, paid for already once. That seems fair.

My point is that the story was entirely one-sided. There are very few quotes from people from Gardendale, only one from a public statement rather than a quote as far as I can tell, and lots of scathing commentary from the judge in the case, the lawyer for the plaintiffs seeking to stop the independence of Gardendale schools, a random Penn State professor and of course the obligatory comments from a representative of the NAACP. The "story" is little more than a hit piece against the people of Gardendale who probably just want to have some control over their children's education.

Contrast that to this piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The new face of Cobb County: Whites will be minority in 4 years. It starts off with this:

The first time Tammy Garnes visited a school in Cobb County, 10 years ago, she left in a hurry. It was just too white.

“I want to surround my children with black people,” said the film producer, who was sitting at a table in Marietta’s Double Take Cafe with a friend.

Well that is clearly racist! If a white parent was interviewed and said they didn't move to an area because the school was just too black and they left in a hurry and that she wanted her kids surrounded by white children, that would be scorched by the media as just being racist. So the next thing we read is the author, Bo Emerson, taking her to task for her racism. Right? Um, no.

But when the Garnes family made a second visit to Marietta two years ago, Tammy found a different world: A diverse school, several fellow black California expatriates, a sophisticated town and a true gumbo of cultures. Since then she’s enjoyed Guatemalan cuisine, made Hindu friends and sent her daughter to a friend’s Brazilian baptism.

“We didn’t think that was what Cobb County looked like,” said Garnes. “It is a true melting pot, and that is a beautiful thing to see, with everything happening in the world.”

Wow, she went back and there were fewer whites! It was now a "sophisticated town"! What a miraculous transformation! It is so much better a place to live now! No hint of what she said being disturbing or racist. In fact the rest of the article moves back and forth between example of old white people being afraid of the minorities and how wonderful life is in Cobb County now that it is less white.

I don't know what life is like in Cobb County. Atlanta has too many freaking people and traffic is crazy and it is too hot. I do know that anyone white that was interviewed anywhere, anytime by any newspaper and said they wouldn't move into an area because the school was full of black kids and they wanted their kid surrounded by whites would be labelled a racist. But when the person being interviewed is black and she and her husband are film producers...

During their time here Paul Garnes has produced three feature films, including the Academy Award-winning “Selma,” and more than 200 television episodes. Tammy Garnes produced the introductory movie that plays at the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington.

...the story moves on without missing a beat and instead focuses on white fear of minorities moving into their neighborhoods.

So to recap:

A majority white school district that wants local control over their own schools is motivated by racism.

A black woman who doesn't want her kids in a school with a bunch of whites and wants her kids surrounded by other blacks is a swell person.

Ironically the media in this country is one of the main sources of endless clamoring about race and racism, quick to report any "hate crimes" and slow to report when they turn out to be hoaxes. It is almost like the media has a particular political agenda to promote and a worldview to push, a worldview where all whites are racist and need to be punished and all minorities are swell and victims of racism from whites and the cops.

Maybe the real world is more complex than that. Maybe the endless badgering of white people about how racist they are has reached a point where they stop caring about being called racist. Maybe the media is, consciously or unconsciously, actually making race relations worse by the way they report on race in America. Maybe I am way off base here but these two examples are not aberrations but really the exact sort of thing you see endlessly from the older mainstream media. No wonder more and more people get their news from non-traditional sources. I don't really need to listen to media sources that endlessly insult me these days. Meanwhile old school journalistic outlets look around befuddled because they can't figure out why people don't listen to them anymore. In fact they are mostly outraged that the dirty little people outside of the major cities would dare to not listen to their betters, i.e. the media.

I am all for having conversations about race but all too often these "conversations" are entirely one-sided. That is supposed to be OK because of alleged past injustices but I didn't own slaves, I didn't refuse service to blacks or keep them from drinking out of the same water fountain I did. Endlessly beating me up with "news" that tells me I am racist even if I don't realize it, that only whites (and maybe some Asians) can be racist, that I got to where I am because of unfair advantages, is not going to endear me to those messengers. If we are going to have a productive conversation in our society, in our neighborhoods, in the church, anywhere, it has to be a real conversation. Otherwise it is just a scolding lecture and an increasing number of Americans are sick to death of that and not going to listen.

