Would you expose this grieving televangelist's hypocrisy? (If hypocrisy it is.)

In My Humble Opinion
1

Skaldthetical, longish storytelling OP, probably not a poll today as I’ve got a meeting coming up, blah blah blah. For purposes of today’s story, it is 1998, you are the managing editor of a syndicated TV news magazine. You have just been offered video showing a recently bereaved television preacher, moments after her only child died in a senseless random accident, following the advice of Job’s wife, and must now decide whether to air it. More details are below.

Our story today concerns Jacqueline Jamison (known as **Jacquie **to her friends and fans), megachurch pastor, televangelist, and author of numerous best-sellers with titles like Jesus Is On Your Side, The Holy Ghost Is Always With You, and Why God Wants You to Tithe. On a bright summer morning some weeks ago, Jacquie was walking down a Manhattan sidewalk with her four-year-old daughter Jennifer. Unfortunately, Thanatos was standing at the next corner, taking a smoke. It was nobody’s fault. A stray cat had killed a rat, you see, leaving its intestines on the sidewalk outside a cafe; a woman exiting the cafe slipped on the rodent guts and stumbled into the street and the path of a passing truck; the truck driver swerved to avoid hitting her, causing him to slam into a car; the ran ran out of control and ultimately hit a scaffold, causing a worker to drop a brick which plummeted onto little Jennifer’s head.

Jacquie didn’t know the exact causal sequence, of course. All she knew was that her baby girl had been struck down. She rushed her to the hospital, but it was of no avail; after what seemed only moments, the doctors told her that Jennifer was dead. Shocked and grieving, Jaquie stumbled into the first empty room she could find to wait for her husband to arrive. Thinking herself alone and unobserved, she collapsed, wept, and railed against the heavens. “Why did you do this, Lord?” she said among other things. “Why did you take my baby? I hate you, you selfish, evil mothrfucker! I hate you, God! I HATE YOU!”

The thing is, Jacquie was not unobserved. For reasons I can’t be arsed to contrived (hey, I saidI had a meeting coming up!), the room she thought private was in fact wired for video and sound, and her cameras were runing. Her whole rant was recorded.

Now as it happens, Jacquie is the pastor of a megachurch whose Sunday morning services are nationally broadcast. She missed the next service, and the one after that. But on the third Sunday she was back at work, if more than a little subdued. Thanking her parishioners and viewers for their support, she gave a sermon on loss, mourning, and the grace of God. In this sermon she claimed that, even in the darkest moments of her grief over Jennifer’s death, she never doubted the divine love or mercy for an instant. “All things work together for good for them that love the Lord,” she said. "Even as my baby lay dying, I knew that God had a plan for her and for me that would ultimately be to our betterment. And when the doctors told me she had died, I knew Jesus had taken her to his bosom and would take care of her far, far better than I ever could. Yes, I grieved, but I wasn’t angry at him; I didn’t blaspheme. From the moment we got up that morning to the moment we put my baby in the ground, I knew–not believed, knew–that ‘Little ones to him belong / They are weak and he is strong.’ "

That sermon aired two days ago. Now, on Tuesday morning, you’ve been approached by some hoser who works at the hospital where Jacquie died. Said hoser has access to the videotape of Jacquie’s breakdown, chanced to see the above-referenced sermon, and is en-fucking-raged. Wanting to expose her hypocrisy, he is offering the breakdown video (maybe for money, maybe gratis; does it really matter?) to your show.

Do you air it? Does it matter whether you have to pay for the video? Do you consider Jacquie a hypocrite?

Still got a few minutes before the meeting. Let’s see what kind poll I can whip up.

2

She might be a hypocrite, but I don’t want to make money off someone else’s suffering.

Then again, there’s a reason I’m not in television - I make poor choices about what will bring the viewers.

3

The function of journalists in a free society is to report news of public import. If Jamison were engaged in some form of policy advocacy, and someone offered to sell me footage of her acting at odds with her stated policy position, I’d seriously consider buying it. (Say, Jamison preaches in favor of mandatory drug minimums, but smokes weed; Jamison preaches against gay rights, but has a same-sex lover; etc, etc.)

