Mark has got rightly annoyed with a journalist for a misleading article. The journalist in question has got form — Jonathan Wynne-Jones regularly creates controversies out of thin air. Like a great many journalists, and religion ones are often the worst, he has forgotten the difference between reporting a story and creating a story. It’s partly because without the sniff of a controversy they have little chance of getting a story into the secular papers they work for. In this case the story is exacerbated by two typical Telegraph themes: traditional Christianity is under attack, and the BBC is full of dangerous pinko liberals. Getting their teeth into the BBC Passion is a target too tempting to avoid.
What the story also reveals is just how much sloppy journalism depends on widespread ignorance. Here the ignorance is both of the biblical story, and of any historical background. You know that when a journalist has to resort to a quote from a Church Society spokesman (and they always are men) that they’re scraping the bottom of a barrel.
One detail Mark missed was the implicit sneer: Mark is the “associate professor of religion at Duke University” (missing out the NT bit) whereas Paula Gooder (who must be kicking herself by now) is both “a New Testament scholar” and “canon theologian at Birmingham Cathedral”. The implication that Mark is a non-specialist American (whereas Paula is a good British gal who knows her stuff) has to remain unstated since it is so patently untrue.
Excellent value though Paula is, I don’t think one could quite describe her as one of these “leading theologians” who, explicitly unnamed, are accusing the BBC of misleading the public. Certainly one could not describe rent-a-quote George Curry of the Church Society as either leading or a theologian. No, this is a rhetorical construct, otherwise known as a lie.
Politicians have got used to having an instant rebuttal unit. Anyone who talks to the press needs one nowadays, so it’s just as well that Mark has his blog to hand, and that it’s so widely read.
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