Editor's Notes at EditorsNotes.com

Saturday, September 25, 2004

God Is My Co-Author


CJR:

[T]he World Journalism Institute [is] a J-school with a mission to prepare young evangelicals to enter the mainstream media universe.

[...]

If evangelicals expect to be depicted fairly and fully by the elite media, [WJI Director Robert] Case says, they need to get their hands dirty and play a role in the institutions that define the larger culture.

[...]

"The homosexuals are our role model in this," Case says. "They had the same problems we do twenty, twenty-five years ago — a despised minority hiding in the closet, and all the stories in the media looked to point out their weaknesses. They overcame this by integrating into the mainstream."

There's nothing wrong with encouraging more evangelicals to become journalists, but is there some WJI-like University of Fabulous we're unaware of? GLAAD denies any media infiltration scheme, but they would say that now, wouldn't they?

Case's other, longer-term objective is, by his own admission, more controversial. It is to bring "an evangelical or biblical perspective to the newsroom." [...] "A secularist will always ignore the religious side of life and way of thinking. Evangelicals won't."

[...]

As Adam Belz, a blond twenty-year-old who attends Covenant College in Georgia, put it, "God is the originator of reality, so knowledge of him is knowledge of reality. If I look to God as the source of truth, that helps me in my profession."

Well, who would you trust more as a source, Bill Burkett or Jesus?