Later in 2011, as Occupy Wall Street gained steam, Wallis could not help himself. Despite his carefully crafted new moderate image for the twenty-first century, he could not avoid publicly admiring the Occupiers. “When they stand with the poor, they stand with Jesus,” he rejoiced. “When they talk about holding banks and corporations accountable, they sound like Jesus and the biblical prophets before him who all spoke about holding the wealthy and powerful accountable.”
In early 2012, Wallis was initially concerned over the Obamacare mandate that religious charities, schools, and hospitals were not exempt from paying for insurance covering contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization. He rightly saw it as a threat to his coalition. But, when forced to choose, he naturally sided with Obama and against religious liberty protections. “We applaud the Obama administration’s decision to respond to the concerns of many in the faith community around respecting religious liberty,” his Sojourners group declared of the “compromise” forcing insurance companies to provide “free” contraceptives to employees of religious institutions. “This compromise respects the conscience concerns of those persons and institutions opposed to the use of contraception while still allowing greater access to those services for women who seek it.”
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Behind all of this very public lobbying and support under the guise of religion, there’s a lot of very private money. In the mid-2000s, new Evangelical Left advocacy groups, funded by George Soros or the Tides Foundation, among others, began to arise. They touted liberal stances on “creation care,” immigration, federal budget policies, national security, and policies toward detained terrorists, all coated in evangelical language.
These groups would often claim that “Jesus” has specific political stances—always aligned with the Left—but in reality they were merely repeating the “Social Gospel” themes that the old Religious Left had originated decades earlier. In other words, this was purely a political ploy. The same old message was simply repackaged and targeted toward a new audience.
* * *
According to Jim
“The Bible has no objection, in my view, to making the wealthy pay their fair share, which is more than they’re paying now.”
—JIM WALLIS, 2011
I wonder if the Bible, in his view, tells us exactly who is wealthy and what their “fair share” should be. If not, I’m sure he’d just say it was an oversight on the part of the Bible’s authors and he’d be happy to fill in the blanks.
* * *
This financial alliance between the typical progressive foundations like Tides and an allegedly “religious” organization like Wallis’s Sojourners was not something that was meant for public consumption. When World magazine editor Marvin Olasky confronted Wallis about the funding he’d received from Soros, he brought up Wallis’s own quote from 2005: “I know of no connections to those liberal funds and groups that are as direct as the Religious Right’s ties to right-wing funders.”
Wallis responded by likening the World editor to someone you may have heard of: “It’s not hyperbole or overstatement to say that Glenn Beck lies for a living.” He added: “I’m sad to see Marvin Olasky doing the same thing. No, we don’t receive money from Soros. Given the financial crisis of nonprofits, maybe Marvin should call Soros and ask him to send us money. . . . So, no, we don’t receive money from George Soros. Our books are totally open, always have been. Our money comes from Christians who support us and who read Sojourners. . . . [T]ell Marvin he should check his facts, and not imitate Glenn Beck.”
After proof of the Soros grants appeared online (despite the Soros-funded Open Society Institute’s having removed the original links), Wallis had his public relations staffer release a reluctant confession: “I should have declined to comment until I was able to review the blog post in question and consulted with our staff on the details of our funding over the past several years,” he explained. “Instead, I answered in the spirit of the accusation and did not recall the details of our funding over the decade in question.”
Wallis denied that Sojourners is “beholden to funders on the political left,” while he insisted it promotes nonideological “biblical social justice.” But he’d tacitly admitted that the “allegation” concerning three Open Society Institute grants was true. These funds “made up the tiniest fraction” of Sojourners budget, “so small that I hadn’t remembered them,” he claimed about grants that amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Soros’s support for Evangelical Left fixtures like Wallis proves that he, or at least his staff at the Open Society Institute, understands the importance of religion in American politics—even if the billionaire financier himself is an adamant nonbeliever. How evangelical recipients of Soros cash, claiming to be nonpartisan and nonideological, explain to their churchgoing constituents this support from a hyperpartisan atheist billionaire who touts abortion, same-sex marriage, and legalized prostitution may be more complicated.
A REAWAKENING
Very few of the evangelicals who now follow Leftists like Jim Wallis realize that the technique of exploiting the churches for progressive policies has been tried before. And it failed miserably. Their fixation on a fictitious version of social justice that promotes big government almost killed once-dominant mainline Protestant churches—will evangelicals now succumb to the same fate?
Not necessarily.
The good news is that it’s not too late to wake up our congregations, especially if people understand what is really going on behind the scenes. Church members need to ask whether their congregation belongs to the NAE. They need to research whether the relief and missions groups they support make leftist political pronouncements. They should ask who is teaching at the religious schools where they send their children and exactly what is being taught there.