More on this topic to come because it is one of the most dangerous fault lines in our society and I am afraid we are nearing a serious breaking point, a point that the media keeps shoving us toward "for our own good".

More On Sarah Pulliam Bailey

I posted a pretty harsh response to Ms. Bailey and her essay on the dangerous lack of faith in the media last night. I stand by what I wrote but for a more nuanced and polite and thoughtful response check out Albert Mohler's The Briefing from yesterday.

(oops, forgot the link to Mohler initially, fixed now)

Sarah Pulliam Bailey Defends An Institution That No Longer Exists (And Probably Never Did)

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, a journalist who covers religion and who professes to be a Christian, seems angry that her fellow Christians are insufficiently obsequious toward "The Press". Her piece, Evangelicals, your attacks on ‘the media’ are getting dangerous, essentially places The Media on some sort of mystic higher level and borders on hysteria.

Why are these "attacks" by evangelicals getting "dangerous"? Because, as she starts her piece out, some deranged guy shot up a pizza place. He was (cue the ominous music) "......influenced by the book “Wild at Heart,” by John Eldredge about faith and masculinity, a popular one for some evangelicals." Um, so what? Well she never says why that was important to point out. I haven't read it but it is a hugely popular book that has sold, I assume, millions of copies. So why was it pertinent to mention it? No idea other than it is popular among some evangelicals and this guy claimed to be influenced by it. Wild at Heart has been out since 2001 and I don't recall it being linked to a guy firing his gun in a pizza place very often. So why bring it up right at the beginning of her article? The only possible reason it to impugn evangelicals who like a book by lumping them in with a deranged guy, in other words poisoning the conversation right at the outset with the people she is allegedly trying to reach. That is only the beginning of the irony.

Ms. Bailey's basic premise is that evangelicals are wrong to dismiss the "mainstream" media in favor of what she no doubt considers "fake news" sites like....cue the ominous music again....Breitbart. As an aside I literally never read Breitbart (or watch Fox News or listen for more than five minutes to Rush Limbaugh, etc.) prior to this election but now I click on every single story they post just out of spite. She then undermines her own argument by pointing out, even while trying to soften the blow, that the mainstream media has done plenty to undermine their own credibility.

To Sarah, a "professing Christian" let's remember, the newspaper is how we understand the world (emphasis mine).

I was raised in both a religious home and a newspaper home. My parents would pull out books for Bible study in the morning and plop them next to the local newspaper. The Bible and newspaper went together like cereal and milk. I grew up believing journalism was a noble profession because the best journalism is based on the relentless pursuit of truth.

Your quick dismissal of the entire “mainstream media” feels deeply inaccurate to me as a Christian and a journalist — at least the kind of Christianity I was raised on, where the newspaper informed how we understood the world. The act of doing journalism is a way to live out my faith, a way to search for and then reveal truth in the world around me.

It wasn't "quick", as if we as a group are so easily swayed that we just started reading Breitbart this year and stopped reading the New York Times on a whim. This distrust of the media has been a long, long time coming. Of course it feels "inaccurate" to someone who places an apparent inordinate amount of trust in the media and is part of that group herself. The more important point is that from what she is saying, she grew up where the newspaper had equal or at least equivalent standing with the Bible to inform our worldview. Notice in the second paragraph she goes back to the newspaper as the source of how to understand the world but the Bible doesn't make a return mention. Here is where she goes wrong. The newspaper or other sources of news help to inform us of what is happening in the world but the why things happen is the province of the Bible. I can read about terrorism in the newspaper (maybe) but for all of the pontificating about why the terrorists do what they do, from American troops in the Middle East to oil to blow-back to global warming, the real why of what they do is found in the Bible. The big, "Capital W" WHY is sin and that is central to the entire Biblical narrative, Maybe she should have put the newspaper down and picked the Bible up more often. 

