A Teachable Moment About Media Bias
My Response to NBC’s Senior Writer Tony Dokoupil’s article
‘The rainbow belongs to God’: Anti-gay US pastor sets sights on Sochi Olympics.
(With hope, but not expectation, that corrections will be made.)
It would be helpful for the reader to first review the NBC story:
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/18/20546485-the-rainbow-belongs-to-god-anti-gay-us-pastor-sets-sights-on-sochi-olympics?lite
Now let me try to make lemonade out of these NBC lemons.
Like most of the liberal journalists I’ve spoken with, Tony Dokoupil seems to me like a pretty nice guy. Very personable. Capable of objectivity. Fair-minded. They all seem to truly understand my reasoning as I explain myself, even while its clear they disagree with my views.
I always come away from these interviews thinking ‘this guy (or gal) seems like he (or she) might actually tell the real story straightforwardly, without leftist spin.’ Then I read the articles and get my rude awakening — like a woman waking up in the battered women‘s shelter again after being sweet-talked into yet another abusive relationship.
Take this line from Tony’s story:
“Lively has reason to be a bit cocky. America may have ‘fallen to the gays,’ he says, but much of the world still fears them and Lively is working to keep it that way.”
This isn’t journalism. It is leftist political spin. Tony has every right to believe it, but this opinion belongs on the editorial page, not in a news story. I have never and would never speak like this, and I just don’t think that way.
That sentence is not objective journalistic analysis. It is the subjective perspective of “gay” victimology, a fantasy world where “homophobia” is accepted as a legitimate scientific term rather than (what it is, in fact) a manipulative rhetorical weapon designed to frame ALL disagreement with the homosexual political agenda as an anxiety disorder.
My major beef with Tony and all of the “progressive” journalists who dominate the mainstream media is that their “news” stories always reflect the “gay” perspective of what is still a two-sided argument.
For example. This is what I wrote to Tony in our email exchange:
“btw, here’s a bombshell that dropped today and supports two of my most central assertions. 1. That most “gay” hate crimes are perpetrated by “gays” themselves. 2. That the underlying narrative driving all “gay” propaganda and policy initiatives is “all disapproval of homosexuality leads inevitably to hatred, violence and murder against homosexuals,” and therefore the “gay” movement and its allies spins every “gay”-related news story and routinely fabricate evidence — even faking stand-alone hate crimes — to “prove” the narrative. You will recall that I (ironically) invoked Matthew Shepard as an example of what even I assumed was a true story to show how determined the “gay” movement is to prove their narrative. Now we know that even the central supporting pillar of their “disapproval = death” argument is a lie.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/14/The-Matthew-Shepard-Story-is-a-Lie”
Importantly, this huge, eminently relevant Matthew Shepard story broke AFTER I had stressed to Tony that these two observations are foundational to my thinking and constitute my key rebuttal to false claims that I incite hatred and violence against homosexuals.
However, this is what Tony wrote in his article:
“where Lively’s message goes, violence seems to follow. In Oregon in 1992, a same-sex couple died when their house was firebombed during OCA’s campaign to declare homosexuality “abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse.” In Sacramento in 2007, a gay man was called a “faggot” and punched to death by a stranger in a park. In Uganda in 2011, the country’s first openly gay man had his skull caved in. And right now in Russia and in the former Soviet states, there’s been a surge in homophobic vigilantism, including a torrent of shaming videos, some depicting gay teens being tortured by skinheads. Lively has not been linked to any of these crimes but we asked: Couldn’t his talk of predatory gays, “good and evil,” and “war” have played a role? “
What a perfect opportunity for Tony to have done his journalistic duty and shown Scott Lively’s perspective of the matter. Instead, he perpetuated the “gay” victim narrative, chapter and verse as if we had never spoken of it.
Not only did Tony fail to give voice to my side of the argument, he got his facts wrong to boot. The “gays” killed in the 1991 or 92 Oregon firebombing were unintended targets of racists trying to kill the Black family who lived upstairs. The Sacramento incident ended with a mistrial after the jury could not agree that it was even a hate crime. The Ugandan victim David Kato was killed not by a deranged “homophobe” but a male prostitute whom he had bailed out of jail to be his live-in lover and house boy. The killer confessed and is now serving 30 years in a Ugandan prison. And the Russian incident appears to me to be another case of gay on gay crime, but even if it isn’t, it’s just random crime completely unrelated to and unjustified by the new Russian law.
Importantly, I specifically provided Tony the facts about the Sacramento and Uganda incidents, so there can be no other explanation for this paragraph except that it is intended to bolster the “disapproval = death” narrative, and to misrepresent my history as proof of it‘s validity.
There are more false facts in the article:
“In Moldova in 2011, according to Human Rights Watch, he helped several cities declare themselves ‘gay-free zones‘.” Not true, and not fact checked with me.
“Lively — who calls himself the ‘father’ of Uganda’s anti-gay movement…” Not true, and not fact-checked with me. This is a label given to me by Al Gore’s Current TV.
Lastly, Tony wrote:
“To whip up support for such policies, Lively simply shares his beliefs about gay people: They’re dangerous predators, even killers.”
What I actually said to Tony was this: “We don’t attack unrepentant sinners to try to ‘save the world.’ We attack the sin of the world to try to save the sinners.”
The simple inclusion of that quotable quote would have gone a long way toward balancing this NBC story and toward explaining my motivation and goals, but I guess that’s probably why it was omitted.
In the end, what I hope to have achieved in this “teachable moment,” is not harm to Tony (I’ve already forgiven him) but to show through my own painful experience at his hands that the first loyalty of progressive journalists is to their ideology, not to truth. No matter how nice they seem, you can’t trust them when their sacred cow of homosexuality is at issue.
