Secular Snobs
Table of Contents:
When the Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf dismissed evangelical Christians as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command,” ombudsman Joann Byrd reported: “Hundreds of callers offered proof that they don’t fit the description. One man said there was a Jaguar parked in his driveway; people revealed their incomes in detail normally reserved for a Form 1040. A woman ran through the degrees of the six people living under her roof: two PhDs and another on the way, three master’s degrees. A Florida man said that in his ‘multimillion-dollar business, none of my employees commands me.’”
Byrd wrote “The simplistic Journalism 101 answer: Go back through a story and challenge every sentence for its factual basis.”
If the Post quickly apologized for Weisskopf’s snide “easy to command” verbiage, why does this long-standing journalistic disresepect for religion continue? Is it a “fact” that Republicans want to install theocracy and repeal the First Amendment? Is it a “fact” that abortion providers or gay people are killed by a “climate” inspired by the Bible? Reporters have a nasty tendency to uncork attacks on religion that are short on documentation and long on editorializing.
