Article VI Blog

. . . and we can prove it. But before we get to that, please take a moment to take the poll you will find in the right column. We are trying to figure out our readerships so we can serve them better. And now . . .

A Boston Globe columnist named Alex Beam has written an anti-Romney piece today. The title gives away Beam's not-so-subtle message: "A Mormon President? I Don't Think So."

Beam writes about a forthcoming PBS documentary (we wrote about it last June) called "The Mormons" and set to air April 30 and May 1, 2007. The show will be a two-part, three-hour documentary on “Frontline” and “American Experience,” the first time the two shows have ever collaborated.

Beam's premise seems to be that lots of people will watch the Frontline documentary and find it so disturbing that Romney's candidacy will suffer a fatal blow:

PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week. Let's say one-tenth — no, one-twentieth — of that audience watches "The Mormons." That's almost 4 million men and women who will know more about the Mormon faith than Romney might wish them to know. It's bad math for the Mittster.

Kind of gives you the flavor of Beam's piece, doesn't it?

So what could possibly be so explosive about "The Mormons?" According to Scott Pierce of Salt Lake City's Deseret News,

"The Mormons" will no doubt displease anyone who doesn't want to hear a negative word about the LDS Church. At the same time, it's going to anger those who don't want to hear anything good about it.

Sounds like balance to me. Helen Whitney, the documentary's producer, told Pierce:

"I hope that most of the stereotypes — ideally, all of them — will be blown away . . . . Because so many of them are just based on ignorance. Ignorance about Mormon history, ignorance about Mormon theology. Ignorance. . . . Most of the time when I bring up what I'm doing and I talk about it with people, the first word that comes up is polygamy."

In light of Ms. Whitney's comments, Alex Beam's column looks a little, well, foolish. Beam has seen part of "The Mormons," and shares this witty but ignorant observation:

"The Mormons" even tackles the ultimate red herring, "celestial marriage," Joseph Smith's term for polygamy. The church has gone to great pains to promulgate prophet Wilford Woodruff's 1890 declaration condemning polygamy, deemed to have superseded Smith's earlier, contrary revelation. HBO, which continues to broadcast "Big Love," a series about a polygamist who lives outside Salt Lake City, apparently didn't get the memo.

Nor did PBS. "The Mormons" estimates that 30,000 to 60,000 fundamentalist believers practice polygamy. Whitney has footage of 11 happy children passing plates around the dinner table, with three mothers and a father in attendance. Heather has three Mommies! Sorry, I couldn't resist.

These jocular but clueless paragraphs prompt two conclusions: (1) The Globe has no editors worthy of the name, and (2) Beam is such a lazy journalist that he did not even go to the trouble of investigating the LDS Church's position on polygamy (any member practicing it is excommunicated) and the total lack of connection between the LDS Church and the polygamous sects he writes about (yes, even the characters in "Big Love" declare their non-affiliation with the Church). Anyone who lifts a finger to research the subject finds that information immediately.

Helen Whitney has stated her goal in producing "The Mormons:"

I would . . . like [viewers] to take a deep and searching look into their own religion and see the ways in which there are commonalities as well as uniqueness and difference," she said. "I think that by looking into the Mormon heart, you look into your own.

I guess Alex Beam didn't get the memo.

John adds: You know what I don't understand is why people are willing to tar the CJCLDS with the break-away sect brush. Even the most virulent anti-religious rant from the left has not tried to tar the entirety of traditional Christianity with the brush of Jim Jones.

Beam, and his Globe editors, appear to think the rest of the country is as ignorant and intolerant as he is. He seems to assume we are incapable of telling the difference between the CJCLDS and break-away sects. He seems to think we do not understand that there is both good and bad in every religion. He also seems to think that the viewers of the piece will take PBS at face value, a mistake not many people make any more. Oh well, the MSM has viewed the general public as dupes for a long time.

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