This is interesting. On Jan. 3rd, the Christian Post published an article by Morgan Lee reporting that a Christian blogger was calling Todd Starnes a liar due to his biased, selective, and misleading reporting about “persecution” against Christians. The original story is still available via Google cache, but no longer appears on the Christian Post site itself. If you search for “Todd Starnes,” a link to the original story comes up, but it leads to a 404 page.
Methinks someone got a little note behind the scenes, perhaps?
You know, that was a major part of my deconversion, becoming aware of just how much hypocrisy was allowed, how much lying was allowed, how much good Christian doctrine was based on lying, lying, lying, all the time.
You know what, after reading the story, I’m not completely convinced that calling out Todd Starnes was the reason it was pulled. Check out this bit:
– Noble also said that because the business model of many news organizations is based on “pageviews, ad revenue and subscriptions” it was vital that Christians realize that many reporters and columnists had an “economic incentive to tell our readers what they want to hear and readers have an incentive not to check [the veracity of the story.]”
“If it confirms everything I believe, what incentive do I have to check that?” he said. “This becomes a big problem and this happens [on conservative and liberal websites.]” –
Maybe a news website that depends on readers not being skeptical doesn’t want to put out an article telling their readers to be skeptical. 😉
The story is back at the Christian Post but it has been edited quite a bit. For example, after the fourth line-break the original version said:
However, Noble explained that after “a quick Google search” he found another Fox story that showed that Starnes had ommitted two critical sentences from the statement.
And now it reads:
However, Noble explained that after “a quick Google search” he found another Fox story with an extended VA statement.
Similar changes have been made in other parts of the article and most of them seem designed to protect Starnes’ reputation. It looks like Christian Post has bowed to pressure from Fox News.