People should be leery of political causes being broadcast in their local churches. The verbiage is often benign (for example, “creation care” for environmentalism, “caring for the sojourner” instead of amnesty for illegal immigrants, “Christian peacemaking” for absolute pacifism and isolationism), but the underlying political agenda often is not. Church members need to find solid, sensible policy alternatives to the Religious Left’s proposals. Groups like the Acton Institute, Cornwall Alliance, and Institute on Religion and Democracy specialize in helping church members counter big-government politics that are disguised as Christian compassion. They are also great resources.
Most important, church members must hold their congregations to a focus on God and scripture—not on their pastor’s personal political views or answers to rhetorical questions like “What would Jesus cut?” When we stand up for the basic tenets of our faith—morality and freedom—we stand up for the tenets of America by default. Religious Left activists like Jim Wallis may claim to preach the word of God, but those words have been run through a filter of politics and ideology and are no longer recognizable.
And if all else fails, and you still cannot tell the difference between an authentic sermon and one that is straight from the pockets of George Soros, then take a page out of the activist playbook and ask yourself this: “Whom Would Jesus Listen To?” If your answer is a former radical who twists the gospel for political ends, who preaches bipartisanship as a cover for his Marxism, and who measures his success in book sales and television appearances, then Pastor Jim Wallis could not be a better fit.
“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.”
—Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO, News Corporation
NOVEMBER 23, 2004. The time had finally come for Dan Rather to step down. The pressure, ratcheted up by bloggers, had been building for months. His speech to the CBS newsroom on this day would not exactly put it that way—but everyone knew the truth. The ticking hand on the 60 Minutes stopwatch was about to stop on Dan Rather for good.
What would happen over the next few minutes has largely been forgotten. You won’t find i
t in any journalism textbooks. Even in blog lore, it probably hasn’t gotten much play. It would be too strong to call it a “tipping point” moment, but, in some ways, it perfectly foreshadowed how the media landscape was about to change forever.
OLD ANCHOR MEETS NEW MEDIA
The main newsroom inside the CBS News complex on Manhattan’s West Side had come to be known as “the Fishbowl.” It was composed of a semicircle of offices that opened into a news gathering and broadcast floor where Dan Rather sat nightly to anchor The CBS Evening News. Today, however, Rather would enter the Fishbowl to speak to the staff. He wouldn’t be resigning, per se—he wouldn’t leave the company for a few months—but he would say, out loud, that the time had come, that he would be stepping aside.
Not everyone at CBS News could walk to the Fishbowl to watch this historic moment on West Fifty-seventh Street. No matter—an in-house closed-circuit television feed would carry his speech to the larger CBS News family. And that, in retrospect, changed everything.
As it turned out, one CBS News staffer in New York that day happened to be talking on his cell phone with a friend in another city. The friend, a journalist named Scott Baker, who now works for me as editor in chief of The Blaze, mentioned to him that it would be cool to listen to Rather’s speech on the phone as it happened. “No problem,” the staffer responded. “I’ll just put my phone down next to the TV monitor—listen as long as you want to.”
After realizing that he’d likely be hearing history in the making, Baker quickly sent an instant message from his laptop to someone he thought might be interested in a live transcription of Dan Rather’s “resignation” speech. That message put into motion a series of events that would take Dan Rather’s words on a unique path.
As Rather spoke in the Fishbowl, a camera carried his words live on that in-house feed. The words exited a TV monitor and entered a cell phone, where they ricocheted to a tower (and maybe a satellite or two) and then zipped to a distant city. Scott Baker, listening via headset, transcribed the words rapidly into an instant messaging window as he heard them.
Within a matter of moments, Dan Rather’s words began to appear on the front page of the Drudge Report.
It’s time to move on . . . I will continue to report to you . . . it has been . . . an honor to report to you. . . .
By that time Drudge had already become a newsroom essential. Everyone monitored it. All day long. Even at CBS News.
One CBS News employee who was in the Fishbowl at the time of that speech would later recount his amazement as he listened to Rather speaking and saw his Drudge-tuned computer screen refresh with the very words he had heard spoken just moments before.
A key Drudge contributor had just one word for the moment: “Epic.”
While no one in the Fishbowl that day wanted to admit it, the ground was shaking underneath the traditional media elites. But denial can’t stop an earthquake. The fact that their boss had just resigned “live” on the Web, let alone that another news source had literally scooped CBS News on its own story, made it all the more clear: everything was about to change.
INSTA-JOURNALIST
There have been plenty of grassroots new-media success stories since that day, and plenty of reasons to be proud if you’re a conservative or libertarian. But this is not a chapter about patting each other on the back; there is far more to be done. And you don’t need me to tell you that the mainstream media outlets still let America down. We still have major, systemic problems in the media. There are so many stories of radical bias, so many instances of clear hatred and bigotry toward conservative thought, that it would almost be boring to keep recounting them all if the stakes weren’t so high.
