Jerry Falwell would not be surprised.
He probably wouldn’t even be as disgusted as I am – because everything I’ve heard about him over the last 24 hours indicates he was ever gracious when facing down the media firing squad that took aim at him in 1979 and kept its crosshairs fixed for the next several decades.
But me, I guess I’m not feeling quite so gracious after seeing stories about his death topped today with headlines like “He was a uniter and a divider” (USA Today); “For New Generation of Evangelicals, Falwell Was Old News” (The Washington Post); and “Falwell: one of a kind, thank God” (The Globe and Mail of Toronto). And that’s just what showed up in the print media.
On CNN’s Larry King Live, anti-conservative ax-grinder Mel White, founder of the pro-homosexual organization Soulforce, called Falwell “the face of homophobia.” Even worse, the show that follows King’s on CNN, Anderson Cooper 360, sought expert analysis from Christopher Hitchens, a Vanity Fair reporter and author of the new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
“The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing,” Hitchens said. “That you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend.
“If he read the Bible at all -- and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book -- he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way.”
All of this leads to one question: Is this the kind of news – and I use that word more loosely here than I may have ever used it in my life -- we’ll see on the sad day when someone like the Rev. Jesse Jackson passes away?
Of course not. Jackson will be the subject of hundreds of TV hours and newspaper column inches hailing him for his decades of courageous stands for the causes he believes in. Sure, Jackson has been no less controversial than Falwell, and he has no shortage of personal and political critics. But those people will not be given a worldwide stage, just hours after he’s breathed his last, to call him an “ugly little charlatan.”
And that’s as it should be.
It is deplorable for any news organization that expects to hold the public’s trust to open the vitriol floodgates the way so many did Tuesday after Falwell died. It’s one thing to note that he was a polarizing figure on the national stage; that’s documented, fair-to-report fact. But when an obituary story or TV segment contains as much savagery about someone as it does appreciation for him, when a headline suggests the most important thing about a man’s life was that some people didn’t like what he stood for, there can be only one explanation for it: the media are taking one final shot at someone they have always despised. And you can predict, with almost 100 percent accuracy, that anyone subject to such treatment will fall somewhere to the right of center on the ideological scale.
Focus on the Family Chairman Dr. James Dobson, who knows a thing or two about being attacked by the media for advancing Christian principles in the public square, put it this way during his segment on Tuesday’s Larry King Live:
“They tried to make him look like a clown. There was an effort to marginalize this man because he had such political influence. And as a result, people saw him in a way that was simply not accurate.”
How sad, how sorry, that this character assassination followed the Rev. Falwell to his grave. Thankfully, as fellow followers of Christ, we can be assured it has not followed him to heaven.
