Vice.com

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Mormon psychic involved with the very successful 'Sound of Freedom' film? Read on ...

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Mormon psychic involved with the very successful 'Sound of Freedom' film? Read on ...

Operation Underground Railroad, the Utah-based organization that inspired the hit indie movie “Sound of Freedom,” has no shortage of problems right now.

There’s a news organization (Vice.com) that is constantly running exposés on it; the unexpected resignation of its telegenic CEO, Tim Ballard, in June due to allegations of sexual misconduct; a criminal investigation (since closed with no charges filed) by the Davis County attorney’s office; and a dust-up with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Also, a Utah Fox News outlet — which was totally fed up with Ballard’s antics — ran this story about the called-off criminal investigation. Shortly thereafter, the attorney’s office released a bunch of documents. At that point, newsrooms pounced.

The latest piece of news sounds like a tabloid title. “Operation Underground Railroad Child Rescue Missions Were Based on Psychic Intelligence,” was the Vice headline last week.

Before quoting from that piece, I want to note that the media pile-on over “Sound of Freedom” exaggerated claims about Ballard’s heroic role in stopping child sex trafficking does mystify me. This isn’t the first movie out there to take major liberties with the original story, while bringing “reality” to the screen. Look at what “The Sound of Music” did to the real Von Trapp family.

A key piece of the Vice story:

It was a tense day in February 2016 for Tim Ballard and operatives working for Operation Underground Railroad, the anti-human trafficking group he founded. They were on what would prove to be a bumbling and ineffective mission to save a trafficked child Ballard believed was being held in a village on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. 

This wasn’t just any mission, however. The child they were searching for was Gardy Mardy, a missing Haitian boy whose abduction Ballard has portrayed as “the case that led us to found OUR.” Joining him and his team of elite operatives was Janet Russon — a psychic medium from Utah whose supposed visions were guiding the mission.

Vice News has had OUR in its crosshairs for some time, including a large investigative piece that ran in 2021 followed by several more articles. The gist of the 2021 piece alleged sloppy training done by OUR for its operatives; that OUR chose its workers more on the basis of how much they donated to the organization and that some of its methods were making the sex-trafficking industry worse.


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China's 'social credit' system: 'Hunger Games,' Big Brother or the book of Revelation?

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A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a piece on Vice.com about China’s social credit system, a mix of “Brave New World,” “The Hunger Games” and Revelation 13:16-17.

Do you think the Chinese government would use this system to punish religious believers? We will come back to that angle.

For those of you not familiar with end-of-the-New Testament prophecy, the latter concerns a “mark” (barcode?) one must have to do any financial transactions worldwide. It all sounded like something out of the 22nd century until I began reading about China’s creepy citizen tracking system.

A short piece at Vice started thus:

RONGCHENG, China — Here and in other cities across China, monitors have been tracking people's behaviors — good and bad — for the country's new Social Credit System. It’s kind of like the American credit score system, except it tracks far more than financial transactions.

And the consequences can be pretty serious.

Part of the system is a neighbor watch program that's being piloted across the country where designated watchers are paid to record people's behaviors that factor into their social credit score. Zhou Aini, for one, gets paid $50 USD a month to watch her neighbors as an "information collector." She records observations in a notebook and then shares it with a local government office that determines the results.

A high score could bring you lower interest loans and discounted rent and utility bills, but if your score is low, you can be subjected to public shaming or even banned from certain kinds of travel. Basically, your life gets harder.

While the score is not exactly the biochip everyone must have embedded in their hand or forehead mentioned in the apocalyptic “Left Behind” novels, it is unsettling.

China’s persecution of its Muslim, Falun Gong and Christian minorities is getting worse by the day, so you can guess which groups would immediately suffer losses of their social credit. Today they might not be able to buy tickets for a plane flight. Tomorrow they may not be able to buy food.

Various media have been covering this trend for the past year. However, when it comes to religion, I haven’t seen much connecting of the dots.


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Scientology gets a TV channel, but rates little more than a yawn in the news coverage

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The Church of Scientology started its own TV channel this week, but coverage of the event -– such as it was -– didn’t come from religion specialists. Instead, it was general assignment reporters who did the job.

That left readers with some pretty predictable questions about this story. For example: What about the "why?" factor in the traditional journalism "who," "what," "when," "where," "why" and "how" sequence?

I found the show on YouTube and watched it for an hour. Muzak played throughout and much of the content was focused on how you, the viewer can -- through Scientology, of course -- set personal goals, overcome adversity, sail through life, and more. There was a ton of testimonies from members (or really good actors) on how Scientology had improved their lot.