Many people involved in the press and especially those in the media friendly bastions of New York, Washington, D.C. and Chicago hold the media in an almost mystical regard. Let me amend that, they (ironically) hold certain traditional media outlets in the highest regard, like the New York Times, NPR/PBS and the Washington Post, as well as a rather jarring combination of far left, openly agenda driven sources like the Huffington Pot and Jon Stewart that are as far as you can get from the genteel and proper format of largely white, upper crust people in expensive suits reading the Washington Post on the Metro in D.C. while on their way to Important Jobs™ that tell people in flyover country why what they think is wrong and irrelevant.

This sort of almost religious reverence for The Media is a large reason why so many of us reject the narratives they try to force down our throats. To people like Sarah with a deep and abiding faith in the media, the media is out for Truth and Justice, acting as a check and balance against the powerful. In reality the press is not that and hasn't been for a long time. It now is a largely agenda driven media enterprise that seeks to mold and change public opinion, not in favor of objective truth but rather in favor of a certain ideological viewpoint. What is especially ironic in her essay is that she thinks that you get a broad viewpoint from the mainstream media that you don't get from "Breitbart"!

The “mainstream media” is collectively valuable because it presents a range of information and viewpoints, while the Breitbarts of the world present a singular voice to a targeted group of people.

Come on. Does anyone actually think that is true? One of the mainstream media's most respected sources is NPR and this is a radio station that has E.J. Dionne and David Brooks on for their Friday political round-up as if they represent different sides of the political spectrum but as Brooks showed in his extremely nasty and partisan commentary on Election night, he is only slightly less liberal than E.J. People like David Brooks are captive, token "conservatives" who are allowed to cluck their tongues and shake their heads sadly at the ignorance of regular conservative yokels who lack their enlightenment. 

Sarah says some stuff like this:

I sympathize with some frustrations you have, including a lack of ideological diversity within some media outlets. Some reporters have unfortunately stepped into more advocacy-oriented journalism and we’ve seen a blurring of opinion with reporting. 

Could the media do a better job of covering various topics — including religion — with nuance? Absolutely. 

But immediately dismisses them as real concerns and anyway you should stay away from Breitbart! I don't expect the media to cover religion with more "nuance" because the media for the most part considers sincere religious faith to be primitive, scary and more than a little dangerous. What Sarah apparently considers "legitimate" media is almost exclusively centered in highly secular, deeply liberal urban centers that are every bit as much in an ideological bubble as us huckleberries in rural Indiana live in.

It also bears mention that sort of like a preacher who depends on the offering plate to make his living preaching about tithing, someone who writes for the mainstream media and probably gets paid lots of money and gets a lot of exposure and fame for doing so has something of a vested interest in having evangelicals who number in the tens of millions in America buying newspapers that pick up her columns.

The press still serves an adversarial role like it used to when they were muckrackers in the early days of America but not in the way expected. Their adversary now is....me. Not specifically me but people like me, people who live outside of certain urban enclaves, who have faith, Christian faith of course, and take it seriously and not only allow but insist that it inform our decisions on matters beyond what to take to the church potluck, people who think that laws matter, that borders are necessary, that government is too big and too intrusive. We are their enemy and they are the ones who made us into adversaries. You can only mock and denigrate what people hold dear and at the same time beat them over the head with the nobility of things that are abhorrent to them for so long before they will stop spending their hard earned money to subsidize the abuse. Ask ESPN and their collapsing viewer base about that.

Ms. Bailey makes an impassioned but hollow call for people who don't think like she does to think like she does anyway because, like too many people who control the media and entertainment world, she thinks she knows better for us than we do. We aren't having it anymore. I am not having it anymore and haven't for some time. Listening to news sources that don't meet the mythical  "journalistic standards" as declared by people living in Washington and New York and Chicago isn't something I feel the slightest obligation to do and trying to guilt by association me into it by some wild attempt to link a lone disturbed individual with anyone who doesn't dutifully buy the New York Times every day is cheap, clumsy and intellectually lazy. In fact it is precisely the sort of stuff that makes people like me no longer care what people from the WaPo or Chicago Tribune think.

