As long as there is a Donald Trump, then Jerry Falwell, Jr., will be the face of Christian higher education for editors at The New York Times and elite media in the blue-zip-code media in the Northeast.
This is sad, since the coronavirus crisis — along with life after Millennial-era enrollments — is creating a wave of important local, regional and national stories about private education, including Christian higher education. Hold that thought, because tomorrow’s “Crossroads” podcast is dedicated to that topic.
But back to Falwell and the Times.
Faithful readers may remember a recent GetReligion post — “Rank these stories: Falwell rolls dice with virus or potential collapse of some small colleges?” — in which I chided the Great Gray Lady for its familiar Falwell obsessions. Here is how that piece opened:
What we have here are two stories about Christian higher education during the coronavirus crisis.
One is set in a rather remote part of America, but it involves — kind of — Citizen Donald Trump. The other is a national-level story with news hooks that will affect institutions (and thus newsrooms) in several hundred communities spread out from coast to coast.
So which of these two stories is grabbing national headlines, including chunks of time on TV news? That isn’t a very hard question, is it?
The critique included, logically enough, several chunks of the Times report that was so critical of Falwell. The fact that we did that resulted in GetReligion getting a letter from Liberty University threatening legal action.
What an interesting twist: GetReligion paired with the Times by the Falwell team because of material we published in a critique of the Trump-Falwell obsession at the Times. As it turns out, we were not alone, in terms of getting caught in that crossfire.
This brings me to that recent Times update on the topic: “Falwell Focuses on Critics as Coronavirus Cases Near His University Grow.” Readers may, when they open that story, want to examine the URL carefully. Note that this report about a controversy in Christian higher-education was filed under “politics” in the Times storage system. #ShockedShocked
Here is a key section of this Times update (read carefully):
Since the media spotlight trained on Liberty’s decisions, Mr. Falwell, a close ally of Mr. Trump, has protested that his policies were no different than many other university administrators, and that he has been singled out for unfair criticism by liberal journalists bent on his destruction. …
The media, he said in a radio interview with John Fredericks, who identified himself as a Trump campaign operative, “just want power, they’re authoritarian, they’re like nothing I’ve seen since, if you go back in history, to Nazi Germany. That’s what they remind me of.”
And he has spared no effort to defend his actions since articles on Liberty’s reopening ran in ProPublica and The New York Times. He pursued arrest warrants for misdemeanor trespassing against two journalists, Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, and Julia Rendleman, a freelance photographer for The Times. He enlisted a New York law firm to threaten legal action against The Times and, he has said, other outlets as well.
He called a Times reporter shortly before midnight, leaving a voice mail message that said, “you’re in some serious trouble.”
It would be interesting to know the size of that “other outlets” crowd, in addition to GetReligion (again, because our critique pointed readers to several chunks of the earlier Times story).
However, it’s interesting to note a crucial fact claim linked to the Liberty complaints.
Ironically, readers can find this crucial information in a report at World magazine — another publication that received a sword-rattling letter from the Falwell team. The headline on that World report said, “Liberty in a pandemic: The largest Christian university grabs the spotlight — again.” Here is the key passage, in the story by reporter Michael Reneau (note: a friend of mine here in East Tennessee):
On March 29, the New York Times reported up to 12 Liberty students were exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms after returning to campus after spring break. Falwell denied Elizabeth Williamson’s Times report. The story attributed that number to a local doctor, Thomas Eppes, president of a practice whose physicians operate Liberty’s student health center and who informally advised Falwell before Liberty’s spring break. Eppes told me he did not tell the Times reporter 12 students were showing symptoms: “That was a rather remarkable overstatement on her part.” …
Will opening the campus to anyone who wanted to come back mean more COVID-19 infections? I asked Eppes whether the possibility of those spreading COVID-19 being asymptomatic should make colleges more restrictive, not less: “True social distancing would have said you close down everything. … [Falwell] did what he perceived to be the right thing for the students of the school.”
OK, so what we have here — along with political rhetoric and complicated arguments about on-campus vs. off-campus Liberty students — is a complaint about an alleged misquote. The source of some of the most crucial information in the original Times story (the one that led to the legal threats) is saying that he was misquoted by a reporter.
This could be a case of “he said vs. the Times said that he said.” Was the interview recorded? Was there another other source of information to back the “12 student” with coronavirus claim?
Stay tuned. Your GetReligionistas sure will.