Christian Journalism Students Taught to Deceive

I don't know what organizers at the Baptist Press conference paid the Washington Times' Bill Sammon to speak at their annual confab for Christian journalism students, but if it was more than cab fare from the Nashville airport to the meeting hall, then they were had.

Sammon, the GOP's in-the-pocket White House correspondent for the Moonie-owned Times, addressed the undergraduates, dutifully instructing them to "bring a needed sense of moral clarity to news coverage," according to a recent write-up in the ChristianExaminer. Sammon urged the wannabe scribes, or as he toasted them, "that rarest of the breed: Christian journalists," to use “a basic moral compass” when choosing which stories to cover. In deep teaching mode, Sammon cited some examples from his career when he zeroed in on the "moral dimension."

I wonder if the Baptist Press conference leaders had any idea one of the stories Sammon held up to be admired was actually a glaring example of the deceitful brand of journalism often practiced within the Beltway, and specifically within the right-wing press corps. The fact that Sammon is parading the story around in front of college kids as a model of moral clarity only confirms that he misplaced his moral compass a long, long time ago.

From the ChristianExaminer:

Another moment for bringing moral clarity to news coverage occurred when Sammon covered Al Gore’s campaign during the 2000 presidential election. On one campaign stop, Gore took a canoe ride down the Connecticut River to promote his support of environmental policies.

Sammon learned that Gore had instructed local officials to release water from a dam upriver and raise the water level by a foot in order to facilitate his canoe ride. Because the area was experiencing a drought, the water level in the river had fallen. Officials refused to raise the water level previously in order to preserve water for other uses."

After confirming his information, Sammon wrote a front-page story for The Washington Times exposing Gore’s promotion of policies to protect the environment while simultaneously wasting water during a drought.

“It caused quite a little scandal for a number of days and even weeks,” he said.

That's the Sammon/Christian version of events. Raise your hand if you have any idea how a "moral dimension" was addressed by the silly gotcha story. But more importantly, Sammon's tale was essentially concocted. Here's what actually happened. From a 2001 Rolling Stone article I wrote, "The Press vs. Al Gore," which dissected the infamous Connecticut River scene:

In retrospect, the most notable thing about the whole story was just how murky the facts were. Nobody from the Gore campaign asked for the water to be released. (Concerned about security, the Secret Service did.) As for the amount of water released, it was 500 million gallons, not 4 billion - a fact that Sammon reported a week later, long after other media ran with the original story. And the local utility company that operates the dam was already dumping millions of gallons of water into the parched Connecticut River every day. The routine release had simply been moved up a couple of hours to accommodate Gore's trip.

"I felt like we'd fallen through the looking glass," says Sharon Francis, executive director of the Connecticut River Joint Commissions, who coordinated Gore's visit on behalf of the region and for days fielded press queries about the derided canoe trip. She describes the media coverage as "fictional" and "nasty" and "spun to sound like something corrupt."

If the Baptist Press organizers are serious about training moral journalists they'll instruct students to igore Sammon's brand of duplicity.