If you want to read someone who actually seems to get what is going on, check out this essay from right after the election at cbsnews.com by Will Rahn, The unbearable smugness of the press. His whole essay is on the money but check this part out:

The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

Read the whole thing and compare someone who understands the actual problem with the media is the media themselves, not "dangerous" evangelicals who don't subscribe to the newspaper anymore to Ms. Bailey. If I didn't know better I might think that Ms. Bailey's essay is not directed at her "fellow evangelicals" at all but instead was designed to soothe her fellow media types and reassert her intellectual street cred. If I didn't know better that is but then how would I know better since I don't listen to my betters in the mainstream media?

Ah the media

Double standard much?

When a religious figure falsely predicts global calamity, the media trips over themselves covering it and giggling when it is proven false.

When the United Nations Environment Program predicts global calamity including 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010 and nothing of the sort happens, the media reaction?

Crickets.

Gee, why am I so jaded about the media?

Media bias? What media bias?!

The latest from the neutral, unbiased news media, this time in the form of language control from National Public Radio (you know, the publicly supported radio station that gets government funding from our tax dollars) regarding how to describe the sides in the abortion debate:

Here's the memo that was just distributed to all NPR staff:

"NPR News is revising the terms we use to describe people and groups involved in the abortion debate.

This updated policy is aimed at ensuring the words we speak and write are as clear, consistent and neutral as possible. This is important given that written text is such an integral part of our work.

On the air, we should use "abortion rights supporter(s)/advocate(s)" and "abortion rights opponent(s)" or derivations thereof (for example: "advocates of abortion rights"). It is acceptable to use the phrase "anti-abortion", but do not use the term "pro-abortion rights".

Digital News will continue to use the AP style book for online content, which mirrors the revised NPR policy.

Do not use "pro-life" and "pro-choice" in copy except when used in the name of a group. Of course, when the terms are used in an actuality they should remain." [An actuality is a clip of tape of someone talking. So if a source uses those terms, NPR will not edit them out.]

Thanks
David

David Sweeney
Managing Editor

Ah. So people who are pro-abortion are described as supporting a "right". Those who are anti-abortion can still be called that (at least when convenient like 'anti-abortion activist shoots doctor') or preferably they can be described as being opposing a "right". Note they can never link the words "pro" and "abortion", because that makes it sound like you are in favor of abortion and of course no one is in favor of abortion, not even those who profit from them. Abortion advocates are merely champions of a fundamental "right".

Seems like they are taking a stance based on the language they use. Nah, this makes perfect sense. I guess I am just being paranoid. Maybe we can start calling people who support school choice as "education rights opponents" or those who call for pedophiles to be arrested as "sexual rights opponents". Makes for a convenient set of labels!

So apparently Democrats are all in favor of taxes…

….except when they have to pay them. First we had Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s tax booboo, and now we have paragon of virtue Tom Daschle overlooking a small tax burden of just $120,000.

WASHINGTON – Tom Daschle apologized Monday to the Senate panel that will decide whether he becomes Health and Human Services secretary, saying he was "deeply embarrassed and disappointed" about his failure to pay more than $120,000 in taxes.

A $120,000 error? Oops! That seems a bit more than an oversight.

Tom, how are we supposed to pay for a massive and bloated new health care bureaucracy if people have “mistakes” like that on their taxes?

A financial disclosure form Daschle filed about a week ago shows that he made more than $200,000 in the past two years speaking to members of the health care industry that Obama wants him to reform.

The speaking fees were just a portion of the more than $5.2 million the former South Dakota senator earned over the past two years as he advised health insurers and hospitals and worked in other industries such as energy and telecommunications, according to a financial statement filed with the Office of Government Ethics.

