Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 16: Journalism or Public Relations?
In 2006 Facebook, originally just for Harvard students, then for colleges and universities generally, then for high-school students and some corporate employees, opens to everyone at least thirteen years old with a valid email address. As Facebook and other sites soak up advertising dollars and major news sites give away their stories for free, more than half of newspaper newsroom employees lose their jobs by 2020, and news magazines such as Time lose most of their readers.
Also in 2006, World tests its friendship with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, a key ally during the previous nine years. The story starts not with Focus but with a Washington-based political scandal. I ask a smart young World reporter with theological maturity, Jamie Dean, to dig into it.
Jamie then lays out to me the basic facts. A lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, pleads guilty to bribing public officials as part of his work for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, which operates casinos. The tribe fears that neighboring Alabama will legalize casino gambling, creating unwanted competition and hurting the profits of the Mississippi casinos. The investigation of Abramoff brings to light emails showing Abramoff ’s hiring of Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed to head up a devious plan.
The plan is for Reed to recruit evangelicals and conservatives, including Dobson, to oppose gambling in Alabama. It makes sense for Alabamans to oppose gambling in their state, but should they be unwitting volunteers—“wackos” who depend on “Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone,” an Abramoff staffer says—in a Mississippi gambling protection racket?
This investigative story, like two hundred others World publishes over the years, gets intense inspection. Is it something Christians should care about? Sure, because when people have a right to know what’s going on, it’s wrong to go behind their backs. Then comes the usual editing regarding details, structure, flow, and fairness: How do you know this? Who told you that? Do you have documents? Did you see that? Are you sure? Have you solicited and obtained comments from those implicated? Have you turned over every relevant page? Every leaf? Every snowflake? Line by line we proceed by phone, maybe for hours, until the story is bulletproof.
It has taken a long time to build up World’s reputation for gutsy reporting, and we know the risks if we get something wrong. As Jamie and I talk through the story, I can see she has dotted the i’s, so we decide to go ahead. We have statements by evangelical leaders who say they did not know Reed was working with Abramoff. Dobson, though, will not talk to Jamie. Reed’s secretary calls and says Reed will not talk with her but wants to talk with me. That sounds like boss-to-boss “Let’s make a deal” time. One of Dobson’s assistants suggests that if I fire Jamie all will be well, but things might get bad if I don’t.
I explain to both the Dobson and Reed organizations that I trust Jamie’s reporting. If she’s made any factual errors, tell me about them, but otherwise talk to her—she’s the reporter. When I refuse to purge Jamie, Focus on the Family attacks World via Dobson’s radio program and his newsletter. I explain that we’re not saying Dobson consciously did anything wrong. We are saying Reed manipulated him. That could happen to any of us. Dobson is not omniscient. He’s not God.
Dobson fans write angry letters. They cancel subscriptions. Once again, World business and board leaders don’t interfere or ask me to make it all go away by axing Jamie or running an apology. (For what? The story is accurate.) They seem to understand that losing subscribers is sometimes the cost of good journalism. With each investigation we build trust with our readers. Readers see that we tell the truth, even when it hurts.
After the furor dies down, I ask a World business executive how many subscribers canceled because of Dobson’s assault. The estimate: three to five thousand, at a time when printing and mailing costs are rising. The average “acquisition cost” to replace those subscribers is $35 per person, so the total hit is more than $100,000, but I hear no complaints from the board, nor do I complain when it decides to change the magazine from a forty-some-page weekly to an eighty-some biweekly in Big savings on postage, and as the magazine loses some newsiness—the place for breaking news is now our website—the rationale for investigations becomes even stronger.
We don’t consider limiting investigations because of their cost, perhaps because Joel Belz for three decades laments founding World a little too late to break the story of 1986 scandals involving Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker. He wishes that was World’s scoop. Our investigative stories over the years include some about governmental spending that World’s mostly conservative readers would expect from a conservative magazine. We also, though, publish some that would seem more likely in a liberal publication, such as “Welfare for Big Corporations” and “Snakepit: Republican Leaders Posturing.”
World unsurprisingly runs investigative stories on social issues that evangelicals emphasize, particularly abortion, with headlines like “Sex, Lies, and Audiotape” or “Banned Parenthood: Abortion’s Eugenics Roots.” But World also investigates evangelical mainstays and runs headlines like “Christian Publishing Losing Theological Integrity,” “The Breakdown of Promise Keepers,” and “Contemporary Christian Music Tensions.”
Independence from political party and the evangelical establishment has a cost—one that in the first two decades of this century we are still willing to pay. World (except for a brief mistaken plunge into the for-profit sector) has the advantage in hard times of being a nonprofit: We don’t have to make money for stockholders. If we end the fiscal year even, that is sufficient.
The Abramoff story angers some Christians unhappy that our reporting hurts rising GOP star Ralph Reed, who loses his race for the Republican nomination to be Georgia’s lieutenant governor. But we insist that part of the Christian journalist’s duty is to expose public sin and bring to light the dark deeds of the powerful, whether they are Christian or not, and whether they hurt “our” side or not.
In 2007 that controversy is in the rearview mirror. My UT teaching is going smoothly. I’ve run the race of giving our children what I never had, an anchoring in one specific city. I’ve read to all of them The Lord of the Rings as bedtime stories. All four are now out of the house. Susan and I are settled in. Then, in the springtime, two unsolicited phone calls get me thinking about what else God may have in store for us.
The first is from Liberty University. Jerry Falwell wants me to set up a journalism school there. It’s intriguing enough for Susan and me to spend several days in Lynchburg, Virginia. We visit classes, talk to professors, meet Jerry Sr. in his office decorated with New York Yankees paraphernalia—and ultimately say no.
A short time later, though, the president of The King’s College, New York City, invites me to become its provost—the chief academic officer. The administration and faculty are at war with each other. The previous provost has left. Susan and I visit the financially shaky two-hundred-fifty-student school with classrooms and offices in the Empire State Building. While we’re there, doctors find the King’s president has a brain tumor. Suddenly the school faces a future without either a president or a provost.
I’m in my mid-fifties, an age at which many tenured professors coast. I’d like to say I feel called to King’s, but that’s not so at first. It’s an adventure that appeals to my sensibility, shaped as it is by both the gospel and Western movies. I’ve chaired the board of one Christian school and been PTA president of another, but I’ve never been a higher education administrator. It’s good to try something new, and maybe I can be the sheriff, rescuing this evangelical outpost in America’s greatest city.
As the spring semester ends, I accept the job on a temporary basis. UT grants me leave for the fall semester. I plan to be back in Austin in January 2008, teaching my regular courses and doing the King’s provost job long distance. Any further commitment might force me to relinquish the lifetime security of tenure, something that happens so rarely that one California professor who does it is thereafter known as “the man who gave up tenure.”
My favorite song line in 2007 comes from Austin singer-songwriter Patty Griffin: “It’s a . . . mad, mad mission. Sign me up.” I think of Susan and me as hobbits, but maybe we’re Muppets. We head to Manhattan.