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CBN on CNN
By Larry | August 25, 2008
This morning I note that CNN has brought into its Sunday morning Late Edition program a commentator from the Christian Broadcast Network to comment about politics and evangelical voters. This is the same CBN owned by Pat Robertson who declaimed that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for abortions in the U.S. and who, according to the blog Yurica Reports, employed Blitzer as a Middle East correspondent when he was beginning his journalism career.
The watchdog site MinistryWatch describes CBN as follows, “Christian Broadcasting Network, Inc. (”CBN”) uses mass media, especially television and visual media, to prepare the world for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of the everlasting kingdom of God on earth.”
The religious right continues to shape public perception of Christian faith. In his Sunay column, Frank Rich notes that 5.5 million turned to the Saddleback appearances of John McCain and Barack Obama while 32 million tuned into the time-delayed reports of the Olympics on NBC, suggesting, perhaps that the media attention given to religious conservatives might be a bit much, but never the less, it was a debate whose questions were framed by the evangelical wing of the faith.
However you feel about that, nuance and substance in reporting about religion have long since been abandoned by most U.S. media. And now CNN has decided to give legitimation and voice to an expression of an evangelical enterprise that is, in its most generous description, a fringe on the hem of the mainstream fabric of the faith.
All of which brings me to my on-going concern about the absence of mainline voices in the media and, because you’ve seen it before here, I pledge I’m going to just stop writing about it. I’m coming to the conclusion it’s futile to continue to point it out.
What this means is quite simple. Until some leaders emerge who can express theology in the public square from the Mainline tradition the Mainline will not shape public perception of Christian faith and its social reponsibilities through media as it once did.
We don’t have the likes of William Sloane Coffin, Jr., or Fr. Malcom Boyd, who some readers won’t even know, and there is little value in writing about that which only causes me continuing heartburn. So, I think I’ll swear off.
Topics: On Faith, On Journalism |
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