Bible is standard for objectivity in journalism

[The Straight Story]

Bible is standard for objectivity in journalism, Olasky says

Published October 19, 2006

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)-All journalists are shaped by their worldviews, and the only way to bring true objectivity to journalism is to be shaped by the worldview of the Bible, Marvin Olasky said at the Baptist Press Excellence in Journalism Banquet in Nashville, Tenn., Oct. 7.

The banquet-the culminating event of the sixth annual Baptist Press national Collegiate Journalism Conference-featured award presentations for students achieving excellence in the fields of print journalism, photojournalism, broadcasting, web design and yearbook.

Olasky is editor-in-chief of World magazine, a syndicated columnist and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of 17 books, and his writing has appeared in such newspapers at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA Today.

"Only when we take up these biblical lenses can we see things as they really are," Olasky said. "So here's my thesis: the only true objectivity is biblical objectivity."

Journalists frequently make two errors regarding objectivity, he said. Sometimes they claim to be completely objective and not bring any presuppositions to their reporting, Olasky said, noting that such claims are wrong because everyone has presuppositions and a worldview. He said others wrongly bring their presuppositions to bear on a story so much that they fail to report the facts accurately.

http://www.floridabaptistwitness.com/6567.article

As a christian myself I really don't buy into this.

I don't want someone else's variety of christianity to start imposing on my own brand of it, thank you very much....

[Hissyspit]

1. Um, something written hundreds and hundreds of years ago by a

variety of people with an amazing spectrum of ideas on what TRUTH was/is using a great variety of writing styles and narrative devices that has been rewritten and rewritten and translated and mistranslated and edited and misedited...
should be some kind of standard?

...o.k....

[The Straight Story]

2. You bring up a fascinating point here

About the bible being a 'living' document. It itself DID evolve and change over time, otherwise there would not be 66 books in it but one single writing defining it all.

The core message can move along, but the subtleties change over time. So many miss that these days.

[JHB]

3. Olasky from SourceWatch

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Marvin_Olasky

"Raised Jewish, Olasky turned to atheism and then Marxism before converting to Christianity. He's now <2001> a member of the conservative Presbyterian Church in America." (sourced to a broken link to Deseret News)

Now, let's check Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Olasky
Marvin Olasky (born June 12, 1950) is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas, a leading conservative columnist (Creators syndicate), and the editor-in-chief of World magazine.

Youth and education
Born in Boston, Massachusetts into a Russian Jewish family, Olasky became an atheist at 14, shortly after becoming a Bar Mitzvah. In college, he discovered Communism and became a Communist in the early 1970s, after graduating from Yale University in 1971 with a B.A. degree in American Studies. By 1976, however, Olasky had become a born-again Christian, after questioning his atheism while reading Lenin and then the New Testament in Russian. Also in 1976, Olasky graduated with a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan.

So if he was born in 1950, then in 1964 (age 14) he became an atheist, became a communist circa age 22, but by age 26 he'd become a "born again Christian".

I'll go out on a limb and say that "dabbled in" would be better descriptions than "turned to". It's telling those things are even on his "resume" three decades later.

[Gabi Hayes]

4. I, personally, like to refract my reality through the lens of Zeus,

Appollo, and the goddess of wisdom, Athena.

If you'd like to compare the Greeks' religious explanations for the cosmos, you can look them up in the library, right next to the bible, in the Dewey 500s section, which is classified "Mythology"

jesus

[leesa]

5. Are you kidding me? Those tribes were fighting like mad back then.

These people actually think the scribes who wrote the letters and text of the Bible weren't biased??? Where do they suppose the hatred/dislike/distrust of the other tribes other than the chosen one came from?

[shadowknows69]

6. My professors must have skipped that lesson

or I was out that day but I didn't miss many of my J classes.

[nemo137]

7. they waited til you were gone.

Couldn't let you in on the conspiracy, you might have blown it.