The Woke Ethic & the Spirit of Protestantism
ON FERVENT & MANIC BUSYBODIES
April, wrote T.S. Eliot, is the cruelest month. With apologies to the eminent 20th-century poet, June has become a whole lot crueler. There is virtually no quarter for dissenters to what is now almost universally known as Pride Month.
Consider the cruel fate of two TV news directors in Michigan who issued a directive to their reporters this June to dial back coverage of local Pride events. “We should not cover every Pride event that we learn about,” wrote Amy Fox, assistant director of WOOD TV, a channel based in Grand Rapids, allegedly at the behest of the channel’s director, Stanton Tang. “We need to do some work to discern the newsworthy-ness of the event. If we are covering Pride events, we need to consider how to make the story balanced and get both sides of the issue.”
Balanced reporting! What’s the problem?
Plenty, in this day and age. Enough for Fox and Tang to get axed.
In announcing their firings, general manager Julie Brinks said, “WOOD-TV is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to covering and reporting the news of the day in an expansive and inclusive fashion, consistent with these values.”
Inclusion, not balance, is the order of the day.
If you didn’t already suspect that your local TV news crew was trying to brainwash you, now you know. You can forget about hearing both sides of an issue. Only one side is fit to be aired.
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Our past is neither as virtuous as our optimists think nor as vicious as our pessimists think. It consists, rather, of a mixture of comic and tragic elements.
In this special section, which runs as an occasional feature, we present samples of the offerings in the Narthex, the NOR’s online blog.
It is a cruel irony that, in less than a century, Catholics have gone from being victimized as unwelcome immigrants to being widely perceived as racist victimizers.