I’m not making this up. This just happened to me.
I was contacted this morning by someone who works for one of the three major news networks. They wanted me to come downtown and film a segment for a TV news talk-show addressing the question, “Is the media anti-religious?”
I prepared. I pondered. I was ready.
Here was the basic idea of my planned reply:
“‘The media (if we must use such a vast generalization, like “Hollywood” or “Democrats” or “Republicans”) tends to go with whatever will be the most arresting story, and thus “they” often go for extreme voices instead of something closer to the truth. Thus, we end up with a lot of stories about religious people doing extreme and terrible things, or about religious people being ‘intolerant.’ But you get the same thing in the religious press … religious voices speaking in extreme, attention-grabbing, self-righteous terms about the non-religious. It would be helpful for the nation as a whole if other voices were given room, to represent religious people who are actually thinking people interested in contributing to a healthy, balanced dialogue instead of throwing stones from the far end of the spectrum.”
Then, a few minutes later, before they had heard anything about my potential replies, they called back.
And guess what…
They told me I wasn’t an “extreme-enough” voice. They had realized I wasn’t going to be offering an extreme anti-media response, and were looking for some religious person who would.
I can’t think of a punchline good enough to end this story.
Perhaps this is the punchline– just repeating the question: Is the media anti-religious? Here we have a media outlet “reporting” on how Christians think they’re being marginalized … and how do they create the story? By marginalizing Christians.
You know, that’s just terrible. Too bad you’re not gonna tell us which one of the networks it was . . .
Surprised they were so frank as to tell you what the motive behind the call-back was.
That’s just plain crazy.
If you put this in a novel your editor would say, “Sorry, not believable enough.” The media are totally pathetic. Check this out: http://8zero8.blogspot.com/
Not extreme enough. Did they read your letter to the fans of “The Passion…”?
funny and sad all at the same time — thanks for documenting the journey — these are things you suspect, but never really have concrete examples of…
[...] This sort of thing reminds me of the time Jeffrey Overstreet was invited to be interviewed for a talk show addressing the question of whether the media was anti-religious, only to have his invitation withdrawn because his opinion wasn’t extreme enough (you can read his account of that here). [...]