Five million in speaking fees over the last two years. I am sure none of the groups who paid him exorbitant amounts to speak (and he is not much of an orator) will be looking for special access in return for their payments.

This is the Democrat party. Big spending rich liberals who can afford tax shelters while at the same time pontificating about people “paying their fair share” and passing growth crushing tax increases at every opportunity. Limousine liberals who fan the flames of populist rhetoric with great speeches that amount to “do as I say, not as I do”. Little wonder that liberals are so opposed to simplifying the tax code, because in doing so they lose control over people and the filthy rich among the liberal elites can’t hide their income anymore. I expect the Senate and the media to give Daschle a pass on this, just like they have everything else associated with Obama. Jeremiah Wright? Pass. William Ayers? Pass. The Clinton Foundation? Pass. Timothy Geithner? Pass. Tom Daschle? Pass. Media bias? What media bias?

Hope? Change? Politics as usual.

Media bias? What media bias!?

There are few things held in more disdain by the "mainstream" media quite like people serious about their faith and traditional sexual mores. So imagine the pleasure of the media when a report came out that teens who signed purity pledges to remain chaste until marriage were not any different in their sexual behavior than teens who didn’t sign them. “Hah, see it is all a sham!” crowed the media. From the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn Like A Virgin: The Press Take On Teenage Sex :

The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don't. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.

Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.

"Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," screams CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.

In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: "Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study."

But not so fast…

Here's the rub: It just isn't true.

In fact, the only way the study's author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called "Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers," and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.

The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that "virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general -- a fact that many media reports have missed cold."

What Dr. Healy was getting at is that the pledge itself is not what distinguishes these kids from most other teenagers. The real difference is their more conservative and religious home and social environment. As she notes, when you compare both groups in this study with teens at large, the behavioral differences are striking. Here are just a few:

- These teens generally have less risky sex, i.e., fewer sexual partners.

- These teens are less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, or to have friends who use drugs.

- These teens have less premarital vaginal sex.

- When these teens lose their virginity they tend to do so at age 21 -- compared to 17 for the typical American teen.

- And very much overlooked, one out of four of these teens do in fact keep the pledge to remain chaste -- amid much cheap ridicule and just about zero support outside their homes or churches.

Let's put this another way. The real headline from this study is this: "Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge."

So the reality is that virginity pledges aside, the bigger factor in teen sexual behavior is their religious upbringing. Far from being a discouragement, this should encourage parents that what they are teaching their children has an impact on the way they live later on. The numbers are still very disturbing and we still live in a sensuality driven culture that wars against what we try to instill in our kids, but the effort is worth the while. (jumping on soap box) I would still insist that trying to stem the tide of the secular worldview with a couple of heart to heart talks, an hour of Sunday school and another hour of youth group is not going to counteract the pervasive diet of sexual permissiveness that is rampant in public schools (jumping off soap box) .

This is yet another example of selective “reporting” designed to twist data to reach a predetermined outcome. This was not accidental. It is either sloppy journalism or more likely a willful attempt to twist data to push an agenda. That agenda is a simple one, and one that manifests itself in ways subtle and not-so subtle and seeks to tear down every wall of morality in our society and give cover to every sort of sin. We do a fine job of justifying our own sins as it is; I am a champion at it. I certainly don’t need the media helping me out in trying to rationalize away my own sinful behavior. Every Christian, heck any thinking person period, needs to examine what is coming out of media reports with a keen eye. All the more reason to base our worldview on the unchanging rock of Scripture. Media fads come and go but the Word of God is true and endures forever!

(Dr. Mohler featured this issue on his radio program Tuesday, I haven’t downloaded it to my iPod yet but I am sure it was excellent!)

A "small cache of weapons"?

Believe me, I am not a defender of Plaxico Burress. He is kind of a punk and played for Michigan State. But when the news media "reports" on something like this and

Weapons cache reportedly found at Plaxico Burress' home

Reports: Weapons, ammo seized at Burress' NJ home

Authorities seized a small cache of weapons and ammunition from the New Jersey home of New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, the New York Post and Newsday both reported Wednesday, possibly setting up the embattled player for more legal trouble.