I can’t see any public interest in the story as described. People deal with grief as they see fit. Jamison may be bending the truth of her own experience in her sermon, but I can’t see any terribly malicious intent to it; she may profit from folks tithing to her specific ministry, but she doesn’t make money from folks privately framing their grief in religious terms. I have no love of any religion, and I expect I’d find this mega-church distasteful - but there’s just nothing going on here. Heck, it’s even possible that Jamison believes she’s relating her experience accurately - memory is a funny thing.

4

The ethical issues involved seem similar, incidentally, to a recent story Gawker ran involving a CFO at a major media company. Evidently, the fellow was married to a woman, but was being blackmailed by a rent-boy. Gawker ended up taking down the story, after much criticism, and I’m not going to link to it - I don’t want to assist in embarrassing the subject of the story further. Anyway, here’s an excerpt from an email I sent my friends on this issue:

The CFO in this article isn’t really a public figure, and he’s certainly not a member of the social-conservative morality brigade - it’s not as if he goes around arguing against equality for LGBTQI folks in public, only to snog rent-boys in private. The fellow’s misadventures may be amusing, and he may be a crap husband (unless he has an understanding with his wife in such matters), but I’m hard-pressed to see the public interest here. The Gawker article is just “hah! look at the funny gay man!” Like I said, ugly.

Moreover, it’s not as if we can just say, “yah, it’s a puff-piece, but not all journalism has to be hard-hitting stuff.” That’s certainly true. But this isn’t just a harmless puff-piece - the subject of the article has been very, very publicly humiliated. Sometimes, it’s appropriate to harm public figures in this way - especially when they perform substantial public harms themselves. This poor bastard? Perhaps he deserves an unfavorable divorce settlement, but I can’t see how he’s earned this exceedingly high-profile public shaming.

[With regard to the decision to take down the article:]

I admit, I was pretty torn on the decision to remove the article as well. I generally agree that journalists should correct their mistakes, but also leave those mistakes visible for public review. “Disappearing” mistakes removes transparency from the reporting process - which is a big deal, because we need that transparency in order to assess the trustworthiness of news sources. Further, when old mistakes disappear without a trace, it becomes a lot harder for the public and other media to even talk about a given story; when the content keeps changing, there’s no good way to reference it. So, when it comes to factual, grammatical, or stylistic errors, I believe the correct approach is to use a correction notice. (Or, as some blogs do, to simply strikethrough the old text and insert new text next to it).

However, this story is different. So far as I know, it contains no factual errors that must be corrected. The problem isn’t that the article is substantially wrong, the problem is that it never should have existed in the first place; simply by existing, it imposes significant public harm upon a man who doesn’t even come close to deserving it. No edit or correction to the article could realistically mitigate this harm. Removing the article entirely doesn’t do much to mitigate the harm either, because stories propagate on the Internet so quickly - but at least it makes it very slightly harder for folks to run across all the embarrassing details. Moreover, taking the article down means Gawker isn’t earning ad revenue from it - a small thing, perhaps, but still.

Our normal intuition is that reporters should keep their errors public, and it’s ordinarily a well-founded impulse - but that’s because we normally expect reporters to write stories of at least some public interest, and so there’s a public interest in tracking changes to the coverage. This is a bizarre exception to that rule, because Gawker opted to run a story of essentially no public interest, which simultaneously imposes considerable harm on a random guy. In this very unusual case, I support the decision to take the story down entirely.

5

Is Jacquie using her pulpit to oppress others? Is she politically active and supporting political positions in her sermons? If so, fuck her. Bitch be going down! If not, then she deserves privacy and comfort.

Yes, I am small-minded and hypocritical. So what?

6

I would not air the video. Things like this deserve to be private. A person’s emotional crisis is not news in a case like this that involves no wrongdoing, premeditation, etc.

What I might do, as a reporter, is approach Jacqui and say “I know that you had this breakdown. I’m not showing the video. But I would like to do an exclusive interview and let you speak to the public about your crisis of faith and the death of your child, and how you handled it.” My only condition would be that I won’t allow her to say something that is factually untrue. If she makes me set the story straight, I will.

As I see things, I win by potentially getting an exclusive story of interest, and she wins by having a chance either to refuse or to frame how the issue is brought up.