And that’s why I’m here to tell you whom to blame for it all: Us. You and me. Conservatives, libertarians—anyone who feels like they’ve been manipulated or, at best, misunderstood, by the media is at fault. Why? Because, for far too long, we’ve been pretty much uninterested in doing the job of actual journalism ourselves.
Young conservatives who’ve aspired to jobs in the media usually wanted to be columnists or radio talk show hosts or the host of their own prime-time opinion show. That’s where the money is, the fame, the power . . . the fun. O’Reilly, Rush, Hannity, Ingraham. They want to give perspective and point of view.
But getting to that point in a career is a long and difficult road. Believe me, I know from firsthand experience. While I may have taken an unorthodox route, I did enough Top 40 morning radio and local talk to last multiple lifetimes. The same is true of almost everyone else in the field who’s “made it.” Overnight sensations are usually far from it.
I’ve done a lot of job interviews with young conservatives over the years and it’s struck me that few of them seemed to be very interested in doing the hard work that it takes to get a job in the mainstream media as a journalist. They don’t dream (or even tolerate the thought) of covering a school board meeting on Tuesday night or being the beat reporter at the courthouse. But that’s where the real action is. That’s where you learn the ropes and put the necessary time in to build a career.
Fox News, while an invaluable resource and amazing success story, has not solved the problem. Despite their growth, we are still left with a media culture that is nearly always devoid of any nuanced conservative insight. Fox can beat the drum on a story all day, but when it’s reported the opposite way on every nightly newscast and in every major newspaper, we still lose.
* * *
One of a Kind?
I was in the newsroom at CNN on the day that Tim Russert passed away and I remember a lot of the journalists and producers all having the same general reaction: They just don’t make them like that anymore.
I also remember my reaction after hearing that: Huh?
What do you mean “they” don’t make them like that anymore? The reason that Tim Russert was so beloved as a journalist was that viewers never really knew which side he was on. He’d ask someone a tough question and you’d cheer; and then a minute later he’d ask the guy you support an even tougher question and you’d get mad. That’s exactly what fair and honest journalists are supposed to do!
Instead of saying “they don’t make them like that anymore” we must become that ideal ourselves. We create our own destiny and live up to the standards we set. If we dismiss the guys like Russert as journalists of the past, then we’re guaranteed a future of lazy, partisan journalism.
* * *
THE OUTSIDERS.
Over the last few decades, conservatives have been rightly angered by a media that has mocked and marginalized their values and principles. For a long time, liberals in the media tried to deny that there was any kind of a bias problem. But that eventually became laughable. Study after study showed what we all knew instinctively to be true: in the Major Leagues of Media, liberals played all the positions.
But I’m here to let you in on a secret: While I have many horror stories from my early days in cable news, there is no secret elevator at the CNN operation in the Time Warner Center. There’s no unmarked door that takes you into a conference room where the media elites secretly gather to plot how to undermine and discredit all that is good and wholesome. There’s no Batphone with a direct line to some unseen executive who matches up scripts to Democratic talking points.
The sad reality is that most of the people who work for these companies think they are being fair—they just don’t have any idea what that really means.
I remember one instance at CNN when I spent hours on a conference call with people from Atlanta who were concerned that I was not fully explaining the motivations behind the terrorists in Afghanistan who were targeting and killing American troops. I couldn’t believe that I had to have those conversations, but I realized later that this wasn’t happening because of some political ideology; it was happening because these people really believed that if we just understood the terrorists we might be able to explain why they hate us so much.
A conservative I know who once inter
ned at a network news operation says he saw a correspondent with a stopwatch in her hand declare that a story was fair because the conservative had been given seventeen seconds and the liberal had been given only fifteen seconds.
That is exactly what I mean when I say that the root cause of this bias is not always politically motivated. They think they can measure fairness with a stopwatch, but no stopwatch can ever provide real perspective when there is such a widespread and systemic lack of understanding about how real people, in real communities, live their lives.
Peggy Noonan has a great story about how this works in practice. You may know Peggy as a thoughtful newspaper columnist and commentator on television. You may even know that she once wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan. But one part of her résumé that many people don’t know about is that she once worked at CBS News, where she wrote radio scripts for . . . Dan Rather.
In her book What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era, Noonan describes the culture at CBS News in the early 1980s:
My peers at the network, the writers and producers in their late twenties and thirties, thought of themselves as modern people trying to be fair.
There are conservatives over here and wild lefties over there—and us, the sane people, in the middle. If you made up a list of political questions—should we raise taxes to narrow the deficit; should abortion be banned; should a morning prayer be allowed in the schools; should arms control be our first foreign-policy priority? Most of them would vote yes, no, no, yes.