The Post, citing anonymous law enforcement sources, said a 9-mm handgun, a rifle and ammunition for three other guns — a .380, a .45 and a .40, the same caliber of gun Burress accidentally shot himself with — were seized during the execution of a search warrant at Burress' home in Totowa.

A "weapons cache"? One rifle. One handgun. Some ammunition. That is newsworthy? The headline makes it sound like he had dozens of M-16s hidden in a fortress, a virtual Branch Davidian compound in New Jersey. Nope, one rifle. One handgun. A couple of boxes of ammunition.

I would be willing to bet that most people in Michigan have at least that many firearms in their house, many of us have quite a few more. I know I do! I am afraid to think what the news media would describe my collection as: "an arsenal"? "A paramilitary training ground"? The national news media is so removed from the majority of Americans that the discovery of law-abiding citizens (not including Mr. Burress of course) owning firearms in the home and believing in God is like discovering a long-lost tribe in the jungle. Little wonder that Barack Obama derisively spoke of middle Americans clinging to their guns and religion, and that the comment caused little uproar on the coasts. How can we expect to get our news from people who spin reports like this, turning a couple of guns in an apocalyptic cult waiting for doomsday?

Media Bias? What media bias?!

I mentioned a couple of days ago, without being overly subtle, a hit-piece in Newsweek magazine chastising Christians for actually believing in that book they carry around when it comes to gay marriage. When it comes to caring for the poor, absolutely read the Bible! When it comes to sin, you need to look first to the prevailing winds of the culture!

The cover story is hardly unexpected, but behind the scenes is a more subtle sign of the extent to which the mainstream media attacks the Christian faith. Along with the piece by Lisa Miller is an editorial salvo from Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek:

On the campus of Wheaton College in Illinois last Wednesday, in another of the seemingly endless announcements of splintering and schism in the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan and other leaders of the conservative forces of reaction to the ecclesiastical and cultural acceptance of homosexuality declared that their opposition to the ordination and the marriage of gays was irrevocably rooted in the Bible—which they regard as the "final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life."

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

Apparently being the editor of a "news" magazine with a rapidly declining readership qualifies Mr. Meacham to pass judgment on what is or is not orthodox, historical Christianity. Mr. Meacham uses much of the same mockery and misrepresentations that Ms. Miller used:

This is a sweeping and open declaration of Newsweek Magazines opposition to Biblical Christianity. Mark Hemingway of National Review makes the following succinct observation:

Of course, religious Americans are more than used to shoddy coverage of theological debates. So what else is new? Criticism that a Newsweek cover story serves a left-of-center political worldview is almost, well, a weekly occurrence.

What is remarkable about this week’s cover story was how Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, has handled the backlash. He hasn’t defended the piece as a matter of opinion or part of a public debate. Rather, Newsweek has apparently come out of the closet as an explicitly ideological magazine editorially endorsing the article’s viewpoint.

Quite true. We are rapidly seeing the sheep's clothing being taken off by the increasingly bold wolves. We saw it in the unapologetic openness of the mainstream media's effusive support for Barack Obama, casting aside any pretense of neutrality. We saw, and are seeing it, in the media's ongoing overwhelming negative coverage of President Bush. We saw it in the media's initial coverage of the passage of Proposition 8. We see it now in this editorial note from Newsweek, perhaps the most bold declaration yet that the media is no longer even pretending to be neutral.

We should not be surprised by this blatant ideological bias on the part of Newsweek and other bastions of the old school mainstream media. In fact, as Christians we should welcome it. For too long these secular left institutions have been hiding behind journalistic integrity to claim to be unbiased. Now that they are increasingly "out of the closet" it should be easier to identify what they espouse as the ideological rhetoric it is, instead of assuming it to be actual news. I just hope that more people in the church will see these organizations for what they are: prophets and evangelists for the secular humanist left.