News-media outlets recently have suspended several reporters and commentators for their allegedly controversial political views.
ESPN suspended two of its stars for being offensive. Steven A. Smith was suspended for a remark about women provoking domestic violence, and Dan Le Batard was suspended for renting provocative billboards sarcastically “thanking” LeBron James for bringing two NBA championships to Miami.
Reporter Sean Bergin of Channel 12 in New York/New Jersey was suspended for a remark he made about too many black youths having no father in the home.
Following the shooting death of Jersey City police offer Melvin Santiago, Bergin said, “It’s important to shine a light on this anti-cop mentality that has so contaminated America’s inner cities. This same sick, perverse line of thinking is evident from Jersey City to Newark and Patterson to Trenton. It has made the police officer’s job impossible, and it has got to stop. The underlying cause for all of this, of course, young black men growing up without fathers. Unfortunately, no one in the news media has the courage to touch that subject.”
A spokesperson for Channel 12 News told the Hollywood website, The Wrap, “It is News 12′s policy that reporters must be objective and not state personal opinions on-air. In regards to the particular incident with Sean Bergin, the matter is being addressed internally, and we don’t comment on personnel matters.”
Clearly, media executives are prepared to take action against some material considered offensive.
What’s important for audiences to understand is that media morality can be very different from public morality. Even more important, the public needs to understand that the media wants to implant its anti-biblical, leftist morality in the public’s consciousness.
Thus, over the years, Americans have become much more accepting of sex outside of marriage, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, secular big government, and same-sex marriage because of media indoctrination.
Of course, what the mainstream media never considers to be offensive are any attacks on Christian faith, Jesus and Christian believers. The idea that Disney/ABC would even consider a program called GCB (Good Christian B—-es) or that Turner Broadcasting would produce a program like Black Jesus, shows that offending Christians is of little concern to media executives and their flunkies in the newsrooms and programming offices in Hollywood, New York and Washington, DC. Worse, it shows they willingly and consciously invest in programs that ridicule Christianity, Jesus and people of biblical faith.
Allegedly offensive comments by people such as Steven A. Smith are spur-of-the-moment slip-ups. The production and scheduling of GCB or Black Jesus are not.
It’s highly informative that the remark that got Sean Bergin suspended closed with the line, “Unfortunately, no one in the news media has the courage to touch that subject.” This implies there are people working in the media that fear reprisals if they say something truthful that doesn’t adhere to the unwritten, but well understood, leftist morality of the media.
Take the case of inner-city crime, for example. Statistics show that African-Americans are far more likely to be murdered by a young black man than they are to be murdered by a policeman. However, whenever an African American is killed by a police officer, it makes national news, giving the impression that the police are conducting some kind of genocidal campaign against the black race throughout the United States.
Of course, crime statistics also show that males are stopped, arrested and killed by police far more than females, but that doesn’t mean America’s men and women in blue are a bunch of feminist, sexist “pigs” trying to destroy the male gender.
Because of the leftist media’s almost constant distortion of the news, a distortion which it uses to increase racial strife between blacks and whites, an inner-city suburb in St. Louis, the city of Ferguson, this month saw four or five straight nights of rioting, looting and attacks on the police after the death of an 18-year-old black man during an altercation with a policeman.
As in many other recent cases, the rush to judgment among media pundits and even reporters would make your head spin.
Thus, if you work for the mainstream news media, your paycheck depends on your staying in line with the leftist media’s unwritten moral code. This explains why there are so few moral conservatives in the media. To earn a paycheck, you must either agree with the media’s liberal agenda or pretend that you do. Mention that fatherless families are bad for society, and you can get suspended. Do it a second time, and don’t even consider being a news reporter.
The Fox News Channel infuriates the rest of the media, and gained a large audience, because it refuses to tow the Christophobic, secular progressive line of the Left. The Drudge Report really angers the media elite by drawing the attention of the American people to stories the mainstream media doesn’t want covered. But, even Fox and Drudge don’t interview the media executives who produce and market programs like GCB and Black Jesus. Neither do they lay bare the direct consequences of the sexual revolution.
America’s mainstream media would have you think America’s problem is underfunded schools and poverty programs, not promiscuity, immorality and left-wing extremism. The American people are smarter than the elites running the media. When surveyed, they chose welfare as the leading cause of poverty. They also ranked the breakdown of the family far above racism, unlike the recent reports on the riots in Ferguson from the likes of The New York Times, USA Today and CNN.
What America, and the world, needs is news-media competition. We need reporters who can report without fear on the problem of fatherlessness. We need reporters who won’t be intimidated by Muslim terrorists or by leftist racial demagogues. We need a major media company that green-lights movies and programs that support conservative, biblical values and the historic, traditional definition of marriage and that promote faith and family. We need executives who would be repulsed if someone asked them to fund programs like GCB or Black Jesus.
The best way to defeat the Left’s misguided, mindless media morality is by applying Christian, biblical values of truth, justice, beauty, self-control, kindness, goodness, gentleness, purity, faith and love.
These values begin with Jesus Christ. They are all part of His gospel.
David Outten is production editor for Movieguide, and Tom Snyder is Movieguide‘s editor.
This article originally appeared on Movieguide.org. Want to know what God’s doing in Hollywood?
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