Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh lets a ministry play the victim in a Feb. 19 article:
The "cancel culture" has struck the influential D. James Kennedy Ministries, founded by the influential Presbyterian minister.
The organization said it's been deplatformed by Lifetime TV, to which it paid "enormous fees" over the years, because of its Christian perspective on issues such as abortion.
Lifetime TV had demanded that the ministry remove all "controversial" content or it could not continue to purchase time for its program "Truths That Transform."
Frank Wright, CEO of the group, said Lifetime imposed an unacceptable demand to remove all programming that addressed abortion or left-wing financier George Soros or it would be banned entirely.
Of course, Lifetime has every right to choose the programming that airs on its channel. And note what Unruh glossed over there: D. James Kennedy Ministries "purchased time" on Lifetime. He also ignores another question: What business does an organization that proclaims itself to be a religious ministry have in pushing a political hatchet job on Soros?
Indeed, the program, "Billionaire Radical: George Soros and the Scheme to Remake America," is very much a hatchet job that has nothing to do with religion. The goal of the program is to make Soros look as unflattering and evil as possible -- even suggesting that he's some kind of puppetmaster, an anti-Semitic trope, though not actually using that word -- even repeating the sleazy smear that "he did assist Nazis" during World War II, attacking him for doing what he could as a teenager to survive a Nazi regime whose goal it was to murder people like him. The program quotes only right-wing Soros critics like David Horowitz, Daniel Lapin and Richard Poe.There are many slippery, misleading and outright false claims, such has calling Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a "Marxist."
Of course, this is ultimately all about money; at the end of the program, a pitch is made that for a donation, Kennedy Ministries will send out "a compelling chart and guide showing in graphic detail how George Soros' money flows to radical causes," further claiming that "we have done the homework to separate the facts from the myths" -- highly unlikely given its embrace of the Nazi smear.
WND also gave Kennedy Ministries president Frank Wright a column the same day to whine about this further, complaining: "Lifetime objected to our exposé on Planned Parenthood, in which we documented the organization's sale of baby body parts derived from abortions. The network objected to our exposé on billionaire radical George Soros and his systematic efforts to undermine American laws and institutions. They even objected to our program on the spiritual life of George Washington." Again, Wright never explained what business a religious ministry has in creating a political smear job on Soros.
Wright also huffed: "One might argue that the foundational question here is: Why are progressives so deathly afraid of the free marketplace of ideas? They are in urgent need of reading – perhaps for the first time – John Milton's 'Areopagitica.' In his polemic against the state-sponsored cancel culture of his day, this Puritan declared: 'Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?'" If Wright cares as much about "Truth" as he claims, why didn't subject his Soros hatchet job to any kind of outside fact-checking or even allow a Soros supporter to appear in his program to rebut its claims? Where is the forum anywhere at any Kennedy Ministries website where people are allowed to engage in debate over the false and misleading claims in the Soros program?
On top fo that, claiming "cancel culture" and "censorship" as Wright and WND are doing is also highly dishonest; there are enough media outlets that Kennedy Ministries should be able to easily find one and that there's no need to rely on a single outlet like Lifetime, which is exercising its right as a private business to decide what it airs -- indeed, the ministry has many TV outlets.
