EARLIER THIS YEAR the National Organization for Women and its friends on the cultural left decided it was time to take on Promise Keepers, the men’s evangelical movement founded six years ago by the former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney. Armageddon was to be October 4, 1997, when Promise Keepers gathered in the nation’s capital to hold a big rally. In op-eds and on talk shows, the cultural Left argued that Promise Keepers really was part of the religious Right and that it was intent on undermining the rights revolution of the past half century that has brought women equality with men. McCartney and other PK leaders insisted that the organization was not political or against women. Yet this question of the Promise Keepers’ identity had been planted, and in the run-up to the event, it was a dominant topic in the news coverage.
The headline of a long piece on McCartney in the September 28 Washington Post asked whether “He’s the Coach for the Faithful — Or the Far Right?” Two days later the NBC Nightly News, in its first story on the event, noted that “some women’s groups feel that Promise Keepers, their warm and fuzzy ideology, is a mask for something more sinister.” The NOW-ish kicker by correspondent Jim Avila was this: “But not everyone is a convert, and as the Promise Keepers face their biggest weekend ever, they’re finding that returning to a world where man has the final word will take more than a promise and a prayer.”
But the NOW storyline did not dominate. Remarkably, the more common journalism was sympathetic to the organization and the rally, and some pieces — like one in U.S. News & World Report — explicitly rejected NOW’s take. A story the Post published the day before the rally noted that PK opponents who had flocked to Washington to spread “their own message” were now admitting that their message had been “drowned out by the generally favorable coverage the group has received.”
This trend in the coverage did not change when the rally was held, no doubt because none of the speakers made a political speech. One of the most glowing pieces was the New York Times’s main story on the rally, by Laurie Goodstein. It began this way: “In a religious revival rally that stretched a mile from the Capitol past the Washington Monument, hundreds of thousands of Christian men hugged, sang, and sank to their knees today, repenting for their own sins and what they see as a secular and socially troubled America.” The story included many comments from the men who did the repenting, and not until the 24th paragraph (out of 33) was there a mention of NOW’s perspective. It was introduced with this dismissive lead sentence: “The event has its critics.” The next paragraph quoted the wife of one of the men, who said that NOW was off base and that Promise Keepers had helped her husband “realize that work is not as important as family.”
No news organization assigned as many reporters to the event as the Washington Post did — at least 23, by my count. And the Post’s Sunday coverage of the rally was massive (no fewer than eight bylined articles) and friendly. Consider these headlines: “Promise Keepers Answer the Call”; “Men Were Driven to ‘Confess Their Sins'”; “At Assembly, a Call to Bring the Races Together”; and “A Father and Son, Standing in the Generation Gap.”
The Post’s coverage merits special notice in light of the fact that in 1993 it published a front-page article casually noting that the people who watch television evangelists are “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” Responding to hundreds of objecting readers, the Post published a correction, but it has had to live with the perception that it is hostile to evangelical Christianity. Did the experience affect how the paper covered the recent rally? An editor who worked on the coverage says it didn’t, and perhaps that is so. In any event, the coverage of the rally left those who objected to the “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command” stereotype four years ago little to complain about. The Post has not had to run any corrections of its Promise Keepers stories.
There can be no question that the frame of the story would have sharply changed had McCartney or any other of the many speakers at the rally declaimed on abortion rights or vouchers — or if religious-Right figures like James Dobson or Gary Bauer or Ralph Reed had spoken. At the same time, the many “people” stories that were available as the men poured into Washington meant that much of the coverage would be upbeat. The rally’s emphasis on racial reconciliation also invited positive coverage, unless this commitment could be somehow shown to be inauthentic. That proved an impossible task, as prayers of forgiveness for racism were lifted to the heavens by the assembled (one in seven was black). And no doubt it left a favorable impression with the media that some of the men who came to the rally repaired a dilapidated school in the District of Columbia. Indeed, it is hard to discount the impact on the media of the manner in which the hundreds of thousands of Promise Keepers conducted themselves, both before and after the event, and during it. “You can’t help but be moved,” said one CNN correspondent reporting on the rally.
The nature of the coverage left the Media Research Center with nothing to do. MRC, which specializes in reporting media bias, was prepared to stand in the gap with a special report on rally coverage. “I was waiting for a huge hit on Sunday and Monday about how subversive the Promise Keepers are,” says MRC’s Brent Baker, “but it didn’t happen.”
The most significant failings of the coverage turned out to be theological. Promise Keepers has been criticized for avoiding the sacraments, encouraging small-group ministries that promote pietistic excess, and failing to come to grips with hard theological differences in order to promote Christian unity. Few stories treated these issues. But perhaps that was too much to ask of secular journalists few of whom are knowledgeable about such matters. At least most of them got the basic story that here were men who met on the Mall to repent of their sins and worship God and better serve their families. It was hard to be negative about that.
Terry Eastland is an editor for Forbes Digital Tool and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