7

Really? You think airing such an emotional crisis is going to hurt her? I see it as bring her more sympathy, even if she is a hypocrite.
As a society, people give grieving parents a lots of latitudes. It is a mean and spiteful person who is going to point out the hypocrisy for that moment. As PR moments go, I can’t see it hurting her.

8

It’s not the hospital video alone that will hurt her. It’s the hospital video, combined with the sermon, in which she straight-up lies about her blasphemy. Exposing that would show her hypocrisy and enlighten some persons as to her character. I wouldn’t hold the hospital breakdown against her, but I would hold the lie against her.

(Which is not to say that I would air the tape.)

9

I still think if it is real person, and there’s real footage of a mother crying about the loss of her child, any hypocrisy would be easily forgiven by her parishioners and most parents.
The leaking of video itself would be so controversy, that would overshadow any hypocrisy on her part. The news organization that publish it would defend it by saying it’s about her hypocrisy. But most people would criticize it anyways as unnecessary and a rating’s bait.

10

Ambivalent. Jacquie should not have crafted a fake version of her own grief stage to make herself more pious. Heck it would have been a better sermon to go with “from the depths my soul cried out in despair” and then say how God got her over it. But at the same time it is a personal issue.

Yet, however… silenus has a point, if she’s using the story of unflinching piety to enhance the prestige or influence of her ministry in the political or economic sense, the temptation will be great to take a whack at those feet of clay.

I’d find myself agreeing with dracoi’s choice.

11

She’s made her money and fame on how strong her faith is, on telling others that if their faith is strong enough, they can handle anything. if she’s like most televagelists, she solicits donations from even those who can’t afford it on claims of heavenly rewards.
She sells books on her strong faith and how you can have faith like hers.

Yet, in a crisis, that faith is shown to be a facade. Rather than confessing her lack, she lies about it and pretends that her faith got her through. Now, when a member of her flock fails to deal with a tragedy, they’ll feel like a failure rather than understanding that humans and faith have a limit.

I don’t know if I would pay for the tape but it’s going on the air.

Or what JDR said while I was slowly typing.

12

But Rev. Sunshine is making revenue from her lies, to pay for her megachurch’s air conditioning and the $27,000 oil change for her Maybach. And knowing others like her, it wouldn’t be the first time.

I’d run the video wall to wall, turn it into a promo with a laugh track and run it for years — if doing so isn’t illegal; the whistle-blower might end up in jail for releasing it.

13

Disliking mega-churches and their pastors like I do, I’m tempted to say I’d show the video and shame the hell out of Jacquie. But I like dracoi’s idea of giving Jacquie a chance to come clean to her flock and explain that a momentary lapse of faith in the face of grief is very human. She still would suffer a little loss of face for lying in her sermon but I suspect her followers would forgive her.

14

Would you feel the same if she’d never given the sermon about her loss, or if she’d given such sermons before Jennifer died but not since?

ETA: That is not a rhetorical question. The Rhymer Rules require e to punch myself in the nads if I ask rhetorical questions.

15

I would not air the tape. Two wrongs do not make a right, and in my view publicly airing private grief is wrong.

16

I don’t think that things said in moments of extreme grief are necessarily representative of someone’s views as a whole, and they shouldn’t be treated as such. Thus, I’ll give the televangelist a pass on this one.

I also wouldn’t show the video-- kicking someone when they’re down is never cool.

17
  1. I wouldn’t air the video. But …
  2. The breakdown video is not where Jacquie was being a hypocrite. Her hypocrisy was lying in the sermon, in claiming she never wavered in her faith.
18

Ugh, televangelists.

Still, I hardly think I’m going to come across as a person of great honor and integrity by publicly airing the emotional breakdown of a grieving mother. Pass.

19

I thought you had to iron your hands.

20

None of the above (except the last option). There’s not enough information given for me to decide whether she’s a hypocrite or not. Is it possible she doesn’t remember her angry outburst, having repressed it (or whatever the correct psychological term is) as a defense against the trauma? Or would that still be un/sub-conscious hypocrisy?

What I’d be tempted to do is show the video to Jacquie in private and ask her to defend the claims she made in her sermon. How she responds to that would influence my opinion on whether I’d want to see the video go public.