Conservative Christmas Correctness

Once again, WorldNetDaily has joined other Christian conservatives in hyping a purported "war on Christmas" that can be countered only by coercing retailers and schools to recognize Christmas in the fashion they demand, usually by threat of lawsuit or boycott.

And once again, WND's war is largely driven by press releases from conservative legal organizations.

Related articles on ConWebWatch: For Immediate Release: A Manufactured Crisis Left Behind: The ConWeb Edition Another Brick Out of the Wall

As ConWebWatch detailed last year, WND relies heavily on the contents of legal groups such as Liberty Counsel and Alliance Defense Fund to advance the meme that the celebration of Christmas is somehow under attack. WND rarely strays from the content of the releases, making no effort to contact the targets of the legal groups' ire to obtain their side of the story. Indeed, what little description of opposing views is supplied in the press releases themselves.

WND did their bidding again this year, obligingly cranking out several articles based on press releases from these groups. A comprehensive list of this year's press release-generated articles at WND is provided at the end of this article.

When a news organization relies on press releases from conservative legal groups for articles to the extent that WorldNetDaily does, more often than not the end result is a highly biased, if not basically untrue, article. And so it is with WND's reports that a Wisconsin school district had allegedly replaced "Silent Night" with a song with the same tune but different lyrics called "Cold in the Night."

WND articles on Dec. 7 and Dec. 14 on the controversy hewed closely to press releases sent out by Liberty Counsel, and WND made no effort to contact the school district for a response. WND's only original contribution to the articles was to add a brief history of "Silent Night."

And what was the rest of the story that WND couldn't be bothered to pursue? As Think Progress points out, the song "Cold in the Night" comes from a play the school was to perform called "The Little Tree's Christmas Gift," about a small, lonely Christmas tree that is told it is "too scraggly, it will never sell." The tree sings the revised lyrics in a scene lamenting his sad state. The rewording is a plot point in a play; it has nothing to do with "secularizing" the song. This information never appeared in the Liberty Counsel press releases; therefore, it never appeared in a WND article.

Complicating the use of these press releases is the fact that one of these legal groups, the Alliance Defense Fund, is a WorldNetDaily advertiser, described as such in WND e-mails as recently as Dec. 7. As ConWebWatch has detailed, WND regularly provides favorable "news" coverage of its advertisers -- to the point of presenting actual ads as news articles -- raising the question of whether WND is violating journalistic ethical standards that discourage the mixing of news and advertising in providing such favorable coverage to its advertisers.

But the press release-generated article is not WND's only weapon this year. The December issue of WND's Whistleblower magazine is dedicated to the subject of "Criminalizing Christianity," which insists that "a lot more than Christmas is at stake -- Christianity itself is being undermined and attacked with increasing frequency and venom" (italics theirs).

"It's chilling," adds WND Managing Editor David Kupelian, author of "The Marketing of Evil," whose insights are on the dubious side (and whose article purporting to describe "how 'gay rights' is being sold to America" is in this particular issue of Whistleblower). "Our nation's founding religion is being attacked as never before. The Constitution is being twisted out of all recognition, history is being rewritten, and Christian teachings and observances are being shut out and shut up. And while we sit around watching this helplessly, we're bequeathing a different America to our children. It's time for people to wake up."

But while WND and its writers offer lots of scary rhetoric, they offer little beyond isolated cases and propping up one of their favorite bogeymen, the American Civil Liberties Union, to slap around.

We don't know. One side of the story is all that WND cares about, and it's not the ACLU's side. And so it goes on the attack of anyone not deemed to have invoked Christmas sufficiently -- and, ultimately, of not being Christian enough.

That was taken to a hateful extreme in a Dec. 19 column by Erik Rush, who likened anyone who denies that there is a "war on Christmas" -- press release-generated though it might be -- to Holocaust deniers and Nazis:

To me, that sounds a lot like the pre-World War II assertions that the Jews were the name of Germany's pain and the postwar contention that the Holocaust was a Zionist fabrication.

Even the president isn't exempt from direct attacks. WND editor Joseph Farah managed to step beyond the walls of WND to express his Christmas-only intolerance, getting quoted in The Washington Post as saying that he threw the Christmas card he received from the White House away because it said "Happy Holidays" and not "Merry Christmas." In a Dec. 9 column -- during which he recited the bogus "Cold in the Night" example -- Farah claimed that the White House Christmas card is part of a "cultural trend we see in America to minimize the spiritual dimension of Christmas, to marginalize Christmas, celebrated by 96 percent of Americans, as just "one of the seasonal holidays."

Farah also took offense when Bush invoked Santa instead of Jesus during the lighting of the national Christmas tree. From Farah's Dec. 7 column:

For Christians, Christmas is about one thing: It's not about "all things bright and beautiful." It's about God's Son coming to Earth in human form to atone for our sins so that we can share eternal life with Him. It's not about Santa Claus, and I'm surprised this needs to be pointed out to a president who claims to be a born-again Christian.

Farah added that Bush "needs to apologize to Christians in America and around the world. Further, he needs to take his Christian constituency seriously and not for granted."

(By the way, that "Christian constituency" -- or at least the subset of which Farah is a part -- bashes other Christians for being too squeamish about torture, as Farah did back in October.)

Even WND's Les Kinsolving managed to get two days of questions in the White House press briefing on this alleged issue. Kinsolving asked on Dec. 6, "Will the President apologize to Christians offended by his referring to Jesus as Santa?" Kinsolving asked the question again the next day.

Kinsolving also expressed offense that the president's traditional Christmas party for journalists had been changed to a "Holiday Reception."

Farah is quite self-congratulatory over all of this. After insisting in a Dec. 20 column that "[t]his year, more so than any previous, there was a new intensity and frequency to the attacks on Christmas" (again, offering no evidence beyond the anecdotal articles WND has run), he claimed that they were "reversed by an onslaught of popular opinion, lawsuits, boycotts and threats of legal action." He continued:

Maybe it sounds self-serving of me to say it, but I think the difference this year was right here – this news service, WorldNetDaily.com.

wasn't that we were on a holy crusade. It wasn't that we were targeting anyone. It wasn't that we were on a mission. All we did was cover the news – news that probably wouldn't be covered without us.

Wrong. Rewriting press releases is not "covering the news." And those being called Nazis and "anti-God" have a different opinion on whether they are being "targeted." Actually, that sort of invective sounds a lot like a holy crusade to us.

This, ultimately, is a reflection of WND's brand of journalism. All hype and no context, driven by press releases and ideology, not facts. In other words, everything journalism is not supposed to be.

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WND press release-generated articles

Here are selections from this year's collection of WND "war on Christmas" stories and the conservative legal group press releases on which they are based:

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WND story: "Lawsuit prompts towns to allow Nativity," Dec. 9 (Neptune Beach, Fla.)

Source of press release it was based on: Liberty Counsel

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