Baptist Press kicks the hornet’s nest

The Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Baptist Press (BP) news service stepped on the heels of an enthusiastically received Feb. 6 appearance in North Carolina by Mark Driscoll. They published a critical piece on Feb. 11, while the bloom of that appearance was still on the rose.

The story was “assembled” from a Jan. 9 New York Times Magazine article about the dynamic Seattle pastor, other previously published reactions and some original quotes.

Mark Driscoll

Presented to an audience rich in recently inspired Driscoll enthusiasts under the headline Driscoll’s vulgarity draws media attention, it was the equivalent of kicking a hornets’ nest.

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS), which hosted the Feb. 6/7 conference where Discoll spoke, blogged disappointment with the “inaccurate content and harsh tone” of the article.

Ed Stetzer of the SBC’s Lifeway Research stepped forward to obliquely defend “my friend Mark Driscoll” from unfortunate coverage in general (BP was mentioned only in comments by others).

Jonathan Merritt was less gentle in his North Carolina Biblical Recorder op-ed piece Unfair, Unbalanced, and Unacceptable. He blistered BP, and also recalled how release of the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI) in March, 2008, drew immediate reaction from BP:

“Less than 24 hours after the story appeared in national media, Baptist Press had a story distancing the denomination from the document,” the Christian Index reported. They went on to note that Baptist Press “generated an additional 13 stories over the next 8 publishing days. The majority of those took issue with the topic. . . .” During this time, I left multiple voice mails and sent several emails to BP Editor Will Hall to clarify journalistic inaccuracies an offer the other side of the story, but I received no reply.

“No reply,” yet one of the most redeeming values of good American news journalism is communication with the subjects of stories and correction of errors and omissions.

Reply is a newsroom requirement, like the correction of errors.

“No reply” is not an option.

Everyone trained in the field knows that. And experience teaches that prompt reply, and appropriate corrective response when one errs, are both required to protect one’s reputation for quality and win community loyalty.

BP appears to have neither replied nor made satisfactory corrections in the earlier case cited by Meritt. And to have made some changes, but offered no response to the Driscoll matter.

Corrective passion flowed into blogs and environments like and including twitter, as it would have to some degree no matter how BP responded. Snowballing blog commentary is summarized by Timmy Brister’s’ annotated list of selected links.

Amid the fire and brimstone, we did find one comment in defense of BP.

From this old newspaperman’s point of view, the story doesn’t look malicious, as some seem to us to have implied by calling it a “hit job.” Just incomplete and outdated by facts immediately available to both an important part of the audience and perhaps, with some effort, available to the author.

As a result, a vocal segment of the audience felt poorly served. In our opinion, it was, as usually happens with dated, incomplete stories.

In an environment rich in other sources of information, the audience’s protest will be corrective. In part because, as they demonstrated, they’re no longer simply the audience. They also publish.