Retraction TIME

A reporter is supposed to report the news in an accurate and unbiased way, correct?  Is this still true?  I remember a time when it was, but it sure seems like that time has gone away.  I mean, it's been a while since the major news networks in the U.S. haven't taken sides politically.  FOX on the right, NBC on the left, joined by ABC and CBS, and firmly CNN at this point.  But when did accuracy also stop mattering?  The New York Times story on Gary Johnson's Aleppo flub last month is a disturbing and hilarious example of how bad reporting has gotten.  The New York Times is supposed to be a high-quality and trustworthy news publication, and in the age of finding answers on the Internet, you would think that if they wrote a story about how Gary Johnson didn't know what Aleppo was, they would have looked up what it was themselves, right?  And if the writer didn't fact check, maybe an editor would, right?  Apparently not.  The first published version of the article called Aleppo the de facto Capital of the Islamic State (it's not).  They then corrected that and called Aleppo the capital of Syria (it's not) and an Islamic stronghold (it's not).  Finally, they gave up and called it a war-torn Syrian city (accurate).  I guess there's no time for fact checking when you're quickly trying to write a big story to make sure Gary Johnson doesn't take too many votes away from Hillary.

But the reason I'm writing this isn't because of the New York Times.  It's because of a TIME article from a few weeks ago about a Christian organization on 667 college campuses across the nation, InterVarsity.  When I went to college at Wesleyan University, I was involved in the Wesleyan Christian Fellowship there, which was run by InterVarsity.  I met some wonderful Christians from all over the world there, very literally.  We were from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States.  As a white male in the group, I was in the minority, and on some weeks, the only white male in the group.  While these meetings could have been a goldmine for admissions photos, we were all just brothers and sisters in Christ.  We were different, we had different ways of worshiping, but we were unified by our love for Christ and our love for one another.  My experience may not have been the typical InterVarsity experience if you take the country as a whole, but it was certainly not a rarity.  Even today, InterVarsity is a diverse and inclusive group of Christians and has expressed its support of Black Lives Matter, which is not something that very many Christian groups have done publicly.  I've continued to support InterVarsity after college and became more involved with it recently, having started to volunteer in a behind-the-scenes way a few years ago, so I am very familiar with this organization.

I don't know if TIME magazine just felt like doing a hit job on a Christian organization or if they had an epic lapse in fact checking, but it had to be one of those two options, because calling its October 6 article "Top Evangelical College Group to Dismiss Employees Who Support Gay Marriage" misleading is an understatement.  It is flat out wrong.  The article begins, "One of the largest evangelical organizations on college campuses nationwide has told its 1,300 staff members they will be fired if they personally support gay marriage or otherwise disagree with its newly detailed positions on sexuality starting on Nov. 11."  For someone unfamiliar with InterVarsity, that doesn't sound like a made-up thing, right?  It's plausible.  But for me, when I read that statement, it blew my mind.  I felt like Lois Griffin in a 2006 episode of Family Guy...
Peter Griffin: Yeah Brian, your doing the same thing that Mia Farrow did to that Chinaman that Woody Allen brought home from the circus!
Lois Griffin: Peter, hold on to that thought, because I'm gonna explain to you when we get home all the things that are wrong with that statement.

Let's explain all of the things that are wrong with that statement.  For one, staff members will NOT be fired for supporting gay marriage.  And for another thing, InterVarsity has not changed its positions on sexuality in any way.  There you go.  That pretty much destroys the entire premise for the article right there, but I'm not holding my breath for a retraction.  Want to know what's really going on with InterVarsity?  They posted a response here on October 7, the day after the article in TIME came out:
http://intervarsity.org/news/intervarsity-reiterates-theology-human-sexuality

