{"id":4319,"date":"2006-10-19T19:02:51","date_gmt":"2006-10-20T00:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/2006\/10\/19\/send-the-lawyers\/"},"modified":"2006-10-19T19:02:51","modified_gmt":"2006-10-20T00:02:51","slug":"send-the-lawyers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2006\/10\/send-the-lawyers\/","title":{"rendered":"Send the lawyers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Strange kerfuffle over at Jimmy Akin’s site<\/a> with letters from Bill Moyer’s lawyers threatening him about a story he posted on his site previously. Amazing how things go right to a lawyer when a simple email to Jimmy Akin would have been sufficient in the first place.<\/p>\n

The offending post contained a statement by Dr. Beisner relating to Bill Moyers.<\/p>\n

"..he very candidly told me that he is a liberal Democrat and intended for the documentary to influence the November elections to bring control of Congress back to the Democrats. "<\/p>\n

A statement of which Bill Moyers denies ever making. I remember seeing that quote before and at the time and questioning its accuracy. Now I am in no way a Bill Moyers’ apologist and I have fisked him thoroughly in the past. The reason I doubted him saying this is that I have heard him questioned about media bias before. I have little doubt that he truly believes that he sees himself as totally unbiased and as an independent so I think it is totally out of character for him to admit that he isn’t. I do think that he is totally delusional when it comes to this since his fragrant bias permeates everything he does. But like most in the media they truly don’t believe this about themselves.<\/p>\n

Jimmy’s lawyer Stephen Dillard of the blog Southern Appeal<\/a> replied to Moyer’s lawyer’s pointing out that this didn’t rise to defamation and that a simple request would have solicited Jimmy to post Moyer’s denial of the quote.<\/p>\n

What I find ironic is that this all takes place within the context of a series Moyers is doing on the environment which covers in part evangelicals. Last year Moyer’s published an editorial claiming that religious right is deliberately trying to despoil the environment and using as evidence the Left Behind novels. In it he claimed that James Watt who was President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior said:<\/p>\n

…that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."<\/p>\n

What Watt actually said was "we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations."<\/p>\n

So now Bill Moyers’ is so worried about his "integrity as a journalist" without ever recanting his own defamation. A lie that was subsequently used by other media outlets as being true, though some have issued a correction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Strange kerfuffle over at Jimmy Akin’s site with letters from Bill Moyer’s lawyers threatening him about a story he posted on his site previously. Amazing how things go right to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}