As a followup to my previous post, ABC News is under fire for a hateful report.
American’s need to distinguish between a hate group and hateful reporting of a group.
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/885460813519228928
ABC News is under fire for a story in which it characterizes the Alliance Defending Freedom as “an alleged hate group.”
If you are a historically conservative Christian organization, the SPLC brands you as a hate group.
Mark Kellner rightly asks the question: “Here’s a proactive journalistic question: Does expressing one’s faith and beliefs always and without exception equal hate?”
So we end up with this headline today:
Jeff Sessions addresses ‘anti-LGBT hate group,’ but DOJ won’t release his remarks
And the lede:
Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a speech to an alleged hate group at an event closed to reporters on Tuesday night, but the Department of Justice is refusing to reveal what he said.
Sessions addressed members of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was designated an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016, at the Summit on Religious Liberty at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, in Dana Point, California.
The Alliance Defending Freedom took ABC News to task.
AllianceDefends on Twitter
Alliance Defending Freedom to ABC News: Retract defamatory story, issue apology https://t.co/MzxnSzTkhx
The ADF issued this statement from legal counsel and director of communications Kerri Kupec:
ABC News has committed journalistic malpractice. For ABC News to essentially cut and paste false charges against Alliance Defending Freedom by a radically left-wing, violence-inciting organization like Southern Poverty Law Center is a discredit to ABC News and to the profession. Americans’ trust in media is cratering, and the blatant bias and lack of professionalism that ABC attempted to pass off as news can only serve to confirm and intensify that distrust.
Alliance Defending Freedom is one of the most respected and successful Supreme Court advocates in the legal profession, having won seven cases at the high court in the last seven years. Southern Poverty Law Center spends its time and money attacking veterans, nuns, Muslims who oppose terrorism, Catholics, Evangelicals, and anyone else who dares disagree with its far-left ideology. Meanwhile, ADF works every day to preserve and affirm free speech and the free exercise of religion for people from all walks of life and all backgrounds because we believe freedom is for everyone.
For the sake of its own integrity, ABC News should issue an apology to Alliance Defending Freedom and retract the defamatory story it published Wednesday.
Finally, the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher commented on “ABC’s outrageous anti-Christian smear.”
And National Review’s David French wrote that the media should beware because the SPLC “has become a dangerous joke.”
We’ve known that for over a decade here in Moscow.