To sum it up, not only are employees not being fired for supporting gay marriage, but InterVarsity's views on sexuality, based on the Bible, have never changed in the 75-year history of the organization, AND LGBTQI folks are more than welcome to attend InterVarsity events and meetings.  They even included a statement that Christians don't say enough, noting, “Throughout this process, we are very aware that LGBTQI people have experienced great pain, including much caused by Christians. We also know that we ourselves each need Jesus’ grace daily. So we attempt to walk humbly in this conversation.”  The crux of the issue at hand for InterVarsity is theological agreement with what the Bible says on sexuality.  So if I were an InterVarsity employee who agreed with what the Word of God says about sexuality, but I still thought Gay Marriage should be legal, I would NOT be fired.  My personal views on Gay Marriage are here if you're interested: http://thediblas.blogspot.com/2015/08/jesus-loves-gays.html

Look, there are a lot of great reporters out there today, but the general trend in the media has been scary.  I say this as someone who considered reporting as a possible career.  I was editor-in-chief of the country's oldest twice-weekly college paper, The Wesleyan Argus.  While my political views then were significantly to the right of the Wesleyan community as a whole, which was and is one of the furthest-left Universities in the country, you would not have know it from reading the newspaper when I was in charge of it.  That's because what we did was reporting.  The editorial section was for editorializing.  The rest of it was actual reporting.  There are two times I can recall having a discussion with other Argus Staff members that my political or religious beliefs entered into.  In one case, I was wrong, and in another case, I was right.  In each case, the discussion was brief, and the issue was quickly resolved before print.  In the case where I was wrong, I had referred to Jesus as "Jesus Christ" in an article.  An editor told me that calling Him "Christ" was editorializing.  Even though I know that Jesus is Christ, the editor was right, and I agreed that the article should be modified in that way.  In the case where I was right, a writer decided to use all gender neutral pronouns in an article (yes, this was a thing ten year ago, and few outside of the Wesleyan bubble at the time would have had any idea what this was) for no particular reason.  I changed it and said that when the New York Times starts using "ze" and "hir" instead of he, she, his, and her, then the Argus would do it.  That's it.  I didn't steer the newspaper to the left or the right.  Our goal was to make a quality college newspaper.

Last year, the Argus came under fire for publishing an opinion column that had criticism for some aspects of Black Lives Matter.  A large group of students responded by demanding that the Argus be defunded.  The piece in question wasn't even a news article.  It was an opinion column.  I read it.  The student who wrote it sounded to me like he was on the left, and while I may not have agreed with everything he said, what he was saying really wasn't bad at all, some of it made quite a bit of sense, and it was his opinion!  The editorials, opinion section ("Wespeaks" in the Argus), and columns are where opinions belong in a newspaper, not in news articles, but apparently if someone expresses an opinion that you disagree with these days, you should try to silence them or the media by which they convey it.  The Argus didn't lose funding completely, but its funding was cut.  Oh, how times have changed just in the last decade.

It's not just folks on the left who are trying to silence opposing views either.  Sure, a lot of them try to shut things down by calling them racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, hate speech, whatever.  But now we have people like Trump (on the right, maybe?), who most recently said that Saturday Night Live should be cancelled--because he didn't like the way SNL portrayed him.  SNL, of course, has a long and rich history of Presidential debate parodies.

And InterVarsity has a long and rich history of being a wonderful, inclusive, Bible-based Christian organization, focused on bringing students closer to God and serving others.  To the editors of TIME, if you are concerned with reporting facts, I await a retraction.

Locker Room Talk

I endorsed Gary Johnson.  In any other election year, I would not have endorsed Gary Johnson.  If just about anyone else had been nominated for the Republicans, or if Jim Webb had been nominated for the Democrats, I would not have endorsed Gary Johnson.  But we have two of the absolute worst candidates in history as our major party nominees.  I cannot endorse Hillary Clinton.  I cannot endorse Donald Trump.  I don't understand any reason for the high level of Evangelical Christian support for Trump, except for the high probability that his Supreme Court nominees would be better than Clinton's, more supportive of the First and Second amendments and hopefully more pro-life.

