{"id":10659,"date":"2019-07-26T10:29:47","date_gmt":"2019-07-26T14:29:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=10659"},"modified":"2019-07-26T10:29:47","modified_gmt":"2019-07-26T14:29:47","slug":"fake-news-at-liberty-u","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=10659","title":{"rendered":"Fake News at Liberty U."},"content":{"rendered":"

What do you know? Liberty University has a problem with honest journalism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

In my first week as editor in chief of the Champion, Liberty University\u2019s student-run weekly, our faculty adviser, Deborah Huff, ordered me to apologize. I\u2019d noticed that our evangelical school\u2019s police department didn\u2019t publish its daily crime log online, as many other private university forces did, so I searched elsewhere for crime information I might use in an article. I called the Virginia Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators to find out what the law required Liberty to disclose. But the public affairs worker there told the Liberty University Police Department, which complained to Huff. She called to upbraid me: Apparently, I had endangered our newspaper\u2019s relationship with the LUPD. Huff and Chief Richard Hinkley convened a meeting inside a police department conference room, and Huff sat next to me while I proffered the forced apology to Hinkley \u2014 for asking questions. Huff, too, was contrite, assuring the police chief that it wouldn\u2019t happen again, because she\u2019d keep a better eye on me.<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t exactly a rude awakening. I\u2019d spent the previous three years watching the university administration, led by President Jerry Falwell Jr. (who took a very micromanaging interest), meddle in our coverage, revise controversial op-eds and protect its image by stripping damning facts from our stories<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This should not surprise anybody. At the heart of Christianity is a preposterous fiction, and maintaining it requires relentlessly pruning reality; literally, the devout refuse<\/i> to live in the real world and build an alternate reality for themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do you know? Liberty University has a problem with honest journalism. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10659"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10659"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10661,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10659\/revisions\/10661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}