When Jesus sent His twelve disciples out on a mission trip, among the words of warning He gave them was, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Those are words we should be heeding these days, yet too few of us really do, especially when it comes to the media. Journalists and reporters make their living with words, and it is very clear that few of them have much respect for religion, let alone Christianity, yet so often we accept what they say with little skepticism.

Take, for example, the Iowa caucus of 1988, when Pat Robertson shocked the nation by coming in second, with over 24 percent of the vote. Conventional wisdom dismissed his candidacy as futile. Only George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole were considered real contenders, and Bush came in a disappointing third. The idea that a Christian could achieve that kind of success unsettled those in the media who preferred maintaining the illusion that Christians were nothing more than uneducated buffoons. It’s arguable whether or not Robertson’s campaign would have continued well from there or not—we’ll never know, because the decision was taken away from the voters by the media. That year a large number of Southern states were convinced (or should I say conned) to hold their primaries on the same day in order to make a bigger impact. It was called “Super Tuesday,” and that election was the first time it was attempted. Super Tuesday was marketed as a way for the South to make as big an impact on the election as Iowa and New Hampshire traditionally did.

But the night before Super Tuesday, one of the networks ran a trash piece on Robertson, interviewing a disgruntled former employee who claimed something to the effect that Pat Robertson was running for president only so he could start World War III and usher in Armageddon. Since it was the night before Super Tuesday, Robertson didn’t have time to respond, and he lost big in the next day’s primaries. After that, his candidacy faded to oblivion. Most of those Southern states realized the trap they had fallen into, and there has never been a real Super Tuesday since, although the name is still used.

This illustration is very valuable because it shows how people who automatically believe the media can be manipulated. Whether or not you believe Robertson could have or should have won the presidency or even the GOP nomination, had the press not hamstrung his campaign in such a way, Robertson’s candidacy could have made both parties take Christians much more seriously. Instead, it took six more years, until after the 2004 elections, before either party even began to acknowledge the importance of Christians as a political force.

We so often forget, as Christians, that we live in enemy territory. This is not our home. We see the events of the world filtered through a markedly anti-Christian lens. It’s very hard to live life that way and very tempting to simply trust the “eyes” of the media in spite of what we know they believe. Distorted vision is felt to be better than none. But is it?

On July 16, 1999, an inexperienced pilot attempted to fly his plane through a raging storm. One of the hardest things to grasp for people learning flying is the importance of not relying only on your senses. Flying blind can be done, but only by having faith in what the instruments say. That night John Kennedy Jr. flew his plane into the sea, killing his wife, his wife’s sister, and himself. It has been presumed that the crash was the result of the mistake so many inexperienced pilots make: not trusting the instruments and relying only on his senses. Because he limited his sources of information and trusted in ones that he knew would be untrustworthy, tragedy resulted. All he needed to do, some experts tell us, was to ignore his senses and trust the unbiased, accurate instruments.

So, as Christians in a blizzard of information coming from biased sources, how do we find reliable “instruments” while keeping up-to-date on the world’s events? Well, it’s hard, and it takes a little more effort, but then, come to think of it, so is homeschooling.

In the Midst of Wolves
Most network news reporters will slant a story to push their own worldview. It’s become so much a part of modern journalism that the few who won’t badmouth religion are considered unprofessional. Bernard Golberg, in his book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, tells of an event in 1999 when producer Roxanne Russell, in a conference call about the Republican presidential primaries, called Gary Bauer “the little nut from the Christian group,” yet not one of the other producers acted as if what she said was in the least bit out of the ordinary.

While it’s been a long time since it was done, the study by S. Robert Lichter, professor at George Washington University, and Stanley Rothman, professor at Smith College, shows how deep the problem is. The study compared various demographic averages of 240 members of noteworthy media outlets in the United States, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek magazines, the U.S. News and World Report, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and all of the major public broadcasting stations at the time. While only 27% of the general population considered themselves liberal, 75% of the journalists surveyed styled themselves as such. The study found that 42% of the population at large attended church weekly, while only 7% of the journalists did (National Federation for Decency Journal, August 1986). The surprising results have dissuaded journalists from participating in any more studies; thus these statistics are generally dismissed as “old” and “stale,” as if for some reason journalists have become friendlier to religion in the intervening years.

Be a Critical Listener and Reader
Always remember to pay close attention to what is actually said in news stories. Reporters don’t like being sued for libel, and their publishers like it even less. Last year I helped a friend write an autobiography that included explosive details about his past as a young actor in Hollywood. In the draft we finished, several well known people were exposed as pedophiles and sexual predators. The book remains unpublished because no publisher is willing to risk the lawsuits that might come, and my friend has reservations about hiding the facts and so far hasn’t agreed to edit the book to hide the identities of the guilty. Reporters know that what they write needs to be the truth, at least technically. That doesn’t mean they can’t use gimmicks to skirt the legal problems.

One trick they use is to give information in the form of a question, which they then can deny as a statement of fact. For example, following the murder of Matthew Shepard, Katie Couric asked the Wyoming governor if “conservative political organizations like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family are contributing to this anti-homosexual atmosphere?” Such a remark can be defended, legally, as a question, while it still does the damage of making a false and bigoted attack on Christians.

Omitting facts has always proven to be an effective weapon in distorting the news. In spite of the “hate crime” uproar following Matthew Shepard’s murder, the media still refuse to call the shootings at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, the targeting of Christians at Columbine, the 1997 shootings of a high school prayer group in Paducah, Kentucky, and the more recent church burning in Alabama by a pair of Satanists, hate crimes. They simply never refer to them as such. Omitting facts allows the media to twist a story while maintaining the pretense of being “factual.”

