ConWeb Artists

Campus Report ^ | August 12, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

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ConWeb Artists

by: Bethany Stotts, August 12, 2008

At the left-wing blog, ConWebWatch, dedicated to “monitoring” conservative news websites, Terry Krepel has doggedly been criticizing Accuracy in Media.

Krepel also serves as a senior editor at Media Matters the liberal media watchdog “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”

But if Krepel’s critique of this correspondent’s August 1st article, “McCain’s Reverend Wright?,” is any indication, Krepel’s criticisms of AIM are largely misplaced.

In “McCain’s Reverend Wright,” this correspondent discussed how news outlets were associating Pastor John Hagee with John McCain (and, specifically, the McCain campaign), even after the two men publicly distanced themselves from each other. Some media outlets even go so far as to call Pastor John Hagee McCain’s own Reverend Jeremiah Wright. “This election may well come down to which candidate can better control his crazy pastors—and after yesterday’s weirdness at the convention center, McCain has fallen behind by about two cubits,” Dana Milbank wrote for the Washington Post.

Apparently Krepel takes exception to what the AIM article didn’t discuss: that Pastor Hagee was supposedly “retracting” his apologies for his controversial statements on Hurricane Katrina and the Catholic Church. “Stotts ignores that Hagee’s new apparent defense of his inflammatory remarks—and more specifically, his claim that his critics ‘do not understand the Bible view’—seems to contradict his previous retraction of them,” Krepel writes.

The author then goes on to quote Pastor Hagee’s apology about his comments connecting Hurricane Katrina with God’s wrath on homosexuals.

Krepel fabricates a sense of contradiction, underplaying Hagee’s consistent stance on his belief in God’s sovereignty....