An Open Letter to the NPR Ombudsman,
This piece says of Governor Rick Perry:
“He is open about his deep Christian faith.”
NPR needs to be much more careful about how it presents such information in order to eliminate its obvious liberal, lamestream-media, bias. Recently, Fox commentator Bill O’ Reilly in discussing Breivik’s acts of terrorism in Norway and their obvious precedents, Mussolini’s dictatorship and Nidal Hasan’s bloody mayhem, clearly articulated that the standards of whether someone is reported by the media as affiliated with any particular faith should be both ad hoc and post hoc using a “no true Scotsman” analysis in combination with assessment of business card content.
To avoid maligning Christianity in accordance with these standards, the media including NPR must prepare its reports so that anyone, including of course Gov. Perry, can at any future time be credibly identified as unequivocally not-Christian, if some act(s) of his or hers eventually falls afoul of the criteria that Mr. O’Reilly and his fellow faith affiliation arbiters apply ad hoc and post hoc. Unqualified declarations of the faith affiliation of individuals in the media such as the one I have pointed out here can be used subsequent to such determinations to associate not-Christians as representative of the faith and thus those media outlets become, at a minimum, unwitting participants in what O’Reilly has identified as the “movement in the American media to diminish and marginalize the Christian philosophy.”
In keeping with this principle I urge NPR to revise its journalistic standards immediately to reflect that statements such as the one I quoted above shall be written as:
“He is open about his ALLEGEDLY deep Christian faith.”
‘Allegedly’ is written in caps in my example only to call your attention to its addition to the sentence in question. It can, of course, be in lower case in actual reports based on NPR’s usual capitalization standards.
Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter,
J@ne Futzinfarb,
Alleged Agnostic