When you read or hear a story, think about details that would influence the story but are missing. For example, when Larry Gene Ashbrook finally shot himself after killing seven people at Wedgwood Baptist Church, what overwhelming evidence was there to ignore his anti-Christian ranting and dismiss the shootings as “unexplainable” rather than as a hate crime? None were offered, yet we were “comforted” that it wasn’t an actual hate crime. Or when David Kestenbaum, of the notoriously liberal NPR, “noted,” in January 2002, that two anthrax-laden letters had been sent to Senators recently criticized by the Traditional Values Coalition, and that so far the FBI hadn’t contacted them—where was he getting his facts? That question was eventually asked of NPR during heated Congressional hearings months later when it was exposed that Kestenbaum had invented the entire accusation out of thin air. But how many listeners thought to question it as he delivered his transparent accusation?

Another tactic is to include irrelevant facts as if they are part of the story. Rarely did the media not refer to John Roberts as a Roman Catholic during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Much was made of Harriet Meyer’s religion as well, yet this is the same press that continually drumbeats the fear that America will become a “theocracy” and that religious tests will be used for public offices. If they fear religious tests, why do they make such a fuss about the religion of Christians who run for or are appointed to office? What disturbs me even more is how many Christians echo those concerns without actually thinking about who put them into their heads.

Get the Facts! Most American remain convinced that Jerry Falwell called the Teletubby character Tinky Winky gay, in spite of the fact that he never said it. Associated Press reporter David Reed, who seems to take great delight in misquoting Falwell as often as he can, accused Falwell of “outing” the children’s program character in February 1999. The facts are that in 1997 CNN (cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9712/24/ teletubbies/) reported on it and that in 1998 the Village Voice, Time, and People magazines covered it. The Washington Post noted it in January of 1999. So it would be hard for someone to “out” Tinky Winky when so many media outlets had already reported Tinky Winky to be gay. Then there is the fact that the article Reed referred to wasn’t even written by Falwell but by National Liberty Journal Senior Editor J.M. Smith. Few people have bothered to go beyond the claims of one wire service reporter to find what the true story is even though ten minutes at a search engine reveals how distorted the story was. One reporter, with one story, was able to place a lie indelibly into the fabric of our culture. Think of how many lies his thousands of colleagues have foisted on us.

I doubt I need to go into much detail about James Dobson and Sponge Bob. The Los Angeles Times, however, took five days before they ran a correction on their false accusation against Dr. Dobson. By then the damage had been done. Many people still falsely believe Dobson personally called Sponge Bob a homosexual.

As biased as the media is against Christians, they are even more biased against homeschooling. The most notorious example was the infamous CBS report titled “A Dark Side to Home Schooling,” in which CBS created a frightening portrait of homeschooling with five negative examples, while ignoring the thousands upon thousands of homeschooling families who demonstrate the exact opposite. Not all of even those five negative examples were actually homeschoolers, and some had only one or two kids of school age even though the tragedies involved many children not yet of school age. J. Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said that “nothing compares with this series on CBS in terms of distorting the truth about home education.” In terms of fair news reporting, CBS failed to rise to the level one would expect from a junior high newspaper, yet in spite of that, in spite of sponsors withdrawing their ads from CBS in protest, and in spite of 33 members of the US Congress writing to CBS to voice their concerns, CBS has yet to retract any accusations made in the report.

In late 2005 when David Ludwig murdered the parents of his girlfriend and fled with her from Pennsylvania to Indiana, ABC News’ Elizabeth Vargas noted in almost every reference to Ludwig that he was homeschooled. Why? Ludwig is also 6´ 3" tall, but she forgot to mention that, and that has as much to do with the story as the way he was educated does— unless by including the fact she wants to send the message that somehow his being homeschooled was a factor in the crime.

Be Ye Therefore Wise As Serpents
The Bible doesn’t do much in the way of portraying serpents in a positive light, which makes Jesus’ statement a bit puzzling. Surely there were other animals that exemplified craftiness. But a serpent was the picture Jesus wanted. I like animals, and I like watching them. So rather than seeing snakes as something always evil, I’ve admired God’s handiwork in them. Unless the way ahead is perfectly clear, or they’re racing in fear, snakes move very slowly, carefully, and deliberately. They move their head forward and test the surface of the ground, tree, or rock, and only when it’s secure do they continue. The bulk of their body will follow along, passing over the exact spot the head first traversed. That certainly seems wise.

The idea of testing new area before allowing it to become something you rest and rely on is exactly how we need to take each day’s news. There is the wisdom of a serpent. But it requires effort to maintain a framework of knowledge based on proven information, the same way a serpent maintains a large area of contact with the surface, in order to ensure a solid and stable position. It’s easy to not worry about current events and simply trust the evening news, but as we’ve seen, that’s not a source that can be trusted.

Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:14, “That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” How hard is it to knock a snake over? Our understanding of Scripture and logic, as well as of the world around us, needs to be developed to the point that we have solid, factual ground to stand on as we take in new information and weigh it against our established framework, as well as the salient facts. But too often we neglect this preparatory work because we assume others can carry the weight of that troublesome, annoying, and sometimes boring collection of thoughts and ideas.

I’m writing this on my laptop, which is connected to my main computer via a wireless connection. But when I travel, that connection is lost, and unless I make sure I have adequate information stored and accessible on my laptop, it won’t be of much value to me. It is vital that we work to build a framework of information and logic; otherwise, we become worse than useless—we become tools of the enemy, led around by our own foolishness.

Here’s a good way to remember it— always listen to the news the same way you eat catfish: carefully picking out the good parts and throwing out the bad parts. Don’t just swallow the whole thing.