Category Archives: Mass media

The New Yorker’s biased journalism on Jesus

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ChristArt

By Spencer D Gear

Andrew Gopnik wrote the article, “What did Jesus do?” (The New Yorker, 24 May 2010) in which he proceeded to give us his scepticism about Jesus with statements such as:

  • ‘The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith. The more one knows, the less one knows’;
  • ‘Belief remains a bounce, faith a leap’;
  • The reason for Jesus’ cry from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ was ‘the Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down’;

If you want comments from the sceptical left-wing of scholarship of Jesus and the Gospels, you’ll find it in this article with prominence given to people like, Bart Ehrman, who believes

that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.

Then you’ll find comments from the sceptical views of Jesus from people like L. Michael White, John Dominic Crossan co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, Philip Jenkins, Philip Pullman, William Empsom, Diarmaid MacCulloch and Paul Verhoeven.

There was not one quote from a biblical scholar who supported the integrity of Scripture and its reliable witness to the historical Jesus. So, I sent this….

Letter to the editor: The New Yorker

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ChristArt

I sent this online, 24 May 2010, but the letter was not printed in the online edition that I was able to see. A Google search on 16 July 2012 has not been able to find the following letter or part of it:

Andrew Gopnik’s “What did Jesus Do?” (24 May online) is an example of one-eyed journalistic bias. Scholars who supported his skeptical view towards the Gospels were quoted.

Nowhere were contrary opinions quoted from historical Jesus’ scholars such as Drs. N. T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, Samuel Byrskog, Kevin Vanhoozer, D. A. Carson, Ben Witherington III, Craig Evans, Michael Wilkins, William Lane Craig, Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock and others.

If you want me to believe The New Yorker supports balanced journalism, you’ll need to fix this prejudice.

After seeing this kind of journalism over a number of years from many news sources, I’ve grown used to the secular media taking it as par for the course that they will not deliver a reliable, biblically-based view of the historical Jesus.


Copyright © 2012 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 16 October 2015.

 

Mass media correct and Christian wrong!

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Photo: Gay rights protesters gathered outside the Victory Life Centre to make their views known. (ABC News: Claire Krohl)

Map: Perth 6000

By Spencer D Gear

How did the news media report on the ‘Rally to Preserve Marriage’ at the church which Margaret Court pastors in Perth, Victory Life Centre, on 24 April 2012?

This is what one of the speakers, Bill Muehlenberg, stated in his article, ‘Shouting Down the Opposition’. He stated:

The mainstream media was of course intolerant as well, refusing to offer balanced coverage. They did come out to video the protestors. Only a few dozen showed up, but the MSM focused on them and their loud shouting, and refused to have anything to do with what was happening inside the venue.

So if you check out and rely upon only the MSM today (see one example I link to below), you would not even know what occurred inside. All the focus was on the noisy militants. There will be plenty of shots on the television news tonight about the tolerance brigade seeking to drown out the meeting, but no coverage at all about what actually transpired inside.

And this is news coverage? This is professional journalism and news reporting? It is like covering a football match and only reporting on one team, with a complete blanket ban of coverage on the other team. But that is a poor analogy, since it implies two equal teams.

At the base of Bill Muehlenberg’s article, he gave the link to the ABC News (Australia) report on the rally, ‘Gay rights protesters rally outside Court’s church’. I took the Christian, Bill Muehlenberg, at his word and found these news items online to examine their coverage:

The West Australian newspaper provided a slightly different story but with the same slant – only on the protesters who were demonstrating outside the meeting, ‘Gay marriage sides clash at rally’, The West Australian, 25 April 2012.

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Courtesy: The West Australian

This is the email reply I received from one of The West Australian editors:

I have consulted with the reporter who wrote the article. She informs me that the press were not invited into the church. She said she “was barred from entering the church by security staff, who would not let me past the barriers to speak to anyone, so it would have been rather difficult to report on the meeting inside. Also tried to get in contact with Margaret Court, but she did not return my calls.”

I hope this addresses your query.

I have copied below an article from ABC online, which covered the story in a similar way to our reporter.

It sure did clarify my understanding. It gave me another side to the story.

Bill Muehlenberg was complaining about the intolerant, imbalanced view in the mainstream media, giving a link to the ABC news item reporting on this event that only gave coverage of the protesters. According to this news editor from The West Australian, that is the only version that was possible. The journalist had no alternative but to tell about the 70 homosexual protesters outside Victory Life Centre because journalists were banned from entering the church and reporting on the Rally.

This causes me to conclude on this occasion that one Christian gave an uninformed, slanted version of the way things are reported in the mass media. However, I need to observe that any journalist could have interviewed a number of people entering the rally – and they didn’t. Bill Muehlenberg informed me via email that he walked past the mass media journalists and cameras without being interviewed. However, this assumes that reporters knew who Bill was and could identify him for interview.

By the way, this one editor from The West Australian was the only letter of response I received from all of the other media mentioned above. All of these received an email from me.

This is not my opinion about all mass media coverage, but an example of what happened on one occasion that was misreported by a Christian (Bill Muehlenberg).

Marriage cover photo

Courtesy Salt Shakers (Christian ministry)

 

Copyright © 2011 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 1 March 2017.

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