I'm having a "the media is screwed up beyond belief" day. It actually started a couple of days ago with the rumors that former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey would be entering General Theological Seminary in the fall. First it surfaced on one of my email lists, and then commentary and comments began piling up throughout the blogosphere. Nowhere could I find confirmation or the original source of the rumor, but it kept flying around the internet until yesterday afternoon when it was publicly confirmed by several reliable sources. This morning the story was plastered across the front pages of many New York metropolitan area newspapers.
Let's start with the newspapers. Most of them ran headlines that implied that McGreevey would be ordained as soon as he finished seminary. Few of the stories bothered to dig deep enough to report that he was actually starting seminary BEFORE completing the diocesan discernment process. That is not unheard of, but it is not a particularly "politic" path to ordination, since it flies in the face of the guidelines for discernment and ordination in most Episcopal dioceses. Facts went out the window in order to create a sensational headline.
Then there were the bloggers and the commenters. Conservative Episcopal and Anglican bloggers started highlighting McGreevey's past behavior and linking his entering the ordination process with what they see as the moral decline of the Episcopal Church. For the most part, these commentaries were fairly reasonable from the conservative point of view. However, rather than double checking sources and facts, the majority of them went ahead and made assumptions because the story provided them with an ideal opportunity to bolster their argument about the state of the church. The comments on these blogs were even worse. Many of them were attacks on the Presiding Bishop and the staff at the Episcopal Church Center, often in very nasty language. It got even worse after confirmation of the story.
The other story, which quickly became lost in all the McGreevey ordination hype, was the release of his ex-wife Dina's book and her very difficult story. Is it a coincidence that the story about the ex-Governor leaked into the public sphere at the same time? Dina Matos McGreevey's story is an important one, and it needs--and deserves--to be told. Instead, it has been buried in the sensationalist headlines of her ex-husband's supposed new vocation.
With all of this swirling around, I encountered still more media...abuse? overkill? stupidity? sensationalism?...on my way home this evening. I picked up a copy of the current Newsweek because the cover story on military chaplains caught my eye. Before I got to that article, I read the "Periscope" section, which had a story about a fax sent by one of Barack Obama's assistants who is employed by both his Senate office and his presidential campaign staff. The fax, sent from a machine in Obama's Senate office, violated the understandably strict rules about the separation of government business and campaign work. An anonymous person slipped a copy of the faxed memo under the hotel room door of a Newsweek staffer. While I believe the ethics issue of the fax is important to report, Newsweek also reported some of the contents of the memo. Was that really necessary? Did notes regarding his campaign strategy have any bearing on the report of the ethics violation? The report did make a guess as to one of the ways someone other than the recipient of the fax might have had access to it, but it did not question the anonymous informant's ethics. That does not make as good a story as one that seeks to pull down a public figure that the media has been building up for months.
Sensationalism over facts...
Not feeling particularly peaceful this evening,
Jeffri
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