{"id":16022,"date":"2017-02-01T06:51:10","date_gmt":"2017-02-01T13:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=16022"},"modified":"2017-02-01T08:02:06","modified_gmt":"2017-02-01T15:02:06","slug":"church-sits-in-judgment-on-media-coverage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/02\/church-sits-in-judgment-on-media-coverage\/","title":{"rendered":"Church sits in judgment on media coverage"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"DC\"<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

Without saying a word, a friend handed me a folded copy of the front section of Sunday\u2019s Billings Gazette.<\/p>\n

No words were needed. The copy was folded to an ad that spoke volumes.<\/p>\n

It was titled, innocuously, \u201cCongratulations to President Donald J. Trump.\u201d The ad, placed by Oasis Community Church on Old Hardin Road, offered prayers for the new president and expressed support for his agenda. But it also attacked the \u201cObama nightmare\u201d and, brutally, mainstream media.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have been unfair, twisted his words, even outright lied about our President,\u201d the ad said. \u201cThey did not do that with Obama or Hillary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, being fair to two out of three ain\u2019t bad. But the implication that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton got a media pass is a stretch. A study<\/a> by the Shorenstein Center of Media, Politics and Public Policy examined 2016 election coverage by 10 major news outlets. The study found that Trump got more press coverage than Clinton, that a smaller percentage of his coverage was negative and that her scandals got more coverage than his.<\/p>\n

A study<\/a> by the Pew Research Center of the 2012 election found that, once \u201chorserace\u201d stories were removed, Obama and Mitt Romney received almost exactly the same percentage of positive and negative stories.<\/p>\n

Those figures don\u2019t even take into account media sources outside the mainstream, such as talk radio, where coverage of Obama and Clinton has been almost 100 percent negative for many years. I know; I heard far too much of it.<\/p>\n

But Oasis Community Church wasn\u2019t done with mainstream journalists. \u201cIt is obvious they were and still are prejudiced in their reporting,\u201d the ad said. \u201cThis is wrong. They are Traitors to the American People.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dishonest? Sometimes. Incompetent? Sure. Prejudiced? That\u2019s a given. But traitors? Gentlemen, draw your weapons.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>What hurts most are the alternative news sources the church suggested seeking out: the Drudge Report, trunews.com, infowars.com, stevequale.com and \u201cother good quality news sites.\u201d<\/p>\n

What a list. The Drudge Report is usually classified as a conservative site, but that isn\u2019t obvious to visitors as casual as this one. In reality, Matt Drudge does very little original reporting. His site mostly aggregates news from mainstream sources.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, the top stories came from Agence France Presse, Axios (a new site founded by a co-founder of Politico), Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Hollywood Reporter, Bloomberg and the New York Post. That\u2019s about as mainstream as it gets.<\/p>\n

When Drudge does get outside the mainstream, he writes headlines like this: \u201cEntire school in Jamaica gets possessed by evil demon\u201d and \u201c4 Men Dressed Up As Animals, Raped Young Boy At Sex Parties, Cops Claim…\u201d Drudge also has a fairly long history of botched and misreported stories; see Wikipedia for a roundup.<\/p>\n

Trunews was new to this reader, but it also offers a menu of stories aggregated from other sources, including RT, the Russia-owned news service. The selection is designed \u201cto offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media,\u201d the site says.<\/p>\n

The site also offers a prayer request link, promising to refer prayer requests to \u201cour prayer team.\u201d<\/p>\n

Infowars is the website associated with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose fans may include<\/a> Donald Trump. Jones\u2019 views have perhaps best been summarized<\/a> by the New Yorker: \u201cJones\u2019s amazing reputation arises mainly from his high-volume insistence that national tragedies such as the September 11th terror attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all inside jobs, \u201cfalse flag\u201d ops secretly perpetrated by the government to increase its tyrannical power (and, in some cases, seize guns).\u201d<\/p>\n

The last site on the list apparently was intended to refer to Steve Quayle, a radio host who thinks<\/a> global elites want to exterminate 90 percent of the human population and whose website features scintillating stories like this one: \u201cMerkel of the North? Canada\u2019s commie PM tweets to Muslim immigrants they\u2019re welcome: NOTICE HOW DIVERSITY PRODUCES PERVERSITY, EVERYWHERE IT’S EMBRACED?\u201d<\/p>\n

OK, maybe churches aren\u2019t the best place to go for advice on the news. Their concern is not for news but for the Good News. But I was still curious about why so many evangelicals\u2014some 80 percent<\/a>, according to polls\u2014voted for Trump, a man who has a long history of adultery, dishonesty and taking advantage of investors, customers and contractors.<\/p>\n

After all, I am old enough to remember when conservative Christians argued against voting for Ronald Reagan because he had been divorced. Sen. Gary Hart\u2019s presidential campaign was derailed by out-of-wedlock dalliances, and multiple marriages may have torpedoed Nelson Rockefeller\u2019s presidential hopes. Even John F. Kennedy (whose philandering was little known at the time) was considered too Catholic to be president.<\/p>\n

I fired off a couple of emails about all this to Oasis Pastor John Kyle, whose books include \u201cDo You Have Demon Troubles.\u201d<\/a> I got back this unsigned response: \u201cPresident Trump may have done some of those things you say, however he is not doing them now. He has changed.\u00a0\u2026 Have you ever sinned? We all have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gulp. As it happens, I ran across a list of the seven deadly sins just this week, and I was a bit shocked to realize that I commit, or think about committing, just about every one of those sins on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will pray for you David that you might understand if you truly want to,\u201d the email from the church concluded.<\/p>\n

Apparently, I need all of the prayers I can get. And maybe those old moral standards for political candidates were unnecessarily strict. We ought to have learned a long time ago that confusing statesmanship with sainthood does nobody any good.<\/p>\n

Besides, a lot of those old presidents retained their reputations because of lax reporting, not high moral standards. Still, when I consider that the president and his top two unofficial advisers have nine marriages between them, I have to wonder if something is going on there besides poor chemistry.<\/p>\n

As Thomas Jefferson, who apparently had a few dalliances himself, once wrote, \u201cI tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Without saying a word, a friend handed me a folded copy of the front section of Sunday\u2019s Billings Gazette. No words were needed. The copy was folded to an ad that spoke volumes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":13405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[5462,2853,5463,1297],"class_list":["post-16022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-alex-jones","tag-donald-trump","tag-pew-research-center","tag-thomas-jefferson","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}