I HATE ROLE MODELS!

Via ROMENESKO, I see more evidence of unholy collusion between gay activists and religious conservatives:

[World Journalism Institute director Robert Case II] thinks evangelicals have closed themselves into what he calls a “ghetto” of their own making. They have fled mainstream culture rather than engage it. But if evangelicals expect to be depicted fairly and fully by the elite media, Case says, they need to get their hands dirty and play a role in the institutions that define the larger culture. This doesn’t mean he wants journalism to be done differently. He just wants enough evangelicals to be at places like The New York Times and The Washington Post so that reporters begin to see them as living, breathing people and not backward bible-thumpers.

“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.”

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.” Case thinks that evangelicals, seeing the world as they do through the ethical and moral lens of religion, could make much-needed adjustments to journalism’s focus. The institute was not necessary fifty years ago, he says, when “Judeo-Christian values were regnant in America and something like Roe v. Wade would never have become an issue.” But now that we live in a “postmodern, post-Christian world,” Case says, newsrooms are once again in need of a moral compass. He doesn’t want to dismantle the principles of good journalism, which, he says, are “eternal.” He doesn’t want to evangelize. He just wants the “religious aspect of life” to be articulated in stories, and for issues like abortion or gay marriage to be framed in a way that allows for more than just a secular perspective. It boils down to this: “Most of the elite media are tone deaf to religious concerns,” Case says. “They just don’t see the value to any issue that has a flavor of religion. A secularist will always ignore the religious side of life and way of thinking. Evangelicals won’t.”

I know that I am fond of saying that I hate role models....

But if more people could focus on their similarities instead of their differences, perhaps the Culture War could be laughed out of existence.

I've tried humor before, but not everybody finds it amusing.

Sigh.

posted by Eric on 09.10.04 at 09:50 AM





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Solution seems doable. Have newsrooms hire gay Evangelical Christians. A twofer.

http://www.gmax.co.za/look04/05/25-USreligion.html

I doubt Mr. Case had that in mind, but who knows.

Ray Eckhart   ·  September 11, 2004 06:44 AM


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