Yes, Hillary's campaign released the video of Donald Trump's disturbing comments from 11 years ago as a planned October Surprise, and it distracts from the latest Wikileaks releases, but I can't defend it.  It's not typical locker room talk.  I know that because I am a heterosexual man.  I have been in locker rooms with other men.  Yes, we talk about women in the locker rooms.  Many men talk about their (consensual) sexual conquests, but I can only recall one time in my life where I heard a man talking in the locker room about a sexual conquest of questionable consent, whether in jest or not.  I can't say that I've ever heard a man say that he likes to just "grab women by the pussy."  Even if it's not true, sexual assault is not a joke.  If Donald's claim that "No one has more respect for women than I do" is true, we are absolutely fucked.  There is no nicer way of saying that.  But it's not true, so don't worry about that.  There are plenty of men who have a whole lot of respect for women.

But Hillary Clinton is not the right person to call Donald Trump out on his comments.  I don't think she understands the actual problem with Donald's "locker room talk."  In Sunday's debate, she lumped together Trump's problematic comment with far less problematic actual locker room talk.  In her own words, "We've seen this throughout the campaign.  We have seen him insult women.  We've seen him rate women on their appearance, ranking them from one to ten."  Ranking women from one to ten IS actual locker room talk.  Men DO talk about the appearance of women.  This is something that MOST men do.  I can see why some will say that even that is problematic, but like it or not, talking about how women look and rating them from 1-10 is typical locker room talk.  Sorry ladies, that's just how it is.  But talking about or joking about sexually assaulting women?  That is NOT what most men talk about.

I don't think Hillary knows the reason why Trump's comments are more problematic than rating a woman's appearance though.  How could she?  Donald Trump may have said bad things, and he may have had some allegations against him, but he's not sexually assaulting women on a Bill C (Clinton, Cosby) level.  The main issue with Bill Clinton is not his infidelity.  It's the many women who have accused him of sexual assault over the years, and also accused Hillary of threatening them and protecting him.  Sure, somehow the Clintons have gotten away without any real consequences over the years, just like Cosby did for so many decades, but does Hillary really expect us to believe that she never knew about what her husband was doing, never defended him, and never threatened his accusers and victims?  She's not trustworthy on most other things, so why would we trust her on that?  After all, she laughed about her days as a lawyer, successfully getting a man off easy who she defended and knew was guilty of raping a 12-year-old girl.  Some defender of women's rights.  That's even less funny than Trump's comments about just going around grabbing vaginas.

Check out Steven Crowder's interview with Juanita Broaddrick from last week if you want to hear what a 73-year-old woman with nothing to gain has to say about Bill Clinton raping her and Hillary Clinton threatening her decades ago.  It doesn't sound to me like she's making it up.  Just remember what Hillary Clinton said about how women who come forward with rape allegations should initially be believed, although she quickly took that idea down from her website when Broaddrick resurfaced.  Strange coincidence, like so many other things in Hillary's life.

It is not a pleasant thought that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will very likely be our next President.  I know that a Gary Johnson victory is nearly impossible at this point, seeing as he's been kept out of the debates by the bullshit commission.  The best case scenario would be for Trump to drop out of the race, presumably with Mike Pence to take his place atop the ticket.  But that's probably not going to happen.  And Hillary isn't going to drop out either, although if the VP Debate showed us anything it's that Tim Kaine is horribly unprepared to be President and is creepy AF.

On a lighter note, what a motley crew in the Town Hall Debate audience!  You can't make this stuff up.  We literally have a guy named Ken Bone who looks likes some sort of caricature, and then a guy so big that there can only be one other person in his row, while every other row has three people in it.  And they're surrounded by what appear to be Saturday Night Live characters.  Speaking of which, the SNL cold open this weekend will once again write itself.  I mean, half of it can just be quoting exactly what was said at the debate.

Ultimately, America will be just fine, but the next four years are going to be interesting to say the least.