Media Bias #2: God-talk (right and left)

SDG here (still not Jimmy!).

Stephen L. Carter in The Culture of Disbelief let the cat out of the bag (if it weren’t already) that God-talk by political conservatives is viewed far more suspiciously by media and political elites than God-talk by political liberals:

…in the 1992 campaign, the media often treated President Bush’s speeches to religious organizations as pandering—but when Bill Clinton spoke, for example, to a black Baptist group, he was given credit for shrewdness.

Even "pandering" is a mild charge; when conservatives speaking in churches, grave concerns about the separation of church and state are raised, but when liberals speak in churches, they’re credited with staking their own claim to faith and values.

This week, it seems, Barack Obama spoke in an Evangelical church in South Carolina.

Addressing a crowd of nearly 4000 people during a service livened by a rock band and hip-hop dancers, Obama spoke of creating "a Kingdom right here on Earth," and asked the crowd to "pray that I can be an instrument of God in the same way that Pastor Ron and all of you are instruments of God."

Now, let me say right off the bat that this "instrument of God" business doesn’t strike me as ominously messianic God-talk. Obama didn’t say "I am God’s instrument" or anything like that; he asked for prayers that he could be an instrument of God "in the same way that Pastor Ron and all of you are instruments of God."

Having said that, it seems safe to say that if it were Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson or Mike Huckabee who had talked about being "an instrument of God" while speaking at a church, the incident would have received front-page, top-story panic-level treatment in the MSM.

How was Obama’s speech actually covered?

As far as I can tell, the only major news venue to report on Obama’s "instrument of God" line was CNN.com — not in its feature article on the event (headline: "Obama: GOP doesn’t own faith issue"), but in a blog entry at CNN’s Political Ticker blog.

However, if you go to the blog entry today, you may be surprised to discover that the "instrument of God" line isn’t there any more.

The text of the story has changed a number of times this week. Specifically, it keeps getting shorter, with less and less coverage of Obama’s God-talk.

Here’s how the CNN blog covered the event early this week, as reproduced on other websites and blogs:

GREENVILLE, South Carolina (CNN) — After speaking to an evangelical church on Sunday in this traditionally conservative South Carolina city, Sen. Barack Obama said that Republicans no longer have a firm grip on religion in political discourse.

"I think its important particularly for those of us in the Democratic Party to not cede values and faith to any one party," Obama told reporters outside the Redemption World Outreach Center where he attended services.

"I think that what you’re seeing is a breaking down of the sharp divisions that existed maybe during the nineties, when at least in politics the perception was that the Democrats were fearful of talking about faith, and on the other hand you had the Republicans who had a particular brand of faith that often times seemed intolerant or pushed people away," he said.

Obama noted that he was pleased leaders in the evangelical community like T.D. Jakes and Rick Warren were beginning to discuss social justice issues like AIDS and poverty in ways evangelicals were not doing before.

"I think that’s a healthy thing, that we’re not putting people in boxes, that everybody is out there trying to figure out how do we live right and how do we create a stronger America," Obama said.

During the nearly two hour service that featured a rock band and hip-hop dancers, Obama shared the floor with the church’s pastor, Ron Carpenter. The senator from Illinois asked the multiracial crowd of nearly 4,000 people to keep him and his family in their prayers, and said he hoped to be "an instrument of God."

"Sometimes this is a difficult road being in politics," Obama said. "Sometimes you can become fearful, sometimes you can become vain, sometimes you can seek power just for power’s sake instead of because you want to do service to God. I just want all of you to pray that I can be an instrument of God in the same way that Pastor Ron and all of you are instruments of God."

He finished his brief remarks by saying, "We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."

Asked by CNN if he talks about faith more in churchgoing South Carolina than he does in the other early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, Obama said: "I don’t talk about it all the time, but when I’m in church I talk about it."

Around mid-week, though, when I checked the page, the sentence about being an "instrument of God" was missing. Gone. The phrase "instrument of God" was, however, still there, only in a photo caption, not in the text of the story.

Now, though, the the story is even shorter, and even the photo caption has changed so that it no longer mentions the "instrument of God" line. Instead, the "build a Kingdom" line has been moved into the photo caption — and out of the text of the story. (Will the caption change again?)

Here’s the story as it appears at this writing:

GREENVILLE, South Carolina (CNN) — After speaking to an evangelical church on Sunday in this traditionally conservative South Carolina city, Sen. Barack Obama said that Republicans no longer have a firm grip on religion in political discourse.

"I think its important particularly for those of us in the Democratic Party to not cede values and faith to any one party," Obama told reporters outside the Redemption World Outreach Center where he attended services.

"I think that what you’re seeing is a breaking down of the sharp divisions that existed maybe during the nineties, when at least in politics the perception was that the Democrats were fearful of talking about faith, and on the other hand you had the Republicans who had a particular brand of faith that often times seemed intolerant or pushed people away," he said.

That’s it. That’s the whole story. There’s a link to "Full story," but it doesn’t link to the original version of the blog entry — only to the CNN.com feature article that never mentioned the "instrument of God" business in the first place.

Now. I don’t read CNN.com’s Political Ticker blog on a regular basis. For all I know, they could have some strange policy of commonly editing pieces down as the stories get old. It would seem an odd thing to do, and I can’t imagine why they would, but it could be for all I know.

Barring that, though, it looks as if Obama’s God-talk — which even with this low-level coverage has raised skeptical eyebrows in the blogosphere, though not in the MSM or in Washington, DC that I can tell — has been tacitly buried by CNN editors, who ignored it in their feature piece and now have even excised it from their blog coverage.

Now, let’s see what happens if/when one of the Republican candidate darkens the door of a church.