There were snippets from weekly church services, although not enough to get an idea of of what typically goes on. There were odd parts; like showcasing their bookstore? But after smiling personage after smiling personage informed me of the benefits of Scientology, my interest began to wane after a half hour.

CNN Money said: 

The Church of Scientology is headed to television.
The organization is set to premiere Scientology TV on Monday, a new network that will air on DirecTV and available via streaming devices like Roku, Apple TV and Fire TV.
"The only thing more interesting than what you've heard is what you haven't," read a promo announcing the channel, shared on Scientology social media accounts.

The Associated Press did a more in-depth summation that mirrors what I saw:

The first hour offered a slickly produced taste of the series to follow from an in-house studio, including “Meet a Scientologist,” ‘’Destination Scientology” and the three-part “L. Ron Hubbard: In His Own Voice.” The channel is available on DIRECTV, AppleTV, Roku, fireTV, Chromecast, iTunes and Google Play.
(Scientology leader David) Miscavige didn’t directly address critics, but Scientology doesn’t lack for them. Several high-profile projects have investigated the church’s alleged abuses of former members, including actress Leah Remini’s A&E docuseries “Scientology and the Aftermath” and Alex Gibney’s Emmy-winning documentary, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.”
Instead, the channel’s debut offered interviews with church members who touted Scientology’s rewards, showed off its impressive facilities in cities including Melbourne, London, Tokyo and throughout the United States and its work with other churches and community groups.


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Newsweek twists message Elizabeth Smart has been sharing with Mormons about sex

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The people who manage modern, digital newsrooms are -- to say the least -- under all kinds of pressure to print a never-ending stream of content with headlines and snappy story hooks that try to inspire readers to click, click, click those computer mouses (and maybe even visit an ad website every week or two).

This has led to all kinds of "you won't believe what happens next" editing, both in "news" reports and in graphics.

This has led to an increase in an old kind of news confusion.

In the past, it was perfectly normal for readers to wonder, every now and then, how a strange news headline ended up on top of a perfectly normal story. Your GetReligionistas have often reminded readers that reporters rarely, if ever, write their own headlines. Editors can make mistakes, too.

These days, it's no surprise that there's lots of confusion -- especially in newsrooms where journalists are asked to crank up their daily production count with various kinds of quickie articles. Often, the goal is to take a hot-topic story seen somewhere else, perhaps in a video that can be accessed online, and then combine a bit of that and a little more of this and quotes from other articles (attributed and backed with a URL) into a news product that rarely even requires a telephone call.

Hopefully, with a jazzy headline, this results in clicks.

I think that's what happened with a recent Newsweek article about a young Mormon woman who, after surviving a hellish kidnapping, has been speaking out on the need for religious leaders to be more sensitive when dealing with issues of sexuality, abuse and even trauma.

The headline that caught our reader's eye: "Elizabeth Smart, who changed Mormons' views on sex, is wary of religion."

Uh, #REALLY?


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Vice.com's take on climate change blames same old fundamentalist hobgoblins

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I know journalists are seeking good click-bait headlines, but Vice.com’s “The Fundamentalists Holding us Back from a Climate Change Solution” sounded overwrought right from the get-go.

But I wanted to linger, as I’m interested in what all these news/feature/opinion forums, aka millennial niche sites (Quartz, Vice, Vox, Vocativ, Mic, BuzzFeed, OZY, Fusion, The Ringer, etc.) offer in terms of religion reporting. Most don’t seem to have a specialist on staff.

So they get a freelancer or staff writer, who may or may not know anything about religion, to hold forth. Which is why I was interested in Vice.com’s take on climate change problems. The use of “fundamentalists” in the headline is a red flag, in that this term is hardly used these days (and the Associated Press Stylebook says it should be used carefully). The folks described in the opening paragraphs are actually evangelicals.

It's unclear whether the writer knows the difference between the two, but our own Richard Ostling explains things for the uninitiated. Vice says:

Rachel Lamb grew up thinking that climate change was a liberal hoax. That's what everyone thought at the rural Michigan church where her dad was the pastor. The world was slowly getting hotter, but that fact was rarely mentioned in the Baptist social circles she spun through, and when it was, it was in the context of something Democrats blew way out of proportion. Her attitude about the subject was more wary than antagonistic. If someone were to come up to her clique and suggest that the climate was changing, their response would most likely be a sarcastic, Where'd you hear that from?
Although the 27-year-old used to go hiking in national parks with her family as a kid, she was taught to think of her love of Jesus and her appreciation of nature as being separate—two puzzle pieces that made up the larger picture of her personality but didn't fit together. Then she took a climate change politics course at Wheaton College, a Christian university in Illinois, where her worldview coalesced and she found her purpose.

We next learn that she is a member of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, but that progressive groups like hers are foiled by that:


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