In my “Follow the money” post yesterday I mentioned Christian charities and how money might temper them from speaking freely. Now, let me be clear I have no evidence that the Obama administration warned Franklin Graham to temper his words or tried to alter how much money Graham’s organization, Samaritan’s Purse, receives, but just knowing millions of dollars in federal-funding go to Graham’s private charity shows this conflict of interest in being free and unbiased. I admire the work Franklin Graham’s charity does, so don’t interpret this the wrong way.
In the aftermath of this Garland, TX terrorist attack, Graham spoke out in a way so cautiously compared to his previous comments on radical Islam, that the contrast struck me as odd.
From an April 22, 2015 Western Journalism piece:
Then there’s this March 2, 2015 Talking Points Memo (TPM) piece I’ll quote in a minute, but first let me add this news source is NOT the Bill O’Reilly, well known “talking points”, but supposedly, unlike the oft-charged right-wing bias of Fox News, this TPMsite states it is:
“Talking Points Memo (TPM) is the premier digital native political news organization in the United States – covering a broad range of politics, policy and national news in Washington D.C. and beyond. Founded in 2000, TPM has grown from a must-read blog to one of the most trusted and compelling websites in political journalism. Widely recognized as the pioneer of iterative journalism, which draws on readers’ knowledge to break stories, it was the first web-native news organization to win the George Polk award for Journalism in 2007 for coverage of the U.S. Attorney Firing Scandal. The editors of Time magazine say TPM is “the prototype of what a successful Web-based news organization is likely to be in the future.””
So, this premiere news source borrowed a famous title from a right-wing biased news source, which allows it to show up on google searches for O’Reilly’s talking points, but don’t notice that, pretend it picked the name out thin air in 2000 and play along. Here’s a TPM article from March 2, 2015:
“The Rev. Franklin Graham kept up his warnings about Muslim influence on the White House in a recent interview with a Christian media company, saying that “radical Islamists” are “advising various levels of government.””
The articles continues;
““There are Muslims that have access to him in the White House; our foreign policy has a lot of influence now from Muslims,” Graham said. “We see the prime minister of Israel being snubbed by the President and by the White House and by the Democrats, and it’s because of the influence of Islam.””
Then we can look at the May 6, 2015 TPM hailing Graham on his condemnation of Pamela Geller’s cartoon-contest:
“Evangelist Rev. Franklin Graham on Wednesday said that while he supports Americans’ right to free speech, the attendees at the Muhammad cartoon contest near Dallas “were wrong” to mock Muslims.
“As a Christian, I don’t like it when people mock my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ, and what this event in Garland, Texas, was doing was mocking the Muslims. And I disagree with Islam, I don’t believe in Islam, but I’m not going to mock them and make fun of them,” Graham said on “Fox and Friends.””
Now, I actually found this TPM article through a link from Progressive Voices. To try to figure out agendas in America, you have to be suspicious of partisan political affiliations, money connections, and even look through personal bios. I state upfront that my views are mostly conservative, but my politics moved from Republican to being “none of the above” years ago. I am also not aligned with the Tea Party, even though I agree with some Tea Party followers on some issues, mainly, following The Constitution and I agree with many liberals on opposing capital punishment. Sometimes I have felt one way about an issue for years and then later come to a different view on the matter. The Constitution is our protection in America from tyranny. That said, this article was written by Caitlin MacNeal, whose bio states:
“Caitlin MacNeal is a News Writer based in Washington, D.C. Before joining TPM, Caitlin interned and wrote for the Huffington Post, the Sunlight Foundation and Slate. She is a graduate of Georgetown University.”
The Huffington Post and Slate are two progressive/left-wing publications and the Sunlight Foundation claims to be non-partisan – so, two out of three of her previous jobs were working for left-wing publications. Might she be a progressive/liberal? Truly, this is how you have to go through news in Ameica, both on the right and the left – you can’t trust our mainstream media at all and most of them are left-leaning despite proclaiming otherwise and the right-leaning and outright right-wing ones invest more time at slanting stories toward their political viewpoint than they do just looking for the facts and the truth.
Now with Franklin Graham, his recent condemnation of the cartoon-drawing contest , which Bill O’Reilly hailed in his original Talking Points was so at odds with his many other comments on radical Islam, that I wondered about the funding his charity receives from the federal government and if that funding impacted his choice of words. Money taints everything. Quoting the progressive, The Nation, report:
“Nevertheless, according to the grant tracking website USA Spending.gov, Samaritan’s Purse has received 103 federal grants since 2004 totaling over $47 million—including more than $23.3 million awarded since Obama took office in 2009. For example, Samaritan’s Purse received $1.9 million from PEPFAR in 2009 to implement a “Families Matter” prevention program in Mozambique, a grant that continues to be paid out, most recently in December of last year.”
This report was written by Andy Kopsa, whose bio states:
“Andy Kopsa is a freelance investigative reporter based in New York City. She has written for Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Talking Points Memo, Ms. magazine, and many other publications. She was awarded a 2012 Society of Professional Journalists Award for investigative reporting and was a 2013 recipient of a Knight Grant for Reporting on Religion in American Public Life from USC Annenberg.”
Wow, she used to work not only for this TPM news site, but she even worked for Al Jazeera. This same process can be done for the right-wing news organizations and I am even applying this to Chrisitan charities now – agendas and money – we all need to seek the truth, because partisan politics, big money polluting everything from within our political system and foreign money being spent to create chaos in America too are tearing America apart. A free press was supposed to protect us from the tyranny of government and now it’s truly just another tool of political factions. Few “journalists” bother to do much fact-checking or looking for agendas.
I’m just sick of the political factions in America trampling on The Constitution and having to go through this much effort to find the TRUTH from those who proclaim they are our free and unbiased press.
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