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Air Date: October 7, 2013

Host: Jim Schneider

Guest: Warren Cole Smith

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Warren Cole Smith is Vice President of WORLD News Group. He has written or co-written more than 10 books. His essays, reviews, interviews and articles have been included in various books, including ‘Public Relations’, one of the most widely used college journalism textbooks in the world. This Crosstalk looked at an updated and revised book that has Smith teamed up with Marvin Olasky. It’s called, ‘Prodigal Press: Confronting the Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media.’

According to Warren, the news media is enormously influential. To prove his point he explained that by a person’s 17th birthday they will have experienced 54,000 hours of exposure to media. Contrast this to the amount of time we spend in church and you can quickly see how pervasive media is in the culture of Americans.

Warren noted that every news story has a point of view because every writer has a perspective. Today that perspective is often anti-Christian because there’s less stigma today to communicating such a bias. This is just one aspect that reflects the overall decline that can be traced when viewing the history of journalism in America.

Warren described the decline as incremental rather than sudden. Overall he noted the effect of technological and political changes but specific examples he cited included the rise of transcendentalism in the 1840’s with its critical stand toward the orthodox, trinitarian Christian view; the progressive era; the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1825 and the Whittaker Chambers/Alger Hiss trial.

Find out what Smith’s chapter title, ‘Spiking the Spiritual’ means, why liberal media members tend to quote the most outrageous conservative voices, his views on objectivity in the media and its biblical component, how technology has affected journalism and more.

More Information

For a copy of ‘Prodigal Press: Confronting the Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media’ for a donation of $20 call 1-800-729-9829.

World Magazine
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