What ruins the piece for me is that Newsweek has not corrected errors first pointed out by fellow Godbeat scribe Frank Lockwood. It openly corrected one error: The claim that President Reagan ever identified himself as an Episcopalian. It quietly corrected two other problems: Referring to the church’s General Convention as an annual rather than a triennial meeting, and referring to President Ford as if he were still alive. (Under a sacramental reading of Hebrews 12:1, one could make the case for referring to President Ford’s faith in the present tense.)
But Newsweek has let stand some howlers involving membership statistics. As one of many journalists cursed with innumeracy, I sympathize with Miller on these mistakes. I once wildly overstated the membership of the Episcopal Diocese of Springfield, but as soon as I realized my error I alerted my editor to it, and he corrected it.
Correct an error, in ano opinion magazine? Good gracious, how very archaic!
Leblanc’s piece clears things up, though it is not written nor published in a way that likely will properly inform the general reading public, unfortunately.
As I passed his paragraph about the naming of all the Global South ‘rescue’ bishops as ‘African bishops’ it crossed my mind that this mis-statement is really disguised racism, along the same lines as those of Spong, Griswold etc. who have made claims that Africans including their bishops are backward in some way for not agreeing with what TEC is doing. In ignoring the glaring reality that it is a consortium of Global South/equatorial bishops, of many racial derivations in fact, the Newsweek portrayal of the situation is deliberately misleading.
Doug LeBlanc has done a marvelous job of pointing out how Lisa Miller’s article is a startlingly bad case of extremely sloppy journalism, just chock full of blatant errors. If I were a journalism teacher at the high school level, I’d probably give an F to a student who turned in an article this poorly researched and written. It’s very amateurish.
And that reflects badly not just on the author, but on the editorial staff that failed to catch all those numerous factual errors.
Well done, Doug.
David Handy+
Exactly David, the bad editing is almost more troubling than a sloppy article. It shows Newsweek doesn’t care about accuracy and facts.
Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham is an Episcopalian, so you’d think that once the errors were pointed out, he might actually bother to make sure ALL the errors were corrected.
It’s not like the stats data is controversial. She’s using membership data which is readily available from TEC with two or three clicks of a mouse. It’s not a number that requires interpretation.
Here’s the file where she would have found accurate 2001 and 2007 stats for TEC domestic membership at a glance:
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/Members_by_Prov__Diocese_97-07.pdf