If it’s good enough for the mainstream media, it’s good enough for us (sang to the tune of “If It’s Good Enough For Jesus, It’s good enough for me.”)
We figure if the mainstream media believes it is necessary to cover “Faith” as news, why not engage in a little Biblical scholarship of our own on this Sunday when the CBS News magazine show will air on the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. I mean Richard Scrushy had his own religious TV show.
And after all, that’s the life-long goal of University of Alabama journalism historian and professor David Sloan, who may be as responsible for our religious news media as any man alive. It’s a remarkable achievement, putting the University of Alabama’s fine journalism program into heated competition with the Baptist Samford University in Birmingham – for who could produce the most reporters to take care of the internship needs of the Alabama Baptist newspaper for generations to come. And occasionally, slip one in over at the Birmingham News and Fox News 6.
Since I was steeped in the Bible myself in my Birmingham upbringing, an experience that took many years to wear off in my own writing, I say with some chagrin, I figure I’ve got as much right as anyone else.
Since most of the religious people involved in American and Alabama politics I confront seem to use the Bible in ways that indicates they do not have “an ear to hear,” as it says in “Revelations,” and maybe they’ve never really sat down and read the entire thing themselves.
When I was in junior high, a coach and Sunday school teacher set our championship basketball team on a path of reading for the year. We would read the entire King James version of the Holy Bible. In one year.
So we did, and we won, every single game through the state and national championships. And I’m happy to say I only strayed from the reading a few times, during all them begets and such in the Old Testament.
I’ve often thought of those words, since I embarked on a more scientific academic path, perhaps not unlike E.O. Wilson, the Harvard professor from Alabama who has tried to start a movement to get Southern Baptists to embrace the cause of nature as “God’s creation.”
But there is something about the soil here, and the way the words are used, that is not only troubling. Who or what is it going to take to reach the great religious masses of the South and turn them away from hatred and violence?
Where is the newspaper editor who will send up a sharp warning on an editorial page somewhere, begging these people to “stop the killing!”
There were a few newspaper editors who had the guts to do that during the great Civil War, who called on their citizens to stop the killing.
In the early 20th century, there were a few newspaper editors who stood up against the Ku Klux Klan. Some of them lived to tell about it. Some didn’t.
During the Civil Rights struggle in the 1950s and ’60s in Alabama, there were a few courageous newspaper editors who got out front on covering race, but not many. There were crusading liberal lawyers in those days, and a few brave preachers, like the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who is now being treated in a Birmingham hospital.
Where are those voices today? Buried in the antiseptic cubicles of professional drudgery at the last vestiges of newsrooms in America’s cities? Or out there in wild blogland, the dot dot dot wilderness, where e-mails sometimes obliterate communication rather than fostering it – at breakneck speed.
We are looking for those voices and linking to them here, trying with 110 percent, the same as the effort required for winning basketball, to show you the way to the promised land of the best information on the Web. It’s an evil world out there, with all kinds of hacks and hackers, full of evil men who will play both sides against the middle for a dollar all day long every day.
But we know, and you know, that The Word is good. And God is THE WORD!
The Unjust Judge and the Importunate Widow
See you after the show…
We’ll have the embargoed transcript up at 7 p.m.
Here’s the blurb:
IS DON SIEGELMAN IN PRISON BECAUSE HE’S A CRIMINAL OR BECAUSE HE BELONGED TO THE WRONG POLITICAL PARTY IN ALABAMA? SIEGELMAN IS THE FORMER GOVERNOR OF ALABAMA, AND HE WAS THE MOST SUCCESSFUL DEMOCRAT IN THAT REPUBLICAN STATE. BUT WHILE HE WAS GOVERNOR, THE U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT LAUNCHED MULTIPLE INVESTIGATIONS THAT WENT ON YEAR AFTER YEAR UNTIL, FINALLY, A JURY CONVICTED SIEGELMAN OF BRIBERY.
NOW, MANY DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS HAVE BECOME SUSPICIOUS OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT’S MOTIVATIONS. FIFTY-TWO FORMER STATE ATTORNEYS-GENERAL HAVE ASKED CONGRESS TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER THE PROSECUTION OF DON SIEGELMAN WAS PURSUED NOT BECAUSE OF A CRIME BUT BECAUSE OF POLITICS.
Jill Simpson will also be on MSNBC Monday and CNN soon, so watch for details as they come in…
Other Links
A Primer on 60 Minutes Story
And oh yea, lest we forget, that snowy screed of desperation out of Montgomery:
Judge, Conduct of Siegelman Trial Defended
As always, we welcome any comments after the show, and editor and publisher Glynn Wilson will answer questions about the case based on his coverage and other inside info – now that the show is finally out. It’s been a long wait…
